Philip Metres is the author of thirteen books, including Dispatches from the Land of Erasure (2025), Fugitive/Refuge, Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, the NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council. He has received the William Carlos Williams Award, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Lyric Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University and Core Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: It was probably close to a decade ago, but I’ll never forget listening to an interview with Solmaz Sharif in which she lamented the lack of public intellectuals and artists working outside the political arena, but highly invested in our body politic. When I think of your own work, and as I’ve encountered collections over these years—be it the slipcover Sand Opera whisks off the torture and dismantling of humanity at Abu Ghraib; Shrapnel Maps‘ nuanced and wrenching sequences that reveal the palimpsest of possession that is the Holy Land; or a search for both physical and societal belonging that drives Fugitive/Refuge‘s multiple forms and registers—the poems relentlessly look outward even as they beckon closer. Your poems, at heart, ask the crucial question “who is my neighbor?’ with answers as varied as your forms and contexts. Christ used a parable to answer this question, but I’m wondering if you can share some of the poetic devices or formal choices you make in response, either within a piece itself, or between the poem and reader? Would you say yours is a poetry of proximity?

Philip Metres: What a lovely way of framing the question of my poetry… To me, the joy of writing is the not-knowing, the river-following, navigating the bends and rapids and shallows of it. Every book has been a mooring-place along the way, when I step out of the river and try to make sense of where I’ve been and where I am now.

To switch metaphors, I do see the question of neighborliness as a thread in the weave of my work: Sand Opera’s radical encounter between Iraqis and American torturers in Abu Ghraib (and our proximity to that); Shrapnel Maps’ exploration of my University Heights neighborhood, between my Jewish neighbors and my family, and the larger question of Palestine and Israel in that book; Fugitive/Refuge and the question of hospitality and sanctuary.

The older I get, the more I find myself turning back to the touchstone stories that I’ve heard in Mass since I was young. Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan invited his audience to widen their sense of who counted as a neighbor. For his Jewish audience, the Samaritan–from a community that was at odds with their own–helps the robbed and beaten man on the road, after two others failed to. Jesus challenged them to see the Samaritan as a neighbor. From Hebrew Scripture, Lot’s welcome to two strangers–who turn out to be angels–saves him and his family from Sodom’s destruction. Hospitality is at the heart of desert culture, where the land can show no mercy to travelers. In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Red Brocade”:

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.

I haven’t answered your question of the formal choices made by a poetry of proximity at all yet! To me, poetry is, at least in part, an attempt to bring the far near, and the close, closer. So much of capitalist-imperial-digital life invites us to commodify, erase, objectify, human beings. Done well, poetry can be a technology of enfleshment and encounter, perhaps even to see the sacred.

CL: Absolutely. In terms of encounter, I think of “Two Neighbors,” a poem early in Shrapnel Maps, where the first stanza describes a Cleveland snowstorm wherein a Brooklynite offers the speaker a lift; and the second, a Jerusalem bus ride with a young Palestinian (who hopes to study in Cleveland), until soldiers pull him from the bus. The juxtaposition of these encounters, with Cleveland as a fulcrum, highlights the way context can determine who is, is not, neighbor.

In a later section “Theater of Operations,” we read a series of sonnet monologues that dramatize a suicide bombing during the Second Intifada; these pieces arise from the same context of dehumanizing occupation, devastating violence, and perpetual mistrust and fear. While most of the sonnets make the speaker’s perspective clear, I was shocked at how many lines read, or could, in both cases: “So why do I taste metal, like blood in the mouth? / Why do I feel so alive, this close to death?” or later “I have only this / unexploded moment // where the future crouches / a burning smell //” and “our house is now / another house / not the house we used to live in” so “I knew this was a chance / to choose my fate / to end / my disappearance—” How did you begin to inhabit such varied voices with both integrity and creative license? Given the polarized nature of the conflict, was balance something you considered? What can poems capture that perhaps an interview, news story, etc. cannot?

PM: Shrapnel Maps was twenty years in the making, and “Theater of Operations” happened somewhere right in the middle of that process (2008-2009). Though many of the lines of the sequence come from documents, interviews, and news stories that I had encountered during those years, as I tried to understand why Palestinian resistance had turned to this unspeakable form of violence. As a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights and justice, I felt obligated to confront what had become a kind of counterargument by those supporting the separation walls, checkpoints, and other collectively-punishing security measures enacted by Israel–that they were necessary to prevent violence against their citizens. I wanted to understand, to explore the causes and consequences of suicide bombing, but in order to do that, it was impossible not to confront both violences–the violence of that matrix of control that suffocates Palestinian life, and the violence of Palestinian armed resistance. I must have written almost 100 sonnets, then pared it back to 21–the before, during, and after of a single fictional bombing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the pain of a suicide bombing, and the ethics of representing an actual bombing, would have required abiding with the actual victims, and working with them to make sure that they felt that the poems did justice to their loss. So I did what I could, from my point of distance: Wonder. Research. Imagine. etc.

The fact that some of the poems’ lines could be read as spoken by either “side” reflects either the limits of my imagination or my sense that there really is no ultimate difference at the heart of human beings being human, whatever their nationality. Not that there are no differences, of course, but that those differences are along a spectrum, not one in which some people are worthy of dignity and our curiosity, and some are not. Others will have to decide whether my poems work–individually, and as a sequence. I did not seek a balance of perspectives as much as seek to encounter and imagine voices in counterpoint and conversation. Poetry is my way of encountering, of wondering and wandering past the accepted (and policed) limits of the national imagination. I think a poet’s job is to challenge those boundaries, to refuse to accept the demonized, cliche, versions of other people.

CL: Let’s definitely return to documentary poetics and the ethics of abiding. But first: I love the idea of poems as a way of pushing beyond a national imagination, not accepting a party line, or even that there is a single line. I have a fairly no-nonsense friend who gets exasperated with poetry; she always wants to know what it means and it drives her wild that, unlike a news analysis or expository essay, a poem refuses to simply denote.

My question for a poem is always how did it move me, change me, make me see the world anew, require a shift in my own conception of what it means to be alive, or recognize something latent but intrinsic to being a body with a spirit. Daily facing its own constraints, and those from a multitude of others.

With speakers well aware of their limitations (“Deema,…what do I know / of migrant earth, as you // wrote, of entering a rooftop / in Gaza…?”), I can confirm that your pieces do highlight our subjectivities, expand our empathies; we see this in Sand Opera as well, with lyric testimonies written by torturers and prisoners alike; and yet unlike memoir, fiction, or film, often the ways poems alter me is by altering how I read. This happens in a later poem “Map Not the Answer,” which begins:

exists everything here
belonging except

desire you means
have you what for

owned never
dreams in except

On first read the piece makes a scrambled sense, until we reorient and read each line right to left. Readers are also asked to operate differently when reading (or hearing) “Bride of Palestine,” a four columned, four voiced poem describing Jaffa, to be read simultaneously. In that piece, the tonal mash-up allows for discordant realities to coexist.

I’m curious what habits of mind or reading muscles things like inverted margins, or overlapping, or even erased lines require? How does a poem’s form start to reveal itself to you? Does your concept of audience or reader affect these final forms?

PM: Totally, why don’t we say what we mean?! I have a friend like that, too (we all do–and sometimes I’m that person too). Poetry’s romance with figurative language is spooky, haunted, magical. And sometimes a poem can be irksome, because it seems to be a form of hiding, or of posturing, rather than something we really crave–the revelation of beauty or truth or a spell to set things right.

The longer I write poems, the more I seek to do in poetry what can’t be done in prose. Around age forty, I started writing lots of prose (a memoir, yet to be published, and many personal essays). The sudden freedom to cast language around with greater profligacy made me think of the work of the poem differently: the poem as an architecture of sound and vision. Freed from the need to recount a story or even to express a lyric feeling, I gained a renewed appreciation for both received and found forms. (Check out my recent essay in APR on hermit crab poetry.) I never feel like I’m done with the poem until it does that thing you spoke about–until it reveals something I didn’t know, until it announces another vision. Is it possible that too much poetry today comes from a place of certainty, of righteous conviction?

I don’t know if there’s a particular habit of mind, except to proceed through one’s discontent, one’s curiosity, about the unfolding. To essay forth, to experiment, to make mistakes, to risk.

I tell my students that the first draft is for them. The second, probably, too. But eventually, a poem must make a gesture toward its readers or listeners, to be a floating thing between us and the world. If we grip it too tightly, hoard its light, we hide its shining.

CL: Your APR essay broadens conceptions of form beyond received ones to recipes, to do lists, applications, bingo charts, letters, dictionary definitions, exams, etc. all of which, if not as gimmick, can house poetic discovery. In Fugitive/Refuge, you use many of these daily-life forms in service of poetry, and also incorporate family history in an examination of migration and belonging. In several “Border/Manifest” sections, we have a dramatis personae, a definition poem (“manifest”), and the ongoing “Ballad of Skandar” which relies heavily on footnotes, in addition to primary source documents like immigration cards, photos, and ship manifests. This multimodal poem describes a great-grandfather fleeing Lebanon to Mexico; and from further violence, his family seeking refuge in the United States. Like you mention, this narrative rhymes with so many migration stories from all over the world. One could simply write narrative family lyrics, or as you do elsewhere, craft erasures and inventive structures to highlight diaspora and displacement. Yet in this new collection, the primary source documents insist not only on an individual’s story, but also highlight its materiality, its veracity. In an age both identity-obsessed and willing to dehumanize at every turn, what are some of the benefits of documentary poetry as you see it? Challenges? What considerations did you have to make when writing this piece and then weaving it throughout the collection?

PM: For me, documentarity–the impulse toward working with official documents and archives–emerged through my reading of war resistance poetry, as I sought to narrow the distance between the war and the homefront. I could see how, for example, Daniel Berrigan’s docupoetic play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, renders both war and the resistance to war visible in a way that is usually hidden in the U.S. Berrigan’s use of actual court testimony–and court testimony as a declaration of witness and resistance to U.S. imperialism–moved me deeply. Works like that lay bare the ghost-architecture of war as it exists among us in the United States. I’m proofing my next book, Dispatches from the Land of Erasure, and in it, M. NourbeSe Philip talks about the United States as a forensic landscape–that is, a landscape where the crime of genocide took place.

As for Fugitive/Refuge, I found that this was the first time that, instead of investigating the archive to expose and meditate on something distant, I was discovering something about my own family’s journey from Lebanon, through Mexico, to the United States. It began during the Covid lockdown of 2020, when I’d hoped to travel to Salina Cruz, where my grandfather spent his early years, before his father was murdered. The trip never happened, so I doubled down on archival research and did a Zoom for the Metres family about everything that I’d learned. That Zoom became the seeds for the garden of the book, where I took the most resonant elements, the ones that spoke beyond the peculiarity of our family, to the wider story of migration.

One of those docupoems, just to take one example, was an image of the official passcard that allowed grandfather to cross into Laredo, Texas, back in 1923. What struck me most about that document was that the original typed last name, “Meters,” was crossed out, and below it was written, “Metres.” Someone–I’m thinking it must have been my grandfather or another of the family, insisted that the name be spelled that way. In Mexico, in the birth register, it was written “Metriz.” This would have been my great-grandfather’s patronymic, my great-great-grandfather’s first name, Mitri (the Greek Catholic, Dimitri). I’m moved by the insistence of a subjective spelling that, for them, must have felt closer to their pronunciation, in a third language.

Your question, about documentary poetry’s possibilities, requires a book to answer, not a few sentences. I think that the most important thing that investigative poetry enables is to reach beyond the limits of the lyric into the social and systemic. Of course, the lyric can do that, but it’s often couched or practiced as an individual expression, not a collective one. Those interested in this subject would do well to begin by checking out the work of Mark Nowak (Social Poetics), Susan Briante (Defacing the Monument), and Michael Leong (Contested Records), not to mention Dispatches from the Land of Erasure and The Sound of Listening. Each of these books does a deep dive into the theory and practice of documentary or documental poetry.

CL: I want to return to the interplay of distance and erasure, but first, thank you for these recommendations; I know documentary poetry is an entire genre that warrants books worth of exploration. I guess more I was wondering what documentary poems indicate about the importance of truth in a poem since beyond the capital t “Truth” that all meaningful art (I would argue) captures, they relay the factual truth in overt ways.

We need both types of truth, but not all poems can hold both without growing didactic, or unwieldy. You work with a lot of primary sources though, and not just physical documents like you mentioned, but transcripts. I’m thinking of “Disparate Impacts” and “The House of Refuge” pieces, testimonies of formerly incarcerated individuals experiencing housing discrimination and homelessness, interspersed with court records and the listener’s (or recorder) notes, almost like stage directions. They read as direct testimonies lineated for impact, and so I’m curious how you see the role of writer and curator overlapping? What makes a poem a poem, as opposed to a transcript, or family archive? What techniques or considerations do you make in taking those particulars and expanding them to the social and systemic? How (or do) you think about incorporating big T/little t truth so as to not only inform, but transform?

PM: Thanks to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and local connections in Cleveland, I met and spoke with Joseph Gaston and Christana Gamble, two formerly-incarcerated, formerly-homeless people in the Cleveland area. Those conversations led to “Disparate Impacts” and “The House of Refuge,” docupoems co-written with Joseph and Christana. I saw myself as co-author, shaping and sharpening the story as I worked with the text of our conversation, adding some context notes to “The House of Refuge” (to make the intrigue of our conversation come alive) and information gleaned from news stories about Judge Boyko, a sort of nemesis to Joseph and his quest for dignity and justice. Inspired by Nowak’s turn toward doing workshops to create more poets (rather than poems), I wanted both Joseph and Christana to see themselves in their own words. It was a deep pleasure and joy to work with them on revisions, for accuracy and truth. As with any poem, I spent a long time thinking about how lineation, spacing, condensing, and silence might amplify or rhyme with the content. The most important thing to me is that they loved the poem of their own life, and felt heard. The story was now outside of themselves, portable for others to carry and bear.

These poems test the boundaries of art, laden as they are with hard facts about the disparate impacts experienced by the formerly-incarcerated, people whose felony convictions can haunt them for the rest of their lives, even after they have served their time. In answer to your question about “what makes a poem a poem,” I suppose, I believe that we don’t know the boundaries of what a poem is, or what a poem can do. Re-reading them now, I hear them as throwbacks to the oral tradition, where the poem must be heard to be real. I like what you say–that these poems are trying to inform and transform. That begins with each person who reads and hears them. In a way, it goes back, again to the Horatian concept of “dulce et utile”–delight and instruct. Maybe all poems do that, with their own measures of delight and instruction. It is true that most readers of poems would vastly prefer delight over didacticism, so that remains a challenge with such work. The truth is that we all could use more delight in our lives. But part of delight, for me, is my amazement about what people survive. As Greg Boyle says, how to develop “a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”

CL: I’m drawn to your work in part by my own delight at how compassion and art get pushed in tandem, perhaps venturing further than either could alone. There is something so powerful about being heard, or read, and sharing that weight of experience. These witness pieces stand in stark contrast with some of the curatorial work you’ve done previously; I’m thinking of the Sand Opera section where Standard Operation Procedure for Guantanamo Bay gets interspersed with both soldiers’ and prisoners’ testimonies in your “abu ghraib arias.” In that sequence so much is omitted, either through white space, brackets, or overt blacked out text which highlights the unspeakable, paradoxically bringing violence and silencing to the fore. Or in Fugitive/Refuge, we have the erasure of a 2014 email urging activists to pressure governments to address the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. With “This Sea, Wrought & Tempestuous,” language washes away until only single letters scatter throughout the poem’s final page. Despite opposite modes, I feel the erasures and testimonies come from similar impulses. I wonder if you can share how you think about erasure as a poetic device—is it meant to conceal or reveal? Can a literary technique reinforce a silencing? How do you work against this?

PM: This subject of erasure is of profound importance to me. From the forthcoming Dispatches from the Land of Erasure: “So, what is this Land of Erasure? It is not a place, exactly, but a metaphor for the imperial and settler colonial ideology that functions through erasure. An Arab American writer situated at the center of empire, I live in a country where its indigenous inhabitants have been—and continue to be—erased in the long genocide of colonial rule. It is the open secret that remains mostly unspoken, a silence that somehow requires further silencing by school boards, legislation, and disinformation media networks.”

Erasure, therefore, is a term whose registers in poetic and political worlds seem almost opposite. In poetry, it has come to mean a procedure whereby one pares away a text to create a poem. It emerged almost out of nowhere as a poetic procedure in the 2000s, as if something about the age required it! Like Solmaz Sharif, I find a measure of horror in erasure, insofar as it invites poets to do what states do. Or, perhaps in a more banal way, it offers itself as a purportedly subversive gesture, but usually is merely an ironic one. As a poet working with documentary evidence, I want to learn something, not to simply prove something. I want to be opened again to what the document shows and cannot show—and to create a space where a reader might encounter that directly. In this way, it’s like writing every other poem, moving between a resolute tenacity in your vision and a nimble openness to what you cannot yet see, trusting that you will know when your tenacity should give way to flexibility, and when your will should cede to the poem’s will.

Take, for example, “Ark In,” my blackout of a page of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. Instead of merely ironizing a canonical (and also Orientalist and racist) literary text—a typical strategy of erasure or blackout poetry—I discovered that Twain himself was concerned with the problem of Orientalist representations, and the need to “unlearn” all the stereotypes that he’d inherited, and the problem of “a system of reduction.” It struck me with force that knowing the problem doesn’t mean that one will not replicate it. Having this note in Shrapnel Maps, in the wider contrapuntal music of the work, is a reminder to the author and the reader of every work’s limits.

So to answer your question directly, yes, erasure–like any poetic strategy–can also create a silencing, engaging in a form of epistemic violence against the vulnerable. How do we work against this? Great question. At the minimum, humility and proximity. In other words, we need to recognize our own privilege and positionality, and also be in relationship and conversation with those whom the work purports to concern or depict, particularly if those people are vulnerable.

CL: You’re so wise to mention humility, proximity—I think of distance as one of the greatest enablers of harm—whether in the form of oceans from an airstrike, differences in an AQI index, decades between a law and its current context.

Context and text seem to matter as much as the technique of erasure; I feel differently about a government document and a personal letter; a political speech or a sacred passage. What role does the source document play in your feelings about erasure (or broader engagement/ manipulation) as a technique? And lastly, it seems like erasure often has a predetermined agenda rather than that element of discovery you mentioned. Can you think of or share a time when you learned something from a text you didn’t set out to ‘prove,’ or when that nimbleness really came into play and the poem took over?

PM: It’s strange to say it this way, but we have a relationship with the source documents, as well as their provenance. How we came about the source document. Why we are drawn to work with it. What we imagine might happen as a result of engagement with it… Whether or not that relational drama translates to the reader should be a living question every writer working with documents should be asking, and only the work itself will answer.

In addition to the aforementioned Twain story, I think of the “abu ghraib arias” in Sand Opera as one of revelation. Horrified by the 2003-2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal, I wanted to write something, but working with the photographic images felt like participating in the further torture of prisoners. When I came upon the testimonies of the Iraqi detainees at the prison, I knew I wanted to bring their voices–not their tortured bodies–into the consciousness of readers. Over the course of working with those testimonies, which I read as a Lenten project, I found that writing was a form of close reading, an encounter with the human outcry implicit in those testimonies. At the same time, I began to realize–and it was the testimonies that taught me this–that torture involves the apotheosis of the torturer. The torturer is a kind of evil god, who has absolute power over the tortured. Oddly, the principal sadist was Graner, who became G in the poems. The tortured endured a kind of crucifixion, so evident in an image like “Abu Ghraib Man.”

Among other things I learned: the poems weren’t just for an American readership. I got an email from an Iraqi woman, a Ph.D. student, working on the poems. Her cousin, it turns out, was in the Abu Ghraib prison and died shortly thereafter. She said that the poems helped her understand what her cousin had endured. It still astonishes me that these poems found their way back to Iraq. That they provided a measure of truth where only silence had been.

Documentary poems should translate fact into something like truth; it is that process of translation where the fact radiates something beyond its facticity, a truth that is almost like beauty.

CL: What a Lenten practice. I’m fascinated, for so many writers, about the way faith and poetry dovetail, either in explicit content, or in the process of putting pen to page.

For me, poems push up against what I can’t articulate, what I don’t know or can’t understand, and yet must reckon with. The best poems aren’t mine, but come when I can quiet the noise around my head long enough to let the lines arrive, to serve as conduit. Poems not as prophetic, but the record of a spirit at work, of the spirit working through or changing me (I hope). And so I wonder if you might share some about the relationship between faith and poetry, for you?

PM: Agreed. The best poems aren’t mine, either. But oh my: Faith and Poetry…. I was lamenting to a friend about my halting attempts to reach my students. He joked back, “I don’t understand much,” to which I replied: “I have moments of clarity surrounded by long wanderings in fog.” That’s true for me, about both poetry and faith. It happens to be snowing sideways right now, on April 7, 2025, in Cleveland. The world is also going sideways. I, too, feel sideways. A few days ago, after two straight nights of little sleep due to travel complications, I felt like a hologram, visiting Oxford, Mississippi–a ghost among Faulkner’s ghosts.

But when I’m paying close attention, when I’m really in my body, when I’m in the middle of writing something, all those big questions (poetry, faith) don’t itch as much. I’m in my joy. Years ago, I was asked to say something about writing and prayer. This is what I wrote:

When I write, I enter into the mystery of Being, of the Light, of God:
In the wild silence of the blank page.
In the thicket of thoughts birthing into words.
In the froth and babble of the first draft.
In visions and revisions.
In slow clarifying, a fog lifting to reveal a lake.
In the saying of the lake.
The poem, the prayer, the place where we find ourselves.

At the time, I guess I wasn’t feeling so uncertain. Sometimes writing does that. I’m so uncertain about so many things, but I know when I’m homing into myself and into the world. I suppose faith is the word for that homing in, an action and a feeling, an act of the will and a welcoming of what is outside of our power.

CL: Oh—thank you for sharing that. Those are the places where we paradoxically lose, and so find, ourselves. And maybe the best we can do with our moments of clarity is offer them up to others who are currently amidst one of life’s storms. If you were to encounter someone who had little to no experience of poetry, or perhaps a stereotypical one, what poem would you share with them first, to dispel a little fog?

PM: Hmm… I’ve been asked to dispense advice to graduates before, and I’ve deflected, because each person needs different advice, and whatever advice we give tends to be advice for ourselves. The same goes for poems. Some that I teach that seem to reach students: “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Self-Portrait with No Flag,” by Safia Elhillo, “Why Bother” by Sean Thomas Dougherty, “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay. I found myself getting emotional over the poem, “More Than This” by David Kirby, just yesterday, reading it aloud to my class. I can’t quite explain why, except that I know the poem just hit me in the heart, and it created a crack in me where my pain and grief suddenly leaked out. I can’t know what is going to crack you open. After reading the poem aloud, my voice breaking at the end, I told my students, maybe this poem is evading you, but I hope that you find the ones that do crack you open. That’s what I cherish most in poems–not the dazzlings of the intellect, or heady ideas, or fierce stands, but the ones whose nakedness awakens me, helps me feel again.