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abu ghraib arias
abu ghraib arias is a chapbook of poems by Philip Metres. It is hand bound and printed in an edition of 200. The cover paper was made from old military uniforms by Chris Arendt through The Combat Paper Project.
- GenresPoetry
30 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 14, 2017
[This review first appeared in American Book Review.]
SONGS OF THE BLEEDING THROAT
abu ghraib arias
Philip Metres
Flying Guillotine Press
flyingguillotinepress@blogspot.com
26 pages; paper, $10.00
By Angele Ellis
Like the indelible shadows of human beings obliterated by the bombs of Hiroshima and re-evoked by political protestors years afterward, the poems in Philip Metres’s searing chapbook abu ghraib arias dwell in the space “…Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act…” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men.” Metres’s hollow men (and women) are soldiers and rebels, victims and torturers, broken followers and rule-breakers whose identities blur between lines that are fragmented, redacted, grayed—a carefully constructed mélange of found texts that include military manuals, documented boasts or confessions, phrases from religious texts, killing clichés.
To speak or read the name abu ghraib (in Arabic, either “place of ravens” or “place of the west”—both raven and west share the same root as the word Arab) after the tortures perpetrated by U.S. military personnel on Iraqi citizens imprisoned in the jail of that name is to feel disgust and/or the urge to look away. As Metres writes in an exchange with poet and Iraq War veteran Micah Cavileri, “Parsing Arias,” from Jacket2:
"...Some poets fetishize horror, and some poets pretend the knowable world is the circumference of grass just outside their studio window. All I know is that I cannot not look away. But the horror of the world is not the (only) truth of the world."
How does Metres find the arias—literally, the air—in an enclosed space of horror, humiliation, and death? This poet creates music from all the instruments at hand, “song[s] of the bleeding throat,” as Walt Whitman wrote in his elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d.” In abu ghraib arias, the eleven poems titled "(echo /ex/)" that Metres places on the left pages of the chapbook—reminding this reader that Arabic is read from right to left—are operatic duets or choruses that both mingle and separate each time one encounters them. The fourth "(echo /ex/)" on page 8 is a striking example of how a poem can be read as a whole or in two or three parts, and of how an initial, G—Charles Graner? God?—can carry both historical and mythical resonance:
his name is G
“Do you believe in
my broken
ark which he had made
I lost
I lost
G came and laughed
lo, in her mouth
it will break again
arms behind
broken because I can’t
sever pain
X
X the hard site
while the earth remaineth
some pictures
shall not cease
Every mark on these pages, including punctuation, is significant: the missing closing quotation mark in this "(echo /ex/)" is not found until the final line of the book, part of an "(echo /ex/)" composed completely of punctuation—a Rosetta stone of repressed memory, but one that leaves dark traces.
Of the eleven poems Metres places on the right hand pages of the chapbook, six are called “blues”—using American vernacular music to frame the words of individual American soldiers who were part of the operation. These mini-narratives span the emotional spectrum from dutiful reportage to coarse ignorance, from twisted sadism to robotic obedience, from agonized outcry to outright rebellion.
In “Parsing Arias,” Micah Cavileri states that he initially was offended by the blues poems: “…by the implication that those soldiers represented soldiers, the implication that soldiers lack any sort of depth or music, beyond their pathetic attempts at singing the blues.” But Cavileri concedes: “…The mindset is all about killing and proving yourself. But that’s what war is.”
Which brings us to the four right hand poems taken from a Standard Operating Procedure Manual. There is an eerie beauty and irony to these poems, as demonstrated by the detailed care of “Handling the Koran (Standard Operating Procedure)” on page 3:
avoid handling or touching
a language specific
to open the one cover with one hand
in an upright manner (as if reading
not every page is to be
clearly see the pages
reverence
two hands at all times
handle as if it were fragile
delicate art
When Cavileri asks Metres in “Parsing Arias” why poetry is/should be a medium for expressing political and social ideas, Metres responds in part:
"One of my arguments about documentary poetry is from Muriel Rukeyser’s notion of a poetry that 'extends the document,'—that gives the factual another life. I would not know about the Gauley Bridge mining disaster without Rukeyser’s great 'Book of the Dead,' nor would I have been
introduced so aesthetically, so empathetically, to Steve Biko were it not for Peter Gabriel, or Bloody Sunday without U2, or the Mothers of the Disappeared without Sting (yes, sadly, ironically, Sting contributed to my political awareness!). Perhaps I’m mixing pop and politics, documentary and songs too fluidly here, since documentary poetry is often considered part of the Objectivist tradition, in which one allows for the language to speak for itself, almost in a machine-like way, and popular music is such an affect-laden mode. Yet what each can do is that they direct our attention to other voices not given the stage in our grand narratives."
Among the other voices Metres calls upon in his work are those of the peace and justice community and of the Arab American community, including poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Khaled Mattawa, Hayan Charara, and Fady Joudah. abu ghraib arias won the 2012 Arab American Book Award for poetry. Perhaps only a poet so much of his time and place could have written this powerful testament.
SONGS OF THE BLEEDING THROAT
abu ghraib arias
Philip Metres
Flying Guillotine Press
flyingguillotinepress@blogspot.com
26 pages; paper, $10.00
By Angele Ellis
Like the indelible shadows of human beings obliterated by the bombs of Hiroshima and re-evoked by political protestors years afterward, the poems in Philip Metres’s searing chapbook abu ghraib arias dwell in the space “…Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act…” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men.” Metres’s hollow men (and women) are soldiers and rebels, victims and torturers, broken followers and rule-breakers whose identities blur between lines that are fragmented, redacted, grayed—a carefully constructed mélange of found texts that include military manuals, documented boasts or confessions, phrases from religious texts, killing clichés.
To speak or read the name abu ghraib (in Arabic, either “place of ravens” or “place of the west”—both raven and west share the same root as the word Arab) after the tortures perpetrated by U.S. military personnel on Iraqi citizens imprisoned in the jail of that name is to feel disgust and/or the urge to look away. As Metres writes in an exchange with poet and Iraq War veteran Micah Cavileri, “Parsing Arias,” from Jacket2:
"...Some poets fetishize horror, and some poets pretend the knowable world is the circumference of grass just outside their studio window. All I know is that I cannot not look away. But the horror of the world is not the (only) truth of the world."
How does Metres find the arias—literally, the air—in an enclosed space of horror, humiliation, and death? This poet creates music from all the instruments at hand, “song[s] of the bleeding throat,” as Walt Whitman wrote in his elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d.” In abu ghraib arias, the eleven poems titled "(echo /ex/)" that Metres places on the left pages of the chapbook—reminding this reader that Arabic is read from right to left—are operatic duets or choruses that both mingle and separate each time one encounters them. The fourth "(echo /ex/)" on page 8 is a striking example of how a poem can be read as a whole or in two or three parts, and of how an initial, G—Charles Graner? God?—can carry both historical and mythical resonance:
his name is G
“Do you believe in
my broken
ark which he had made
I lost
I lost
G came and laughed
lo, in her mouth
it will break again
arms behind
broken because I can’t
sever pain
X
X the hard site
while the earth remaineth
some pictures
shall not cease
Every mark on these pages, including punctuation, is significant: the missing closing quotation mark in this "(echo /ex/)" is not found until the final line of the book, part of an "(echo /ex/)" composed completely of punctuation—a Rosetta stone of repressed memory, but one that leaves dark traces.
Of the eleven poems Metres places on the right hand pages of the chapbook, six are called “blues”—using American vernacular music to frame the words of individual American soldiers who were part of the operation. These mini-narratives span the emotional spectrum from dutiful reportage to coarse ignorance, from twisted sadism to robotic obedience, from agonized outcry to outright rebellion.
In “Parsing Arias,” Micah Cavileri states that he initially was offended by the blues poems: “…by the implication that those soldiers represented soldiers, the implication that soldiers lack any sort of depth or music, beyond their pathetic attempts at singing the blues.” But Cavileri concedes: “…The mindset is all about killing and proving yourself. But that’s what war is.”
Which brings us to the four right hand poems taken from a Standard Operating Procedure Manual. There is an eerie beauty and irony to these poems, as demonstrated by the detailed care of “Handling the Koran (Standard Operating Procedure)” on page 3:
avoid handling or touching
a language specific
to open the one cover with one hand
in an upright manner (as if reading
not every page is to be
clearly see the pages
reverence
two hands at all times
handle as if it were fragile
delicate art
When Cavileri asks Metres in “Parsing Arias” why poetry is/should be a medium for expressing political and social ideas, Metres responds in part:
"One of my arguments about documentary poetry is from Muriel Rukeyser’s notion of a poetry that 'extends the document,'—that gives the factual another life. I would not know about the Gauley Bridge mining disaster without Rukeyser’s great 'Book of the Dead,' nor would I have been
introduced so aesthetically, so empathetically, to Steve Biko were it not for Peter Gabriel, or Bloody Sunday without U2, or the Mothers of the Disappeared without Sting (yes, sadly, ironically, Sting contributed to my political awareness!). Perhaps I’m mixing pop and politics, documentary and songs too fluidly here, since documentary poetry is often considered part of the Objectivist tradition, in which one allows for the language to speak for itself, almost in a machine-like way, and popular music is such an affect-laden mode. Yet what each can do is that they direct our attention to other voices not given the stage in our grand narratives."
Among the other voices Metres calls upon in his work are those of the peace and justice community and of the Arab American community, including poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Khaled Mattawa, Hayan Charara, and Fady Joudah. abu ghraib arias won the 2012 Arab American Book Award for poetry. Perhaps only a poet so much of his time and place could have written this powerful testament.
February 17, 2024
Horrific. Powerful.
November 4, 2013
Of the many strong things I could say about this short collection, this is the most astounding: how Metres' spaces and sections that are blacked out convey the silencing of voices of prisoners in Abu Ghraib just as powerfully as the words he's constructed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews