PoetryBy Philip Metres (Cleveland State UP, 2008)
To See the Earth navigates the increasingly turbulent waters of a globalized world from Moscow to Chicago, from Philadelphia to Ramallah. In poems haunted by Anna Akhmatova, Robert Lowell, and Lev Rubinstein, Metres renders in vivid language what Fredric Jameson called cognitive mapping: a kind of "situational representation on the part of the individual subject to the vaster and properly unrepresentable totality." To See the Earth travels to Russia, memorializes immigrant Arab American family life in a Brooklyn brownstone, witnesses to the violence visited upon people both at home and abroad, and carves out of such losses images of hope the birthing not of a terrible beauty, but of the dreaming disarmed body.
By Philip Metres (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)
A series of snapshot poems inspired by the life and work of the eccentric photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who murdered his wife's lover, then went on to become one of the pioneers of motion photography and the grandfather of cinema. Handmade by members of the Ugly Duckling collective, the cover image, folded in two, echoes Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" and the larger split/subject that the serial poem dramatizes. Plus, it's a flip-book as well. By Philip Metres (Kent State, 2004) A chapbook of poems that explores the dizzying interplay of language and landscape in one poet's life in Russia during the chaotic years after the fall of the Soviet Union. "After reading Primer for Non-Native Speakers, I feel like I've just come back from a trip to Russia..." — Maura Stanton Poetry in TranslationTranslated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky (Ugly Duckling, 2004) "The major work by a major poet, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, and aptly translated. There is no question that this is one of the 'must have' books of 2004..." —Ron Silliman Translated by Philip Metres (Zephyr, 2003) "We can be grateful to Philip Metres for having introduced English-speaking readers to the astringent and unflappable poems of Sergey Gandlevsky. Like Weldon Kees and Alan Dugan, he is a poet of hard-won clarities, of classical formal concision combined with vernacular swagger. Gandlevsky, with his pugilist stance and lyric heart, is a major discovery." —David Wojahn Scholarshipby Philip Metres (University of Iowa Press, 2007)
Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet's relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation. In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements. New foreword by Philip Metres (Southern Illinois University Press) Of the fifty thousand Americans who declared themselves conscientious objectors during World War II, nearly six thousand went to prison, many serving multiyear sentences in federal lockups. Some conscientious objectors, notably Robert Lowell, William Everson, and William Stafford, went on to become important figures in the literary life of their country, while others were participants and teachers in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This long out-of-print book, reprinted from the rare original 1951 edition, collects firsthand accounts by conscientious objectors who were imprisoned for their beliefs. |
