Dotted Archipelagoes of Language

Peter Gizzi. Some Values of Landscape and Weather. Weselyan UP, 2003. 99 pp. $13.95.

By Mark Tursi, University of Denver

“[E]very thing is poetry here” (7), writes Peter Gizzi in his poem “The ethics of dust,” one of the many perplexing and salient poems in his latest collection intriguingly titled, Some Values of Landscape and Weather. And, it seems he’s not kidding: everything from the very literary to the strictly quotidian becomes a part of Gizzi’s poetic repertoire. He alludes to Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Baudelaire, and then in the same beat or stanza, might reference weather, dreams, trailer parks or Sunday school. His presentation of these subjects and objects, the self and others, the ideas and emotion that travel through and over the landscape of these pages creates a remarkably complex and capacious struggle to come to grips with what the poet has previously called his bewilderment with the world, society, and language. For Gizzi, “All the codes have been compromised” (51) and, therefore, his poetry becomes a presentation of ideas, images, and language that amounts to a complex vivisection of life in its multifaceted, and often unstable textualities and currents. It is language that is keenly aware of the flux of human experience, and a poetic sensibility that is simultaneously, and surprisingly, spontaneous and metaphysical. In other words, Gizzi’s work reflects the off-handed, quotidian, and sometimes whimsical poetry of writers like Frank O’Hara or Gregory Corso, yet it is unsettling in its exploration of being, identity and self, in a way that is reminiscent of Mallarmé or Rimbaud.

In responding to questions regarding innovative poetry in America after Language poetry, Gizzi has suggested that “all poetry is a lament.” In the poems from this book the lament is for what we cannot understand about our selves, reality or others, as well as for the failure of language to find relation and, perhaps, truth. However, the wonderful irony that Gizzi recognizes and explores is that this lament is the building block of poetry. It is the obstinate, unrelenting, inexorable, and somewhat absurd pursuit that the poet makes to discover truth and identity through language, while realizing the impossibility of the task. In the same statement where he describes poetry as a lament, he also notes the following: “I guess my work in some way narrates the gaps I read between my reception and what is known” (“After Language”). Exploring this gap—the spaces between and the middle ground—is Gizzi’s modus operandi. That is, his language operates in the silence and the pauses in meaning and the spaces between perception and knowledge, interpretation and signification. In the title poem, he writes:

We’ve stalled in this whistle before,

the train at dusk. Thinking oompahs of dented brass

yesteryear calling on the road:

cloth, hair, and a string to guide us.

Take me away. Not to negate these years

but I need stay rutted in my own

long enough to swerve outside

this collision of particles that dogs my view. (21)

This middle ground allows the poet to create something meaningful, while also resisting the stable ground on which meaning seems to lay. It is a tension that places the reader in a suspended textual and linguistic conundrum where meaning seems always fleeting: “I think of you more often now I’m dead, / and hope your chevron carries you off to the stars / you are so impatiently calling” (18). Gizzi’s language impels and compels the reader through different potential meanings, often never landing on one. Instead his language impels and compels the reader through different potential meanings, often never landing on one. This isn’t simple ambiguity, but, rather, a kind of linguistic and semantic gymnastics that reveals the vast twist and turns that language is capable of and the way in which these twists and turns distort and shape our perception of reality.

In addition to Gizzi’s range in subject matter and his semantic and syntactic “gymnastics,” the poet has a variety of different formal registers. That is, he moves from lyric poetry to historical narrative to language-centered writing to quasi-surrealism to comic humor and even to memoir. In the last of these registers, in a poem titled, Imitation of Life: A Memoir, Gizzi constructs intricate formal restrictions that seem like a collision of the Japanese Renga and the French villanelle. The poem is replete with repeated words and structures, and recurring syntactic and semantic configurations that reconfigure from section to section. One line transforms from “A boy awoke with horror to discover he was the sole transmitter” to “The difficulty of being here is what do we transmit of ourselves that we can ever really know?” to “There are many lives transmitted in meaningful deception” (33). The life lived in this memoir does seem like an imitation, because it skates along the surface of language and pushes the different permutations of meaning and syntax along an almost purely linguistic axis. However, it is a life that is lived through language and, therefore, it comes across as ironically real and believable.

Another of Gizzi’s registers can be found in the poem “Revival,” written for Gregory Corso. The poem does, at times read like a Corso poem, in its wonderful simplicity and vivid figurative language:

I was talking about rending, reading, rewriting

what is seen. Put the book down and look into the day.

I want an art that can say how I am feeling

if I am feeling blue sky unrolling a coronation rug

unto the bare toe of a peasant girl

with vague memories of Jeanne d’Arc,

or that transformation in Cinderella. (49)

But, Gizzi takes these metaphorical scenes and complicates the language to another level:

Why so phantom, searching for a rag

to embellish the holes in my sonnet,

no tracks leading beyond and back,

no more retrograde song cycle tatting air.

These parts wobble, stitching frames

to improvise a document:

all this American life. Strike that.

All our life, all our American lives gathered

into an anthem we thought to rescue us,

over and out. On your way, dust. (52)

The poem is a comment on the experience of “America,” American poetics, and, it may possibly even serve as Gizzi’s ars poetica. Returning to an earlier passage from the same poem, he writes: “All the codes have been compromised. / This is why the boy can’t fathom polar lights, / liberty, merry dancer” (51). Instead, what is fathomed, what is possible and what is known is “to collect rubble at the perimeter / hoping to build a house” (52). Poetry emerges from the rubble and the border of this American consciousness, diffuse, threadbare and wobbling.

The poem, “To Be Written In No Other Country,” reveals yet another of Gizzi’s many registers, this time with humor and irony at the forefront:

If we were to answer the geese overhead

would we ever find a home

lost as we are in the kiddy section of Wal-Mart? (46)

The poet deftly and subtly exposes what is troubling about Postmodernity and American consumerism. In a wonderfully ironic response to the CEO of Nokia, Jorma Ollila’s suggestion that “Work is no longer a place . . . You can do anything from anywhere or will be able to soon” (76), Gizzi writes, “walking the streets of Paris.com / to see Notre Dame.com in the evening light” (76). And later, in a section titled Song, Gizzi changes modes, once again: “Some say birds overhead are a calligraphy: every child learning the words ‘home’” (89) and “Some say the song of the dove is an emblem of thought” (90). These lines effectively aspire toward song, beauty and lyric at a time when it is significantly unpopular to do so.

As with much contemporary poetry, part of Gizzi’s travail involves an exploration of self that is often accompanied with uncertainty and indeterminacy. In describing Jack Spicer’s poetry in his afterward to The House That Jack Built, Gizzi writes: “Language itself can be a cross—if not a double cross—which we bear (endure) as we are irresistibly drawn to it as a ground of recovery at the same time we experience it as a loss of ground” (“Jack Spicer” 186). This serves well to describe Gizzi’s own poetic project. And, like Spicer, Gizzi’s search examines this loss of ground, as well as our compulsion, even if a doomed one, toward recovery. And, one more comparison seems apropos and necessary: like Michael Palmer, Gizzi examines the mysteries and perplexities of language through deft and elusive gestures that seem startling and new at every turn and break. In “Masters of the Cante Jondo,” he writes, “‘And my body’ / What ground is this?” (62), and then later in the same poem:

Is there a score for the treatise

you compose in rain

for the voice as it comes

out of blankness

liberty? (63)

Gizzi’s language is at times beautiful and at other times elusive and troubling. From rare psychological insight to “dotted archipelagoes” (23) of language to troubling metaphysical mediations, Some Values offers the reader a wonderfully unpredictable landscape. This collection serves well to demonstrate Gizzi’s assertion that everything is poetry. But, he also demonstrates—through a myriad of forms and types—that poetry seems to be in everything. This means that the dazzling and luminous, as well as the unsettling and tragic are the registers of human experience. Gizzi breathes new life into a seemingly archaic notion that the poem is somehow eternal – even if indeterminate. He writes “that poetry can catch you in the headlights / and it’s years refocusing the afterimage, / the depth and passion of its earnest glance” (50). This book will catch you in the headlights, and the earnest glance, as a result, will stay with you forever.

Works Cited

Gizzi, Peter. “After Language Poetry: 10 Statements.” UBUWeb. Ed. Anders Lundgerg, Jonas J. Magnusson and Jesper Olsson. Spring 2004. http://www.ubu.com/papers/oei/gizzi.html. OEI 7-8. 2001.

---. “Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading.” The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. by Peter Gizzi. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1998.