standard operating procedure
- A Review by Dante Di Stefano
- Jun 26, 2015
- 3 min read
Sand Opera
By Philip Metres
A poet is a doctor of the broken word. Philip Metres’ most recent collection of poetry, Sand Opera, proves that statement with a surgical precision. Metres’ poetry draws on government documents: Standard Operating Procedure manuals from Guantanamo Bay prison camp, testimony of Abu Ghraib torture victims, the Schlesinger Report, the Taguba Report, the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi, and a number of other sources. The poet recombines and synthesizes this material in order to chronicle the shrapneling of language that has occurred in the discourse on American foreign policy during the War on Terror. In his notes at the end of the volume, the poet says: “after 9/11, I’ve found myself split—between my American upbringing and my Arab roots, between raising my young children and witnessing the War on Terror abroad.” Sand Opera seeks to rend an aria from the fractured and vertiginous narratives of a culture fragged by an obsession with violence.
The collection begins with the poem, “Illumination of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew.” This ekphrastic poem, inspired by a manuscript leaf torn from a Laudario and exhibited at the Cleveland museum of Art, repositions the martyred body as a kind of sacred scripture. The executioners who come to flay his skin from the bone “bend & tend to him/ as if/
tailors or healers/ their eyes/ narrowing knives/ he balances.” Saint Bartholomew’s torturers anticipate the guards at Abu Ghraib, the soldiers at Guantanamo Bay, the government operatives who used enhanced interrogation techniques, and all of those who use “defense” and “security” as alibis for brutal exercises of power. However, Metres’ ends this first poem with the lines: “& if the flesh is the text/ of God/ bid a voice to rise/ & rise again.” Throughout Sand Opera, the voices of the powerless rise again and again like Antigone emerging from the whirlwind to defy her uncle, the king, and to bury her brother.
The polyvocal repetition of the silent and the silenced propels Sand Opera forward. Metres does not merely bear witness to atrocity, he builds a choir from its rubble. Each of the five sections in this volume effectively uses the postmodern techniques of erasure and redaction to render fluently the tongue of the IED, the interrogation chamber, and the extraordinary rendition. The book itself is the very definition of a hybrid work of art, consisting of black space, empty white space, transparent pages with blueprints of interrogation rooms, and a facsimile of Saddam Hussein’s fingerprints. Nevertheless, for all of the pyrotechnics of form, for all of the grappling with the wreckage of language caused by war, the heart of this book echoes with a salaam. Metres clearly anchors this book as a love note to his daughters. In “Salaam Epigrams,” the poet writes to one of them: “O well overflowing, tell./ Broken vessel, you don’t heal./ Stream of grief: blessing.” To remain open and wounded, to break again and again, and yet to love and to dare to sing despite the fact that your lyrics are all broken—this is the job of the poet. Sand Opera is an essential book because its message is simple: we must “open the spine binding our sight” and we must recite out of this darkness; in other words, we are the Word made flesh and our truest standard operating procedure should be to love.
Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.
For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.
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