The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance by Philip Metres

Abstract

husband and two sons from the “sun and sand” of the “desert country” of her native land. Dealing with “fear and trepidation” and the “pressing problem of language,” Salimah takes a menial job at a local supermarket . There, she cuts and packages meat and gags from the smell of the “scarlet blood . . . that clung filthy, weary [and] listless” over the “stark white tiles of the workplace’s four walls.” Sayuri’s story is told in the form of letters to a former creative writing teacher. She finds that “in a foreign country, language ’s main function is as a means of selfprotection and a weapon in one’s fight with the world.” She aspires to be a writer and for much of the novel details her struggle with the “cultivation of the written word, the language that sustains thought.” The two stories intersect in the ESL class and then in the supermarket after Sayuri suffers a loss and seeks mindless employment . Together, the women shape new lives forged from the bonds of friendship with “these dear people, this dear time, these dear things.” Farewell, My Orange deservedly won both the Kenzaburō Ōe and the Dazai Osamu prizes. Its final pages take a major turnaround with a knockout of an ending. As the setting sun offers “endlessly enduring hope” to one character, it offers solace to another. Or perhaps it is one sun and one story seared together by one language that serves to protect both characters. This heartbreaking novel demands to be read more than once. Robert Allen Papinchak Valley Village, California TARKOVSKY PHOTO: ГЕОРГИЙ ЕЛИН / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Books in Review Philip Metres The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2018. 216 pages. AS DIRECTOR OF THE PEACE, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, Philip Metres might be expected to champion political poetry; after all, the subtitle here is “Poetry as Refuge and Resistance.” As he makes explicit, however, “poetry is never merely an extension of political rhetoric.” His work is certainly a poetics of advocacy, but he tries to differentiate the politically vital from the rhetoric of politics. Against ancient notions that poetry gives instruction and pleasure, Metres prefers the late C. D. Wright’s axiom: we read “to be changed, healed, charged.” Or, to use a classical term, to attain metanoia —an altered vision of life. This book is a collection of Metres’s writings over the past decade. Collections like this can be a tad repetitive, but Metres’s is relatively free of that occupational hazard. Nor is it merely a miscellany. The focus is steady on reading and writing poetry beyond how those practices may exist in the mainstream; poetry’s “cultural work,” besides refuge and resistance, involves “recovering silent voices” and “imagining and modeling a more just and peaceful world.” One of the immediate attractions of this collection is that it is actually about world poetry. Yes, American and a healthy number of Arab American poets are represented, but poets who write in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic , Polish, and Russian are also surveyed, plus a fine meditation on translation. (That essay made me want to read more about its poet, Arseny Tarkovsky.) Metres divides his book into essays and portraits, but there are actually two kinds of each, I think. Some of the portraits are selfportraits , whether as interviews, dialogues with collaborators, or personal meditations, such as the lovely rumination on memorizing poetry. The other portraits center on individual poets. Most winning is the one about Adrienne Rich, largely because of its evenhanded tone, its lack of agitprop, at the same time arguing for the prominent position she rightly holds. The essays also tend to fall into two categories . One is comprised largely of cataloging , such as those on Arab American poetry after 9/11 and on “Poems for Peace.” These pieces are more crafted than “cataloging” suggests, more like Cornellian cabinetry, as the latter essay, for instance, juxtaposes Archilochus and Sappho with Aharon Shabtai and Naomi Shihab Nye, among many others. The second kind of essay is more theoretical, or at least speculative. In the longest chapter (thirty pages), Metres discusses “documentary poetry” or its “overlapping...