Poetry Centered

Philip Metres: The Enduring Work of Poetry

• University of Arizona Poetry Center • Episode 57

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Philip Metres introduces poems that speak to the enduring work of poetry to carry us toward life. He shares W.S. Merwin reflecting on how we not only survive but live (“The River of Bees”), William Stafford invoking the inner journeys we each must take (“Peace Walk”), and Natalie Diaz demonstrating the way poetry can hold us amidst pain (“My Brother at 3 A.M.”). Metres closes with his poem “To Go On One’s Way,” after the Aramaic word “yazil.”

Find the full recordings of Merwin, Stafford, and Diaz reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
W.S. Merwin (January 17, 1990)
William Stafford (February 21, 1968)
Natalie Diaz (September 5, 2013)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

Welcome to Poetry Centered, where we linger in the space between a poem being spoken and a poem being heard. This show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the poets voices you'll hear come from Voca, our collection of poetry readings given at the Center between 1963 and today. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson here to welcome you. Our host for today's episode is Philip Metres, a prolific poet, translator, essayist, and scholar who has published 13 books to date. In addition to being a professor of English at John Carroll University, he's also the director of their Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program, themes which are at the heart of his work as a writer. His collections Sand Opera and Shrapnel Maps consider the US war in Iraq and the Israel-Palestine conflict through documentary poetry. His most recent book of poetry, Fugitive/Refuge, weaves together his ancestors' escape from Lebanon as refugees with the struggles of refugees worldwide today. As I read Fugitive/Refuge, I felt powerfully drawn into the stories and language of exiles. It's a gorgeous and transformative book. In this episode, Phil introduces poems by W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, and Natalie Diaz. Through them, he considers the enduring work poetry does to carry us towards life. You'll hear his poem"To Go On One's Way" at the episode's close. Phil, we're so grateful to have you here today. Thanks for being our guide.[MUSIC PLAYING]

PHILIP METRES:

Hello, this is Philip Metres. I'm joining you today from outside Cleveland, Ohio, where the trees outside my window are taking on the tint and cast of fall. Despite the fact that there is so much precarity right now, so much unsteadiness, so much uncertainty, so much despair, I go to poetry in part because it reminds me of what was older, of what endures, of what is beautiful, of what the truth may be, despite what is told to us. I'm going to share three poems today from the archives of the University of Arizona's Voca, and I'm thrilled to say that I've seen each of these poets read, and each of them has been important to me in a variety of ways. The first poem is "The River of Bees" by W.S. Merwin. And many, many years ago, when I was just starting as a poet, I got to see Merwin read. When we got inside the library where he read, I was shocked to see a luminous man. His thick white hair was swept to the side, mostly with a tuft of it wild at the top, as if there were a part of him that would not be tamed. He wore what seemed like farmer's work clothes, worn jeans, and a rough shirt, partly unbuttoned. He could have been the guy down the block with a crazy garden taking over the front lawn, but he was Merwin. After one of those long introductions that seemed to be part of the poetry reading genre, he nodded and thanked the host and quickly turned to poetry. Whatever he read, the acoustic timbre of his voice sounded like it came from another world, not mannered, inhabited. And it wasn't just his voice, his eyes gleamed with humor, with pathos. It was as if his whole body vibrated with a music that we could sense in our bodies, but not hear. Music in the air made of flesh and breath. I wanted to know how to read that without apology, with my whole body and whole soul. One of the poems that he read was "The River of Bees" from his incredible book, The Lice. This poem still has a hold on me all these years later for its oracular mysteriousness, its surrealism, its invitation to wondering how we answer two primal questions, how shall I live, and what shall I say? One thing also that I observed in listening to the recording of him reading this so many years ago, 1990, was that there's a weird ticking in the background, as if a clock, and somehow that became part of the music of this reading for me as I listened to Merwin, again, invite us to imagine what it might be, not simply to survive, but to live. And this is W.S. Merwin reading his poem "The River of Bees."[MUSIC PLAYING][AUDIO PLAYBACK]

W.S. MERWIN:

This is a poem from that time that I go back to partly because of some of the ones I want to read later, because it seems kind of connected with. I think I've been talking rather too much about the relation of our individual lives and what for, really, for want of a real word we call the natural world. And one can get carried away and talk only about it as though it were something out there, instead of as though it were something in here. And one of the marvelous things about those poems of Zbigniew Herbert's that we were talking about today is the way the one suddenly keeps turning into the other. I think this happens In poetry, all the time, if you go back. And I think this is something that we may be on the verge of rediscovering, I hope so. But this is a poem that I wrote, oh, 20 years ago, I suppose. And it was looking back to a time quite some time about that before that. It's called "The River of Bees.""In a dream I returned to the river of bees, Five orange trees by the bridge and, Beside two mills my house, Into whose courtyard a blind man followed, The goats and stood singing, Of what was older, Soon it will be 15 years, He was old he will have fallen into his eyes, I took my eyes, A long way to the calendars, Room after room asking how shall I live, One of the ends is made of streets, One man processions carry through it, Empty bottles, Their image of hope, It was offered to me by name, Once, once, and once, In the same city I was born, Asking what shall I say, He will have fallen into his mouth, Men think they are better than grass, I returned to his voice, rising like a forkful of hay, He was old he is not real nothing is real, Nor the noise of death drawing water, We are the echo of the future, On the door it says what to do to survive, But we were not born to survive, Only to live."[END PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]

PHILIP METRES:

The second poem I'm sharing with you today is a poem by William Stafford called "Peace Walk." He read it during the reading on February 21, 1968, and as he mentions in his prologue before he reads the poem, this poem is a a documentary poem, in a sense, of his impressions of a peace walk that he took with students in Portland, Oregon. This moment, 2025, in some ways, feels more like 1968 than it ever has in my entire life. There's something about the incredible unsteadiness and turbulence of what's going on in our political world that reminds me so much of what it must have been like political assassinations, genocidal wars abroad, turbulence between parties and people, and a sense that the whole country and maybe perhaps even the world is coming apart, is splitting at the seams. Not too long ago, I took part in a peace walk here in Cleveland to commemorate the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that peace walk, like the one that William Stafford describes, was a beautiful, silent testimony, an alternative witness to a different way of being in the world. I consider William Stafford to be the most important pacifist poet in American history. And in many respects, this poem demonstrates why Stafford's poems, all of his poems, come out of a sense that his poetry is a witness to not only daily life, but also witness to his time and a witness to the inner journey that we're all taking. And it's that combination of insistence on the inner journey. That, to me, tells us something about how we endure in difficult times. Stafford knew this by experience. During World War II, he became one of the few people in the country who declared that they were conscientious objectors, and he performed alternative service in the civilian public service camps during the war. And it was there that he began his daily practice of reading before dawn, before his day began. And he considered it a form of moral repair. And he did it throughout his life he worked on and wrote poems homes and oftentimes wrote a poem a day for much of his life. Poetry, for him, became a sort of daily act of finding himself and working on that inner journey. Now, "Peace Walk" is a really interesting poem because on the one hand, doesn't seem to be about the inner journey at all, but about this walking together that these protesters took. One of the things, though, that we see that's so characteristic of Stafford is the way in which this peace walk is not simply a protest, but it defies, in some sense, the very conventions of protest as a sort of noisy or antagonistic rabble. It begins, in fact, with uncertainty, says,"We wondered what our walk should mean." And while he is experiencing the judgment and stares of fellow citizens as he walks along with his fellow peace walkers, the poem ends with such a clarity of vision and also an ambiguity about what it all meant. At the end, he says, above our heads, the soundtrack blared by the park under the autumn trees and said that love could fill the atmosphere occur slow, the other fallout unseen on islands everywhere. Fallout falling unheard. And then, he says, we held our poster up to shade our eyes. So there's this majestic lyrical vision of love filling the atmosphere and counterpointing or counterposed against that, as the fallout, the nuclear fallout and all those who suffered from that fallout. We held our poster up to shade our eyes. On the one hand, it's just a sunny day, and on the other hand, he sees the ways in which a poster might come to limit our vision. And the final couplet is so powerful at the end, we just walked away. No one was there to tell us where to leave the signs. In some sense, it's a deflationary end. We just walked away. There was no transcendence. At the same time, there's this interesting celebration, a sense of agency. No one is going to tell you where to leave the signs. This is up to each of us how we leave our signs and what signs we leave. There's a measure of self-effacement to that, which is also characteristic of Stafford. And yet, at the same time he valorizes this act of walking together, this peace walk, which becomes, in a sense, a testimony to another way of living. And this is William Stafford reading his poem peace walk.[MUSIC PLAYING][AUDIO PLAYBACK]

WILLIAM STAFFORD:

Well, I read one more in this vein and make a little turn on the process of several autumns ago, students where I teach came up to my office and said, we have a project for the weekend we think you should take part in. I am a veteran teacher. I didn't flee nor did I say yes. I said, what is it?[LAUGHTER] They said, it's a peace walk downtown Portland. I saw immediately, that's right. So I went down, and I wrote this as a kind of documentary. At that time, there was a strike at the Oregonian newspaper. Everyone in the world, it seemed, was testing atomic weapons, very much including the United States. This is the account"Peace Walk.""We wondered what our walk should mean, Taking that un-march quietly, The sun stared at our signs,"Thou shalt not kill." Men by a tavern said,"Those foreigners," To a woman with a fur, who turned away, Like an elevator going down, their look at us. Along a curb, their signs lined across, A picket line stopped and stared, The whole width of the street at ours, unfair. Above our heads the soundtrack blared, By the park under the autumn trees, It said that love could fill the atmosphere, Occur slow, the other fall out, unseen, On islands everywhere, fallout falling, unheard, We held our poster up to shade our eyes, At the end, we just walked away. No one was there to tell us where to leave the signs." Now, a point I wanted to make about this was the most impressive person I ever heard talk about writing was J. Frank Dobie, and he said, I remember his making this point, it seems, from outside, as if the problem is to get things to put in. But the problem, after you've been at it for long enough, you really go at it for a while, the problem is what to leave out. And in this peace walk, of course, millions of possibilities are present in any documentary like this, but I remember one especially. Especially enticing element just for an illustration. The person, a student, apparently standing ahead of me, probably Portland State College student, had in his hip pocket, while we were listening to the soundtrack, he had a paperback edition of the works of Aristotle, and I thought it would be very good to get that in my poem somehow, but I couldn't figure out how. Well, I just used that as an example. I didn't know how to do it.[MUSIC PLAYING][END PLAYBACK]

PHILIP METRES:

The third and final poem that I'm going to share with you today is Natalie Diaz's incredible poem,"My Brother at 3 A.M." from a reading from 2013. Natalie Diaz's poem comes from a book called My Brother was an Aztec, and it's an incredible book that explores a variety of things, but in particular, centers on the challenges of having a brother struggling with drug addiction. This poem, "My Brother was an Aztec," is a poem written in the pantoum form, which is a Malayan poetic form that involves an intricate pattern of repetition of lines. Every line repeats in the poem, which causes a sort of incantatory effect. And I've been fascinated by the way in which the pantoum is a form is particularly capable of holding and bearing with, and in some sense working over, traumatic experience. And Diaz's poem certainly qualifies. One of the things that I think is particularly powerful and intriguing about Natalie Diaz's employment of the form, however, is that it uses repetition with a difference, which is to say that although the lines repeat, they often repeat with slight differences, which demonstrate a measure of a kind of hallucinatory effect that the poem provides us. There is this kind of riffing, in a sense, these slight alterations of recursive lines. For example, one of the lines is, "what's going on?" she asks,"Who wants to kill you?" Becomes a more poignant and exhausted line. She asked, "What are you on. Who wants to kill you?" And just after that, one of the lines is,"The sky wasn't black or blue, but the green of a dying night." And that line becomes in its repetition,"The sky wasn't black or blue, but the dying green of night." These little changes become even more powerful at the ending, when the perspective fully shifts from the brother's, who's seeming to be haunted by someone, to the mother's perspective. When the lines says, "Mom finally saw it a hellish vision, my brother." These small moves that Diaz makes destabilize our sense of what is real and shows Diaz's poignant mastery of the pantoum. And while, of course, nothing is healed in the process of the poem, the predicament is clear and the family is, despite the brothers spiraling, anarchic addiction, somehow held in the arms of the form. And this is one of the things that brings me to poetry, the way in which simply through the measured repetition and incantatory impact of words, we can somehow bear up and bear through all of the pain and difficulty that we can face in a life. And this is Natalie Diaz reading her poem "My Brother at 3 A.M."[AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]

NATALIE DIAZ:

So a large part of my book, I say a large part, not a large part, a chunk of my book deals with having a brother, who is a meth addict. And one of the things that has come up, we received a little packet of cards, of index cards that some of the high school students had written questions to, and I was struck by one of the questions and it said, did you feel pain when you wrote these poems? Because I wrestle with family issues. And I mean, it's a valid question. And luckily for me, I didn't think about those things while I was writing them. I mean, I had to deal with the aftermath after. And then I always get the question when I'm writing poems about my brother and they say, did that really happen? And I always mention an anecdote-- the day after my book arrived to me, my mother had read it. She read it with all of my brothers and sisters. I four brothers and four sisters, and so they all read it. Not out loud, but they just took turns reading it. And the next day, my mother came to my house with my youngest sister. And we had this awkward conversation. And I finally asked her, well, Mom, go ahead and just say it. Say what's in you to say. And she said, well, It's just that it didn't happen that way. And my little sister immediately responded. And she said, Mom, what do you mean? That's exactly how it happened. And I think that's the perfect answer to the question. I'm pulling from real emotions, and I'm pulling from real moments of life, real parts of life, but then I meet that with imagination and wonder and possibility and impossibility. And that's where my poems start to happen. And so I'm going to go ahead and read a poem. This is a pantoum. So it's form. You'll hear some repetition."My Brother at 3 A.M.""He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps, When mom unlocked and opened the front door. O God, he said. O God, He wants to kill me, mom. When mom unlocked and opened the front door,

At 3:

00 AM, she was in her nightgown, dad was asleep, He wants to kill me, he told her, Looking over his shoulder.

3:

00 AM and in her nightgown, dad asleep, What's going on? she asked. Who wants to kill you? He looked over his shoulder, The devil does. Look at him, over there. She asked, what are you on? Who wants to kill you? The sky wasn't black or blue, but the green of a dying night, The devil, look at him, over there, He pointed to the corner house. The sky wasn't Black or blue, but the dying green of night, Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives, My brother pointed to the corner house, His lips flickered with saws. Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives, O God, I can see the tail, he said. O God, Look, Mom winced at the sores on his lips, It's sticking out from behind the house. O God, See the tail, he said. Look at the goddamned tail, He sat cross-legged, weeping on the front steps, Mom finally saw it, a hellish vision, my brother, O God, O God, she said.[END PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]

PHILIP METRES:

This is a poem entitled"To Go on One's Way." And it's after the Aramaic word yazil. This poem was published by and commissioned by B.A. Van Sise for his project called On the National Language, the Poetry of America's Endangered Tongues. And in this book, Van Sise takes photographs of people who are trying to retain the languages that are under threat, that are endangered. And I was given this word, yazil, to go on one's way from the Aramaic. And Aramaic, of course, is the language from which both Arabic and Hebrew spring. It is also the language that Jesus would have spoken."To Go on One's Way." Before the peace pole, we gather peace in a dozen tongues, a flutter of hands to wing this word we want to make in the absence of the world, where I and you translates to we, where we arise and go, walking a wide diameter of grief. Inside is an open field we see but cannot enter, without words, we walk cradle shared sorrow. Are we always too late The world is a narrow bridge. And the important thing, as we walk the abyss that is in us, is us, Rabbi Nachman says, is not to be paralyzed by fear. Clouds descended to earth, not fog this, but not rain either. A kind of impossible meeting to arise and go on our way, to find one foot before the other. If pain cannot be housed, we must circle its circumference. Walking, it said, is a series of controlled falls. We fall again and again. When Isaac Jogues failed to find his friend's grave, he declared the whole ravine a reliquary. Everywhere he stepped could be his friend's body. The whole Earth is reliquary. Elsewhere, under the same sky is crying metal, converting buildings to rubble. How to find the tongue beneath the tongue before it split at the root. I walk inside the number 40, years and days, counting one by one. In these days, he went to the mountain to pray. The verse says, "And all night he continued in prayer." Some forests are countries of fire. In the middle of the ocean, in the middle of an open air seaside prison, some drink when thirst begins to burn the undrinkable sea. Some love what they cannot see is prison. One foot before the other. So many photographs, digital iconostases, we hold in palms, victims of victims. Under the bombs, we walk. Under the bullets, under the rubble, we walk, unable to reach the hurt place. Inside the technology of vengeance, of fear, whole family trees uprooted. No, evaporated. Prayed away all night, even when it is day. We go on our way without. Some images are paths, some are dead ends. We are crazed and cracked vessels. The Lord has poured so many tears in us, our faces can't hold them. The path is grief. The destination unknown. To say Salam is to say Shalom, is to wish wholeness upon another the world otherwise fails to offer. We offer our emptiness surrounded by emptiness, our open palms lifted to emptiness. The imam says the everlasting peace is from you, God, and returns to you. One footstep for self, one for kind. The rabbi says, "May it be your will. I lie down in peace and rise up in peace. One for self."Peace I leave with you," Jesus said, "my peace I give to you." Like that we lean into future, pray all day, even when it is night. God, what is this silence? This infinite well. There is no bottom."Arise and go," Micah says,"for this is no place to rest." This present tense. God, what is this silence? God, the silence. We walk on our own path. Beloved names still on our tongue. No place to put them. Our cracked lips part filling with this. This ocean we open with our mouths.[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You've been listening to Philip Metres, and this is Poetry centered. Phil, thank you for that selection across the decades. I loved hearing Merwin, Stafford and Diaz in conversation with your thought and your work. Listeners, it's always a gift to share this time with you. Thank you. I hope these episodes lead you to want to hear more and read more by all of these writers. Two weeks from today, we have another new episode coming up, hosted by Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis. Take care until then and we'll see you soon.

ARIA PAHARI:

Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.