<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal">Dear Poeticians,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">The Working Group in Contemporary Poetics met on Friday
November 6 to discuss the poetry of Peter Gizzi, who was able to join our
conversation that day.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In response to the opening question about what is
“Americanness” in terms of his interest in an American vernacular and poetric
tradition, Gizzi described that the American landscape and the nation’s
rhetoric or forms of address and speech patterns are tied together. Part of
this, he explained, comes from his understanding of his parent’s and
grandparent’s immigrant and working class background. Thus, the question of
place and identity are not settled questions. His work and the work he is drawn
to investigate aesthetic values which are braided with moral and political
values. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In terms of rhetoric, language
is largely performative and therefore brings certain conditions into being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Poetic language is not strictly
fictional, nor is it reportage. It composes, presents, and represents the world
as he encounters it. The poetic text in a sense ratifies this encounter and
fasions it into a communicable reality that readers can then take part in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Since Gizzi brought in the term
“performative” I would insert a passage from J. L. Austin, the great
philosopher of speech acts an performativity.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>This is his comment on performative utterances:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>I want to discuss a kind of utterance which looks like a
statement and grammatically, I suppose, would be classed as a statement, which
is not nonsensical, and yet is not true or false. These are not going to be
utterances which contain curious verbs like 'could' or 'might', or curious
words like 'good',</o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">which many
philosophers regard nowadays simply as danger signals. They will be perfectly
straightforward utterances, with ordinary verbs in the first person singular
present indicative active, and yet we shall see at once that they couldn't
possibly be true or false. Furthermore, if a person makes an utterance of this
sort we should say that he is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">doing </i>something
rather than merely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">saying </i>something.
This may sound a little odd, but the examples I shall give will in fact not be
odd at all, and may even seem decidedly dull. Here are three or four. Suppose,
for example, that in the course of a marriage ceremony I say, as people will,
'I do'—(sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife). Or again, suppose
that I tread on your toe and say 'I apologize'. Or again, suppose that I have
the bottle of champagne in my hand and say 'I name this ship the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Queen</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Elizabeth'. </i>Or suppose I say 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow'.
In all these cases it would be absurd to regard the thing that I say as a
report of the performance of the action which is undoubtedly done—the action of
betting, or christening, or apologizing. We should say rather that, in saying
what I do, I actually perform that action. When I say 'I name this ship the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Queen Elizabeth1 </i>I do not describe the
christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening; and when Í say 'I do'
(sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), I am not reporting on a
marriage, I am indulging in it. Now these kinds of utterance are the ones that
we call <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">performative </i>utterances.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">+++<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">Gizzi described his
poetry as a performing of his bibliography, the various texts—cultural, social,
political, as well as lexical—that form the horizon of his consciousness. The
poems bring this bibliography into being by the way they make those books
ripple outward through the poems.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">Gizzi described
himself as a “product of books that took [him] out of his mother’s home.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>These books included work by Ezra Pound,
Arthur Rimbaud, the Beats, and others. Books and the arts in general are, he
said, a kind of sonar for discovering the self.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>For these reasons, Gizzi has memorized a great many poems in
that it rescues the past and transforms it into the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Keeping such work in the mind keeps it
alive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Memorization is more than
memorialization, it offers tools to deal with and navigate problems or crises
in the present. He conceives of the poet as an ethnographer, perhaps he is the “ethnographer
of his own nervous system,” and again this system is comprised of his found and
received bibliographic and cultural texts. Poetry then offers explorations of
both vivid and thick description. Gizzi’s use of “thick description” comes from
the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who argued that one must go beyond the
(largely empirical) description of some activity (for instances the winking of
an eye) and try to determine the larger cultural context that enables certain
shaped behavior to signify some specific meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>Poetry than combines an attention to concrete particulars
but also, especially at the level of form, “tries out” the social and
historical context that makes meanings possible.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>For this reason, his work thinks along the lines of familiar
rhetorical figures, but disrupts them to test their horizon of real and
potential meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Thus, in a poem
like “Protest Poem” the lines insist on what the poem is not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“This is not a declartion of love or
song of war/ not a tractate, autonym, or apologia” nor is it “a bandage or
hospital tent/not relief or the rest after.” The poem counters familiar
political responses so as to keep the wound open rather than cauterizing the
emotional and spiritual wounds of political turmoil and allowing them to
heal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The delay of “healing”
becomes the means of protesting. For Gizzi, poetry can be both plaintive and
critical (which seems like an interesting way of thinking about the poetics of
his generation). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">In “Protest Poem”
and throughout our conversation with the poet, his sense of a poetic lineage
kept returning. For Gizzi (and this is central not only for his sense of texts
but for history as a whole), tradition is not behind, in the past—it is
prospective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is self-determined
by the poet who then works in such a way as to generate the conditions by which
his or her genealogy can be made to cohere as a tradition, a tradition that
then gives poets authority and legitimacy.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">Clearly, this was an
intense discussion that again and again revealed Gizzi’s belief that a commitment
to discovering and fashioning tradition is a way of being responsible to the
future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>At every moement, Gizzi
made clear that poetry is an art in which the stakes are always as high as they
can possibly be.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">This was our highest
turnout ever (about 30 people) and that is a testament to Gizzi’s investment in
an art form that matters to anyone connected to our group. Many thanks to Peter Gizzi for joining us for such a generative, provocative discussion. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">Just a reminder: we
meet again on Dec. 5 to discuss the work of one of Gizzi’s teachers in graduate
school, Keith Waldrop.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">Until then,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt">Richard Deming,
Co-coordinator<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:13.5pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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