JERRY #9

Review

How We Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry:
In Defense of Nothing by Peter Gizzi

by Emily Wolahan

Last year, when Peter Gizzi's In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987-2011 was published, we at JERRY clambered to get a copy and pledged to review it. I fought for the chance to take it on and then, reading through poems that span four books, I found I was paralyzed to say anything coherent. 

I first came across Peter Gizzi's work in New York in 2008, it showed me possibilities in verse and imagination that I didn't even appreciate at the time. Throughout his poems, he explores how the imagination investigates art, language and itself. His is poetry in which thinking unfolds—an intoxicating blend of witnessing a mind and feeling that you are somehow a part of that process, that you have been given access to it. Encountering the poems in 2014, I could see in Gizzi's lines moments when I had figured out something about my own work and moments when I'd learned how to accomplish an approach or a line break or a phrasing that had plagued me. Gizzi showed me the way.

Trying to talk about Gizzi's work with my fellow editors, Ethan Hon and Dan Bevacqua, it occurred to me that how we talk about a poet's work reveals his or her place in our constellation of poets. Better than a review, we at JERRY decided to enlist Robert Whitehead, Sumita Chakraboty, and Christopher Kondrich to take part in conversations about of a handful of Gizzi's poems over text-message.

These conversations reflect how many of us engage with poetry we love: we talk about it with other poets. We think about how it relates to our own work. The exchange might be casual or in depth, but it means something to chat about a poem, to get excited by its lines, and to be shown another way of looking at it by the genius of our friends. 

Each is organized with the poem’s title and page number. The wonderful book they are from can be purchased here.

“Blue Peter,” page 6

Emily Wolahan: I really wanted to send this poem to you because it's the poem that started me off in this review. I was trying to write about endings and how great Gizzi is at ending a poem. Giorgio Agamben has that book The End of the Poem in which he argues the essential problem in ending a poem is that a poem is defined as a marriage between sound and sense (Valery I think?) but the end of a poem disrupts the dynamic between the sound established by meter and the semantic power in the line. Gizzi however manages to write an ending that blends sound and sense. There's a lift in the voice ending on a question--a sound that expresses the action of the final word "wave".  On top of that, I think the larger "sense" of the poem is only revealed as we approach and end the poem. We need the end to make sense of it. So, I'm willing to talk about whatever you fancy in this poem, but I am blown away by that end. And not because of the wind power in his final wave. Talk soon! Emily

Christopher Kondrich: What's brilliant about "Blue Peter" (one of the many brilliant aspects) is that sound and sense collide and toss up chalk dust of a sort, the dust of something brutally simple but off upon closer inspection - sight, rhetoric, interpersonal correspondence - like the flags and targets that populate the paintings of Jasper Johns. And, like those paintings, we get the mirage of something official and presidential, especially when we encounter "will not parry from this / dearth." He's screwing with us in the most sincere and serious way that Johns does. I'm probably reducing the work of both artists, but it has me thinking about the necessary surfaces things must wear for us to see them, the 'you' that the speaker wears about his mouth, about the end of the poem which seems to be wearing the cloak of 'the end of a poem'.

EW: I haven't looked at your text until just now, days after you sent it. Not how texts are supposed to work, I know. But I'm glad I waited. I'm blown away with how you've put it: "something official and presidential" paired with Gizzi's light touch. And that idea of the ending being layered, the ending itself being worn "about my / mouth, as a crease, deepening". Looking back at the poem after your response and a week away from it, I'm struck by how differently I read it every time. And I think that speaks to your observation that there's a collision of sorts, several collisions, in the poem that tack and bend to various understandings. How the abstractions of the axis and "multiple / perspective" gives way to "the garden of vestiges, next to // the sweet water cistern". I read love, death, perception, philosophy here--differently each time. The speaker moves away from what does not interest him "as I take / seriously your claim to provoke you."  What do you think about the "you" here? There is so much affection, I think, but I'm not sure I'd be able to say what sort of beloved that "you" might be.

CK: It's an interesting instance in those lines you mention in which I feel like I can't insert myself in some sort of emotionally driven pronoun overlap like I can with, say, "Modern Adventures at Sea," a favorite of mine. I can live in the pronouns of that poem and engage with my own life vis-a-vis Gizzi's. But in this one the 'I' seems like a faculty, like the middle section of a see-saw (an unintentionally related image) that enables the back-and-forth of perception. That would make Gizzi the beloved, which seems appropriate for a poem about consciousness.

CK: I love this poem, and I loved talking about it. I'd like to live in a landscape populated by texts about Gizzi. Or, as Frank Black once sang, I want to live on an abstract plain.

EW: I like this idea of the self-beloved, a dialogue between self and soul. It makes me want to enter the next poem I write completely rethinking pronouns, my relationship to them, the reader's and theirs to each other.
I can honestly say I better understand this poem after chatting with you about it. Catch you in the plane I fly over the abstract plain. Later!

“Bardo,” page 214

Emily Wolahan: Do I send this poem to you because I'm struck how suspended in thought I feel reading your own work? I had to look up "bardo", a liminal moment of thought/transcendence in Tibetan Buddhist meditation, but was drawn initially to the poem because of the action of thought, the Oppen-esque "to crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble." I am astounded by the shift from "if I say the words" to "Is there world?"  As I said, your work strikes me as bound in thinking. How do you get there? How do you get out?

Robert Whitehead: I got a new phone, which usually means I never know who is texting. But I'm pretty sure this is Andrew?

EW: Sorry! It's Emily! I love that I could be Andrew. But I'm not as smart.

RW: I was close!!!

EW: Let's talk Gizzi for my "texting" review.

RW: You are that smart. Let's do the thing.

RW: I just printed out the poem and read it a lot with my office door closed and scribbled on it a bunch. So I think I'm ready.

“This Trip Around the Sun Can Be Expensive,” page 184

Emily Wolahan: Hi Sumita. It's awesome to meet you through talking about Gizzi. He's long been a favorite of mine for so many reasons--but one of them is how he handles long poems. For this exchange I chose a short poem, but in it I see something he does in his poem "Vincent Homesick for the Land of Pictures". He rotates, just as we revolve around the sun. In "Vincent", the second half of the poem mirrors the first in reverse. I'm really taken, and I think have been influenced by, Gizzi's depiction of art/creative thought as circular; representation as something that revisits, with a difference. Thought this poem would be great for a snowed in East coaster to contemplate! The sun is so cheap out here in California it presents its own problems. Get back to me with any thoughts when you can! --Emily

Sumita Chakraborty: Emily!  This poem is magnificent, and so is this idea of yours; I’ve a tendency to ramble on in texts and other personal correspondence theoretically limited to brevity, so on a personal level I’m tickled pink to have a context in which such rambling is basically mandatory.

SC: I love what you’re saying about revolving; and there’s such a remarkable poetic history to the word and the idea, you know?  The volta; Yeats’s gyre; even all the way back to Georgics, with its planets and with the idea of poetry as plowing, which involves having to turn back around at the end of a row.  And there’s a touch of madness and rebelliousness to revolving, right, like the word revolution, which this poem definitely locks right into & grows out of; it’s, well, “viscous,” “flesh,” “Wound bright,” “winter dark blooming.”  The land of pictures, of writing - “all time booming.”

SC: God it’s stunning.  This discussion is going to be a blast.  Thanks so much for having me; I can already tell this’ll be one of the most fun things I’ve done.  I’m in Atlanta these days - working the AGNI gig remotely, hanging out down at Emory - so tragically no snow for me, but winter’s my favorite season, and I can’t tell you how great it is to smell it in this poem.  S

SC: (Oh and by the way - tell me if there are hours that are off-limits for messaging you?  I tend toward night-owling, and I know some people don’t use Airplane mode or Do Not Disturb, etc.; would hate to ramble at you at three in the morning and wake you up!)

EW: No off limits hours! So glad you're on board! I'll return to Gizzi's winter later today.

EW: Yes, Revolution. Yes, Madness. But I hear a cage in this poem. Being shipboard with no where to go. The "viscous air" and the "winter ice" makes me think of being kept in one place, stuck. So the poem revolves and creaks in one place... The trip is expensive, so what is the cost? What's the most expensive trip you've taken, what was the emotional toll?

SC: I’ve been thinking about “revisits, with a difference” from your first message, and the attention you called to the title in your last (that “expensive”) - so you know what I’ve been wondering: what happens to the poem if we take the repeating bits out?  so “Shipboard is / what winter is” repeats; “what isinglass / moonlit wave / winter is // Winter surf / all time booming // all time viscous air / not black, night / winter dark blooming // surfs of winter ice” repeats; I’ll count “This trip / around the sun / is expensive,” too, because of the title, yes?  so here’s what’s left:

No time away
from igloo ice

Winterreise
hubba hubba like

To work
the proud flesh

Wound bright

When you said “cage,” “revolves and creaks in one place,” “shipboard with nowhere to go” - something huge about that feels right to me, especially since it feels to me like there are big stakes here - the revolution and madness I was thinking about, there’s not much of a risk to it if there’s no cage, you know?  So that feels dead on - it’s not inexpensive.  There are consequences.  Somehow out of the revolution and the cage comes those seven lines that aren’t part of the cyclical rhythm itself, but they grow out of it anyway.  (This isn’t directly related, but it sort of obliquely reminded me of this, one of Louise Bourgeois’s cells- I think it came in part from your saying “cage,” and in part from “work / the proud flesh” and “Wound bright”)

SC: oh, and another thought!  You mentioned “Vincent,” on rotating - I went to it (I love the long poems, too), and I’m struck by this stanza:

To step into it as into a large surf in late August
to go out underneath it all above and sparkling.
To wonder and to dream and to look up at it
wondrous and strange companion to all our days
and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us.
The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light
the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers
to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing.
The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it
the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms
these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge.

this I love, that seems to speak to what we’re talking about: “To wonder and to dream and to look up at it / wondrous and strange companion to all our days / and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us.”

and two small details:

The moon’s here too, and the “wave” from “Trip Around the Sun,” it’s here in the “surf,”

The word “wound” here: I read it in “Sun” as meaning “injury,” and here in “Vincent,” it’s “to wind” (and “tighter in the act of seeing” to boot) - so there’s what we’re talking about again!  Stakes, massive.  Injury and the act of seeing, a freedom - “to wonder and to dream” - and entrapment, almost a claustrophobia, “held tight, wound tighter,” “feeling caught up in it.”

EW: What great thoughts! The Bourgeois cells have been floating in my head all week haunting me. I keep returning to WOUND BRIGHT. Your focus on what exactly the poem is rotating around is so interesting and a way of approaching it I wouldn't have thought of. For me it really hinges on some purity in those words "wound bright". The play in them is crucial, their placement in the poem crucial. And "bright"... Somehow pure, cruel and exposing. The most expensive of experiences. Thank you so much for this great chat. You've given me a lot to think about regarding Gizzi and also ways to apart a poem. Now! Back to our temperate, cheap winters. --Emily