Growing up with Modernism

Peter Gizzi
The Outernationale
Wesleyan
ISBN 978-0-8195-6736-9
111 pp.
$22.95

While I was planning this review I heard unexpectedly that Bill Griffiths had died of a heart attack, one of those deaths that despite the person’s age (but he wasn’t that old) and uneven health (but do I really know this) and not having been at all a close friend (when was the last time we talked) feel shockingly sudden, and an abruptly emblematic reminder of the poverty of rewards (economic and cultural) for a lifetime dedication to the writing of some of the best British poetry of the past fifty years. Without thinking, moments after I heard the news I reached for a book that turned out to be Peter Gizzi’s Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003), and read his poem “Redon” in the momentary trance that the shock of such news brings. What previously seemed a Poe-like preoccupation with eerie deathlike states of being now spoke directly to such an occasion. “Spider webs are scarier / when you have a mortal disease” begins the poem, and repeats this theme in its second stanza, saying “The sun seems bolder / when you know / you’re going” and are aware of your “cells wobbling” mortality. It is the second stanza that snags this moment of hearing of a friend’s death.

Everything is so much more
permanent than, say
your shadow is,
all those rushing bells
for a glorious ding-dong decay

I begin with this fleeting personal obituary for Bill Griffiths because the readiness to hand of Peter Gizzi’s poetry  was no accident; this is poetry that wants to know more about the salient and the fugitive affects of lived experience, and brings great precision to their articulation, in “a world of navigable foreshortening emotional registers”. Appropriately enough, in his new book he is insistent that his poems will not “bring back the dead, their ashes flying”.

Some Values of Landscape and Weather created quite a stir in the UK when it was published four years ago. Here was an American poet who could produce some brilliant poem-like poems without apology, expressing subtle emotional phrasings with lovely accuracy, wrote with complete sonic assurance as himself, and yet balanced all this with a deconstructionist attention to the “blurred sentence” of language. A poet whose favorite word was “if”, that bridge to the subjunctive, the speculative, the experimental, that sigil of imagination. A poet of very long lines as well as the briefest phrase. What would the new book be like? From its punning title, The Outernationale, and the subtle formal brilliance of the poems to the handling of wit and emotion this is another fine collection of if. Readers may miss the wonderful long lines he used in the earlier collection, but Gizzi has retained the couplets that he uses so skilfully, continued to write fast meditative poems that stroll among ideas and interrupt their reflections with reflexive double takes, memories, or some other form of gentle self-questioning, “to think a way / between moonlight / and the dictionary.” At its heart is a formal tour-de-force, “Vincent”, in palindromic stanzas where every line is repeated twice in reverse order working outward from its centre. In “Saturday and Its Festooned Potential” he appears to venture a credo--“to be oneself becoming a poem” — in which the ambiguity—to be oneself rather than conforming to aesthetic norms and in a glance back at the Romantic tradition to still be able to live a life in which poems are a central part of that shaping of oneself — is an aspiration to be set alongside the demands of literary genealogy and contemporary divisions. This is a poetry easily misrepresented by a reviewer because it is a collection of poems jauntily out on those thought-ways mooning over the lexicon or carrying the language back to the moonlit world rather than looking up the moon in a book; it is a poetry avoiding high seriousness for the most part out of a scepticism toward its values, as in this passage from the second version of the title poem:

The whole wide whorl
of economics charted
on a dart board
in  bed sheets, -th
-onomy, -illion, -ation.

The claims of economics on our attention are lightly mocked by the pun, and then further undermined by the implicit comparison to a popular game of skill and chance, before contrasting it with the world of love and passion. What could have been a conventional poetic dialectic of society and love is however then neatly turned back onto the surface of language where the suffixes and consonantal endings that collude with the powerful abstractions of economics are lined up revealing their  empty whorls.

A deft aphoristic style proffers its observations with an emotional commitment that avoids dogmatism or piety. When he says that “Faces unlike weather / never return”, the emphasis is less on the transmission of wisdom than on the painful recognition of the consequences of temporality and the flickering changeability of that place where the interplay of body and self is most intense. Other statements sound hard won — “not all speech unuttered equals silence” — though this could be an allusion to Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, a not unreasonable intertextual echo to hear given Gizzi’s belief that “we are the children of Modernism”. The “princess” is becoming aware that something unstated is happening in her marriage to the Italian prince, and it is precisely what is unuttered that is so revealing: “It was not till afterwards that she discriminated as to this; felt how the act operated with him instead of the words he hadn’t uttered — operated, in his view, as probably better than any words, as always better, in fact, at any time, than anything.”  As one might guess from such an aphorism about the value of silence, this poetry knows all about the masculine overvaluation of emotional reticence that mistakenly claims to be realistic and more sensibly sceptical than sentiment could be. My favourite aphoristic line is the opening of a brilliant poem, “Nocturne”: “To know is an extreme condition / like doubt, and will not rest.” This is what Stanley Cavell says discursively in The Claim of Reason (“consider how little of anything, or any situation, we really see”(143)). Gizzi’s poem is also partly a call to open the gates of perception, and partly a celebration of the sensory worlds beyond knowledge, worlds of experience that he represents by colours.

Is it so difficult to admit light
in its unconditional noise

its electric blur, its red
cherry red, red of the advertisements

or yellow, cool as yellow gold
flat as mustard yellow.

And bright-bright Gatorade green
green dusky as gray forest-shade green.

Anne Truitt writes in her journal Daybook, an account of her development as a sculptor, that she “slowly came to realise that what I was actually trying to do was take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake. This was analogous to my feeling for the freedom of my own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color (81)”. I am also reminded of a piece of advice from a painting manual. “Body is staining capacity, the ability of a colour to cover a surface evenly when spread thin”, says Lynton Lamb in Preparation for Painting, revealing how deeply this idea that colours can inhabit our bodies is embedded in our phenomenologies of colour.  When Gizzi arrives at blue, he concludes the poem with a series of associations, the blue of prison clothes and a singer’s eyes, “the blue between tenements” and “between trees, kids, air”, and finally “the throaty blue / in a doorway after a party”. Allusions to music, the bluish smoke of cigarettes, and a catch in the throat from the intense feelings stirred up at a party, all tacitly allude to the Blues, and yet remain on the side of color, of its strange way of becoming part of us. As so often in Gizzi there is also a quiet questioning of Americana, in this case its “red white and blue” moods, just out of full earshot, a puzzling over the contradictions of contemporary American culture and politics.

Aphorisms require a reader’s confidence that claims without supporting justification can be trusted; without this all we hear is dull pedagogy and manipulative sentiment. Poems such as “Nocturne” gain a reader’s trust not only through their scrupulous emotional honesty, they are also convincingly entangled with contemporary discourses. The “unconditional noise” of light is not merely a bit of clever poetic synaesthesia, it also ties in with the use of the concept of “noise” in digital cameras, where noise is the addition of random light that can blur an otherwise clear image, and the term also alludes more broadly to the established use of “noise” to describe the opposite of information. It’s a noise that makes silence all the more welcome.

Gizzi values such quietness highly. His poem “Protest Song” is a series of negatives that begin with the belief that poetry should avoid stridency: “This is not a declaration of love or song of war / not a tractate, autonym, or apologia.” So this is not a love lyric loud with self-affirming passion, a martial imperialist drum-beating verse, not a dominating supposedly reasonable argument to make a case, nor a personal confession of beliefs, not even apparently a poem trumpetting the author’s own name in its repetition of “I, I, I”. Behind these denials is a persistent concern with what might constitute a project for the poet today. Another poem, “Wintry Mix,” meditates implicitly on poetic method while explicitly talking about the struggle to get up on a winter’s morning and go out “into the draft” of an unwelcoming dawn chill, wryly acknowledging the dilemma of being a child not only of modernism but all those earlier formerly modern movements reaching back to classicism: “Can’t imagine opening / the door today in a toga.” The present moment is both the icy winter dawn in which a robe designed for a Mediterranean climate would be insufficient, and the inappropriateness of writing poetry in Classical style. Classicism just doesn’t seem sufficient any more for the “crack-o’-the-world light” of the cold history of the West.

“Protest Song” is even more troubled by the challenge of this divided world and its conflicts, and the tensions between poetry and politics. Gizzi might seem to be saying that “poetry makes nothing happen” when he writes poignantly: “This won’t help when the children are dying / no answer on the way to dust.” His poetry certainly can be read as a principled radical’s refusal to agit-prop his poetry for the many worthwhile political causes of today, but if we read these lines about the apparent powerlessness of poetry when children are shown dying in one war or another alongside George Oppen’s moving observation in his poem “Street” a more complex negotiation becomes evident. Oppen longs for the “end of poverty” and the damage it does to us all (in “The Outernationale” Gizzi writes that “the new poverty is just / like the old poverty”), a sentiment found in many poems, but Oppen shows unusual clarity about his own privileged perspective as a poet making poetry from his feelings and analyses of such deprivation. He writes:  “It is terrible to see the children, // The righteous little girls; / So good, they expect to be so good …” The repetition of “good” does something extraordinary, it connects the author’s feeling of approval for them (good little children) that he feels when he watches them, with their own self-confidence (they try hard to be good children) and bluntly confronts both with the social values of goodness (what the social norms say a good citizen should do) that they may well have to violate in order to survive, and it is these connections that the poem compels to our attention. Our disenchanted knowledge of the difficulty they will face being “good” calls into question any confidence we might have in our own ethical concepts of the good. Returning to Gizzi’s poem we can now see that the apodeictic opening of three of the five stanzas has a similar complicating effect, tying together apparently contradictory feelings and beliefs about poetry and ethics. The second “this” can refer to both the poem as a whole by metonymy to poetry, as did the first stanza, and more. The referent could also be the first couplet, as if now saying that such attitudes, such denials that the poem does any cultural or social work, are themselves a problem if “children are dying” and will render the poetry even more marginal and powerless in the face of the urgent social demands of the day. The poem continues by insisting that it cannot redeem the past, especially those who dies in a war, nor can it even offer consolation, and concludes that the poem is not even “a garden of earthly delights”. Here too is a twist because in religious tradition this garden is the place of sin that will then result in being cast into the kind of terrible hell depicted by Hieronymous Bosch in his painting of this name. Is the poem inevitably so compromised?

Where the poems do find hope is in “what is barely legible / barely in our dailiness”, traces of feeling and thought found in the everyday rather than any of the worlds projected on our screens or other media. These poems remind us just how much rereading poems need before they yield what is barely legible or audible. Lifelong deafness has made it hard for me to hear the lyrics of popular songs in the midst of the plangency of amplified guitars and the other building blocks of the walls of sound that can give even the simplest phrases visceral carry-over, and inevitably I find that once I read the words and go back to listening to the song it has a new depth and precision. Poems start from almost the opposite end of the spectrum, silent, understated, unconnected; reading slowly renders conscious the sonic, visual, historical, and intertextual layers so that the once quiet poem gradually becomes “bright-bright” because as Gizzi’s poem “Human Memory is Organic” explains: “To see with a purpose has its bloom / and falls to seed and returns // to be a story like any other.”  

Peter Gizzi was editor, along with Connell McGrath, of one of the most significant poetry magazines of the past two decades, Oblek. Its distinctive style, a shape and heft similar to a smallish paperback, and a commitment to the presentation of nothing but substantial bodies of work by each poet, either a long poem, or  a sequence of related poems, precluded essays on poetics or the publication of other paratexts. The choice of poets was thoughtfully ecumenical: Language poets alongside earlier and more recent generations of poets, some Europeans--and always an emphasis on poetic virtues of linguistic density, metaphor, communicative and affective intensity. This training as an editor may be another reason why Gizzi can even imagine wearing that toga; he often appears reluctantly intertextual, recognising that it is not anachronistic Classicism that is the danger, but the weeds of Modernism,  tropes that insistently return, still part of the ecology. His poem “Saturday and Its Festooned Potential” is a witty dialogue with Wallace Stevens poems “Sunday Morning” and “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.” In this new collection Gizzi sometimes locates himself just before the great breaking wave of Modernism, distancing himself through an amused identification with an earlier decade in English language verse. He shows he can write like a poet of a new “nineties” who enjoys donning a centenary costume of images and gestures from that decade of poetic uncertainty. “Phantascope (1895)” asks questions about the poet’s relation to a cobwebby cultural tradition best represented by “an antique airship, spider webs, a flute.” The lyrical music of Ernest Dowson’s poem “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” (it takes its title from the fifty-year-old Horace whose Ode 4.1 recalls an earlier era of his life when he was in love with Cynara, and now just wants Venus to leave him alone) and its refrain, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion”, and the famous lines—“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, / Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, / Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind”--are echoed bathetically in Gizzi’s poem: “I have twirled, dropped crumbs, / spent days in archives.” At least the poet does get outdoors eventually in the later triplet though how relevant these actions are today the poem invites us to wonder: “I have captured fireflies on the equinox, / rescued the mountain gentian, / torn my garments in the square at noon”. Gizzi has also written discursively about such re-enactments. In “Poetics Statement” published in Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell’s useful collection, American Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan 2007), he calls such echoes “gestures of narrative disturbance…musical notations to create depth, emotive effect, even sincerity” (107). The nostalgia involved, and Dowson’s poem must be a locus classicus of literary nostalgia, is, Gizzi believes, “a survival of home” because “for an artist it means to survive the poems, texts that compose on—the awesome ground (power) of Modernism. We are the children of Modernism much in the way the ground for the troubadours was classical literature.” (1070 As I mentioned earlier, “Saturday and Its Festooned Potential” is a striking example, where rhythms, repetitive structures, and the notorious onomatpoaeic language from Wallace Stevens’s poetry reappear throughout. Gizzi alludes directly “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” in this quatrain:

When the notion of myth
or collective anything
is undone by wind chimes
by a gentle tink tink

The “novelties of the sublime” that make themselves known by their noise — “Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk” — are though not exposed by the sort of ridicule that Stevens heaps on them, but by the “gentle” reminders of everyday material life. The conclusion of the poem — “To be oneself becoming a poem” — deliberately creates a dissonance with the pervasive sense of the borrowed cadences and vocabulary from Stevens.

If all this sounds anachronistic or possibly contaminated by New Criticism, the poetry of Richard Wilbur, or a nostalgia for the cultural landscape of early Wallace Stevens, Gizzi recognises this as the risk he believes is necessary if certain features of our literary condition are to be acknowledged, and so his poetry constantly writes through these shadows. The powerful penultimate poem, “The Outernationale,” feels like a conclusion given its length, its almost manifesto inclusiveness, its uneasy pun on the call to a socialist millenium, and its ending with a twist on the science fictional frontier of the stars as he looks up at the night sky and describes it as:

the dark we hope to unpack
and move into
that one day
we might find ourselves lit up.

From its depressive beginning — “so the bird’s in the hand / and now what” — to these ambiguities around just what this darkness connotes—the new frontier, the unknown that science explores, or a dangerous moral darkness — the poem finds little hope in the “electro- / magnetic lies” and the “bad history” of the contemporary world. What promise the poem does uncover takes it in a different direction from those poet forebears.

I would like
to expose doubt itself
to open up
the mechanics of want
-ivorous, -etic, -esque, so
someone can feel it
and break it down
inside themselves.

This undoing of scepticism will be difficult. How effective the dismantling of the “etic” (and “emic”) will be remains to be seen. Peter Gizzi’s poetry continues to investigate these areas of language, knowledge and experience that have helped create the torn halves of recent poetry, promising much and leaving his readers with the right questions. What does it mean for poetry, as the final poem expresses it, to “be appendages to evolution” or “mysteries / in the face of violence”? Is this sufficient? This is a book we will want to go on rereading.