I heard Peter Gizzi at Writers House quite a while back (as in pre-blog) & was taken both with how many echoes there are in his work, and also by how much I liked it/them. By echoes, I don’t so much mean influences in the ordinary sense – say, the way John Taggart has influenced John Tipton – as I do a sense that every form, indeed almost every nuance, seems to arrive in Gizzi’s poems bearing the weight of all of its historic baggage.
Picking an example of this from Gizzi’s new book, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, is difficult, not because there so few good instances of this, but because there are so very many:
to think that I have written this poem before
to think to say the reason I came here
sound of yard bird, clinking lightbulb
to think the world has lasted this long
what were we hoping to say:
ailanthus, rosebud, gable
saturnalia, moonglow, remember
I am on the other side now
have crossed the river, have
through much difficulty
come to you from a dormer closet
head full of dark
my voice in what you say
at this moment you say
wind through stone, through teeth
through falling sheets, flapping geese
every thing is poetry here
a vast blank fronting the eyes
more sparkling than sun on brick
October’s crossing-guard orange
This poem, “The ethics of dust,” is a part of the book’s opening movement, itself entitled A History of the Lyric. But if the lyric is the poem of presence, of immanence, a history is by definition an account of that which is not now & which, in so many ways, can never be present. So also every poem in the sequence raises the issue. Hence the opening lines of “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”:
they are right next to you
in the lanes, hugging a shoulder
•
they twitter in the rafters
calling down to your mess
in rays, crescents
the white curled backs
of snapshots tucked in a frame
eyes of the dead
•
Or the opening line of the single-stanza poem entitled “To his wife far off in a time of war”:
that you are not among the winter branches
Or the first stanza of the title piece:
I lost you to the inky noise
just offscreen that calls us
It isn’t just that these are the lyrics of the living dead, but rather that they offer evidence that presence is always elsewhere, the details in front of us overwhelmed with rot & decay. There is more than a little of Jack Spicer here, more than a little of Walter Benjamin & just a twinkle of Charles Addams.
To watch Gizzi explore ambivalence with almost the detachment of a scientist, trace the logic in “To his wife far off in a time of war”:
that you are not among the winter branches
the door opening
a trapezoid in deep gold light
I awoke to water in the distance
rushing loud as traffic on High St.
more real than traffic on High St.
if you were to come now
hair draping your shoulders
were to kiss my neck
bending to clip the flower
a happy lover might be
known to run to excess
but tell me am I happy
No punctuation here, hence no question mark. That absence underscoring all the other possible ways that final phrase might be heard. It is, at once, literal, sarcastic & several other things, not all of which I think I could name. What in this context could “happy” possibly mean?
Or think of how Gizzi maximizes the pressure on the final couplet in “Coda,” the last poem in this first sequence in the book, as melodramatic as anything Matthew Barney or Nan Goldin ever dreamed:
When the sky came down
there was wind, water, red
When the sky fell
it became water, wind
a declaration in blue
When the end was near
I picked up for a moment, joy
came into my voice
Hurry up it sang
in skiffs and shafts
Selah in silvered tones
When the day broke open
I became myself
standing next to a door
In my dream you were alive
and crying
This section takes off from a simple & very accurate observation: the single most important word in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is when. That poem is referenced clearly only once, in the fourth stanza, yet its positioning within this larger sequence recasts A History of the Lyric very differently. Eliot may very well be the model of this entire poem: High Street is indeed the banking center of London.
It is not self-evident that Gizzi’s references & allusions should be read as approval of a given source. Poems are written “after Albert Pinkham Ryder” & “after John Livingston Lowes,” the author, in 1919, of Convention and Revolt in Poetry, a book that argued the idea that poetry is about expectation, which in turns depends on convention, with one set of poets attempting to fulfill expectation, another attempting to disrupt it. There are poems amed “Hawthorne,” “Edgar Poe”, “A Film by Charles Baudelaire” & “Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weill.” The phrase, incidentally, is “There is no time better than the present….”
You have Spicer’s jadedness, Benjamin’s sense that the whole of history infects every word, a panoramic view of the whole of literature combined with the claustrophobia of the carrels & an echo of something that I hear at times in a very different kind of poet: Charles Bernstein. It’s that obsessive quality that both poets have combined with a sense that every sentence, each word, must mean not only what it says, but something else altogether as well.
To say this work is “bookish” is like protesting that Rimbaud is French. In the words of Homer, “D’oh!” Haunted is much more like it. Yet at the same time the book is an extended elegy for presence & direct communication. To say that it’s grief is arch is not to say that it’s feigned.
