Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 206 pages. $29.95.
“In that dark room, nursing my head, poetry was my refuge, a way to return to myself, to remember other people who had suffered as I was suffering,” writes Philip Metres, in the introduction to The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance. In the darkness following a concussion, away from the constant barrage of news and of conversation, an opportunity emerges to consider resistance and “the flurry of poetry activity constellating around the term.”
Although the essays in The Sound of Listening are placed under the umbrella of poetry as refuge and resistance, the breadth of the work extends far deeper. In one essay, Metres considers the act of memorizing poems and how using “your mouth, your whole body, as an instrument for the unfettered music of words” is protest. In another essay, Metres meditates on the complicated process of translation, the impossibility of it, even arguing that “translations are beautiful monsters.” All together, these essays capture the profound complexities of these subjects with a kindness and thoughtfulness.
The Sound of Listening is not unlike Metres’s previously published works, which have thoughtfully engaged with their own forms of resistance and added to a broader conversation surrounding Arab-American identity and politics within and outside of the United States. Metres’s work extends beyond poetry and into prisons and classrooms, constantly asking us to interrogate and reflect.
The Sound of Listening searches for a way to look past the chatter and into the silence within us and among us as a means of resistance. Not to be silent, but rather to listen, to witness, to be alive and present. Considering the relentless violence inflicted upon marginalized identities, as well as the history of American empire and war resistance from World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War, this book of essays assesses the space between protest poetry and poetry that perpetuates violence. It asks us to question where our responsibilities as poets lie, both on and off the page, and what it means to engage responsibly with politics, or not engage enough.
All the while, Metres reminds us that “Our metaphors stretch and reach to something that may be beyond language. Our vision fails. And yet we keep reaching.”
In the essay “(More) News from Poems,” Metres studies the increased use of documentary poetry in our contemporary landscape and the age-old struggle to “amplify the voices of people and movements that mass media journalism has tended to ignore or misrepresent.” He argues documentary poetics can give a “second life to lost or expurgated histories,” “give a breadth of authority that the lyric utterance cannot attain on its own,” and/or enable us to “become cocreators of history through language.” What follows is a complication of these ideas and a conversation surrounding in-depth analyses of work by Charles Reznikoff, June Jordan, and Muriel Rukeyser, among others. Metres writes:
We need to ask ourselves, in our own institutions and structures of power: Are we merely self-replicating, or are we building something new? Are we and our poetry assisting in the perpetuation of unjust systems? Has it become robotic assembly-line production? Does it offer, in its partial sight, some way forward through the eclipse dark of our contemporary moment?
In essays like “(More) News from Poems” Metres skillfully navigates questions such as these with an impeccable attention to the craft of poetry. These essays are often sandwiched between conversations with Metres and Arab-American writers Randa Jarrar and Fady Joudah, as well as Iraqi War veteran and poet Micah Cavaleri.
I was especially thrilled to read Metres’s short essay on Khalil Gibran, in which Metres writes about his adoration for Gibran and even corrects our Westernized idea of Gibran’s name, writing it out as “Gibrān Khalīl Gibrān bin Mikhā’īl bin Sa’ad” very early in the essay. Metres’s piece pays homage to the Lebanese poet, who is a household name for so many Arabs and Arab-Americans. Metres even shares a letter Gibran wrote to his great-grandmother after hosting him in her home, which made me fall in love with Gibran all over again.
Beyond this, Metres shares what Gibran means not only for himself, but all immigrants, who he describes as people who know “home is a verb.” He writes the following of Gibran’s work:
But the spiritual homelessness, the raw longing that resonates past the cliché, describes and embodies what I’ve felt of immigrant life. I think of the liquid melancholy in my grandmother’s eyes shining back at me when I would visit her at 290 Hicks Street, filled with some kind of impossible-to-quench thirst, a look I’ve seen so often when meeting immigrants and refugees and exiles from all directions of the compass.
Metres’s interviews in The Sound of Listening are equally thought-provoking. For instance, Metres’s dialogue with Iraqi War veteran and poet Micah Cavaleri is brave in its questions surrounding not only the humanity of war, but the humanity of writing about war and the ethics that guide us to war. Metres asks, “How can we not be disturbed by the killing of another human being? Can we ever say that it is acceptable?” And when such an atrocity happens, “are we making such violence beautiful, and therefore somehow missing its profoundly traumatic core?”
These are the types of questions Metres sets out to ask in The Sound of Listening. Each essay begins with an observation and an invitation to step into the dark room Metres shares with us in the introductory essay. He asks us to bravely examine and to listen as we attempt to use language as a means of grappling with violence. All along, he notes “How easy it is to get drowned in oppression, how easy to get cut off from the resources of our love,” and “Sometimes poetry is listening, listening to the great listeners.”