Philip Metres on The Social Distance Reading Series
Philip Metres has written ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020), Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded the Lannan, three Arab American Book Awards, and two NEAs, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Here’s Philip reading from his new book SHRAPNEL MAPS, available at Copper Canyon.
—Library Journal
“Shrapnel Maps is so beautiful. Half dream, half nightmare, all real. Filled with the remnants of what people hope for and what they are willing to do, and everything that remains afterwards. It’s a confrontation to identity and it dares to conjugate love as a defiance to the capacity of violence. Extraordinary…. elegant and devastating and compelling and complex.”
GMR: How do you begin a new piece of writing? What conditions help your writing process
To me, it’s a spell, a sort of self-hypnosis, when I tune inward. I crave entering into its cave. As I age, I need less and less to find the opening.
GMR: What was an early experience that taught you language has power?
There was a neighborhood boy who was giving me trouble. My father told me to “let him have it.” So, the next time I was with Caleb, I asked him, “do you want to have it?” I didn’t know what “it” was, but I always seemed to want to resolve conflict with communication, not with fists.
GMR: What poets or writers do you continually go back to?
Hopkins, Chekhov, Rukeyser, Tarkovsky, Darwish, Rich
GMR: What is your favorite childhood or adolescent book
A toss up between The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.
GMR: What are your thoughts/experiences on social distancing?
Years ago, I interviewed a Russian poet who, when capitalism began to take effect, found little time to write. She struggled with the speed of capitalist time and the rising cost of everything. She lamented: “now there’s no time for poems. Back then I found time to write, at the beginning of perestroika, but now things are more commercial, more energetic. In those years, a friend actually walked to the dacha, sat down and wrote 30 short stories and 60 miniatures. A person could work, could complete their task. I was very envious and was captivated. Before the changes, there was time, and a person had the strength, to do that sort of thing.” This may be a period where we can be productive in a non-capitalist sense, to dream our lives in writing. And write and dream into a new way of living.
GMR: Where can we find you? Link to your blog or website?
www.philipmetres.com or @PhilipMetres on Twitter and Instagram
The Social Distance Reading Series
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
We’re thrilled to host The Social Distance Reading Series, a collaboration between Green Mountains Review and The Vermont School poets. In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. At this point, we are focusing on collections by poets whose book events have been cancelled between January through May 2020.
Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Thanks,
–Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Kerrin McCadden, and Elizabeth Powell, series curators.
–Kylie Gellatly, editorial assistant, interviewer.