Some Values of Landscape and Weather, by Peter Gizzi

Here's my recent review on Peter Gizzi's book. The original article appeared in Harvard Review. Thanks to the journal for permission to reprint here:

Some Values of Landscape and Weather by Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)

Peter Gizzi's exciting new collection of poems, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, finds this accomplished poet engaged in nothing less than a reinvention of the lyric, attempting an updated version that combines depth and urgency with the jaggedness of our schizophrenic contemporary experience. He approaches this task chiefly via the device of ekphrasis, the recreation of an image in words. Organized into five sections that recall essentialisms of the post-industrial world, "Forensics," "Wilderness," "Nerves," "Industry," and "Song," this book reveals a preoccupation with planned obsolescence or "lateness" as a phenomenon central to modernity and the avant-garde, the notion of the new containing the promise of the obsolete within it: "An avant-garde / a backward glance" (p. 5). Gizzi's interest in this theme involves neither the Oedipal agon central to Harold Bloom's theories, nor some patriarchal view of literary descent. These poems have for the most part rid themselves of gender and psychoanalysis. Rather, Gizzi's version of lateness derives from three causes: the dilemma of speech become writing, the relationship of poetry to other media, and technological change. Technology in particular plays a central role, taking the place of the sublime in these poems by inspiring both awe and fear, as well as enabling lyricism through speed. When the speaker of the title poem says, "It is the pixel hour, / a witching pre-code silver industry / blowing through my head"(p.22) he evokes a blurring of the distinction between the imagined and the real brought on by technology. This blurring sets the stage for Gizzi's version of ekphrasis as phenomenological, concerned with states of perception rather than reality.

Once the poet makes this rhetorical move, all perception becomes ekphrastic, even the cataloguing of multiple objects as he channel-surfs through them or zooms by them in a motorized flaneurie. The poem "Etudes, Evidence, or a Working Definition of the Sun Gear" foregrounds this theme by referring to the sun gear, part of a car's automatic transmission. The speaker in this poem takes things in at great speed:

In a picture of thought the f-stop opens
as when skylarks departing,
it was night, wheeling clicks in the lens,
full, volumetric night, scribbling
streets, irregular gardens
around a sea chamber, the din
deployed as architecture, a ribbony neon
or the permanent shape of a letter. (p. 69)

The weird synesthesia happening here (the streets are "scribbled" as if drawn by someone, and the din is an "architecture") highlights another aspect of Gizzi's version of lateness: it often involves transposition between media. Not strictly literary, Gizzi's poems find their genesis equally in music, paintings, and films. Among the other sources of inspiration here are Jim Jarmusch's movie Dead Man, Belle and Sebastian's song "Stars of Track and Field," a painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder, the music of the cante jondo, and numerous other references the reader may or may not discern. The poems don't so much capture or re-create these artworks as narrate the moment of the poet's perceiving them, transposing some aspect of them into the key of language.

This transposition can be awkward. If writing about art is like dancing about architecture, then Gizzi's speaker quite literally hears and sings images in half-darkness. Such are the difficulties of a twilight lyricism. But the intersection of lateness and synesthesia can also derive from the figure of address, in this case a kind of inter-bodily blurring between speaking and reading, between reading and being read. The speaker in "The ethics of dust," like many in this book, undergoes a strange amalgamation with an other who can also be read as the reader:

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. (p. 6)

This strange puppetry or bodily interpenetration of reader and writer relies on a notion of language as spoken and embodied, a definition which finds its echo on the page in written language. This rhetorical dilemma, the realization that writing is not speech, provides another angle of incidence for the notion of "lateness":

By the time of this speech
the original has vanished

without promising emancipation
The sound is a body

This sound is my body (p. 61)

This last line, alternately sad and triumphant, may be a dark note. But for someone who has "known the morning to be darkest / upon waking"(p. 8), this is indeed the beginning of a new, and often beautiful, lyric mode.