Philip Metres

Author's Statement

So much of our writing lives is scratching with a poor spoon in a dark hole dug out of a prison wall, trying to tunnel to the outside. Every day, we're lucky to produce just a bit of dust and a bit more of the way out. Receiving the NEA fellowship is roughly the equivalent to your fellow prisoner loaning you his shovel. With this recognition, the writing does not get easier, but I have the keen sense that I'm not alone, and that someone might be waiting for me on the other side, listening for the sounds of the scratching coming closer. 

This fellowship has spurred on revisions to A Concordance of Leaves (shortly forthcoming), and Sand Opera, a collection of poems that sets in counterpoint the experience of becoming a father on the home front and the War on Terror abroad, and meditates on what it means to celebrate the body, raise children, and write poetry in a terrifying world of war and violence. I take Herodotus as guide: "I Herodotus of Halicarnassus here set down what the Greeks and Persians did so as to prevent these deeds from drifting into oblivion." 

Sand Opera began out of the vertiginous sense of being named but unheard as an Arab American, and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced, since 9/11.

In the post-9/11 world, many Americans have turned with a particularly keen ear toward the voices of Arabs, even though it has often been a fearful and selective listening. Even the great Errol Morris, for Standard Operating Procedure, chose to interview only Americans for his film on Abu Ghraib! I have tried to gather voices in the United States and in the Middle East--voices that embody our common humanity and the dehumanizing perils of war.