[Wgcp-whc] minutes--Gizzi visit 11/6

[Richard Deming]

Dear Poeticians,



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.



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.  In terms of rhetoric, language is  
largely performative and therefore brings certain conditions into  
being.  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.  Since Gizzi brought in the term “performative” I would insert a  
passage from J. L. Austin, the great philosopher of speech acts an  
performativity.  This is his comment on performative utterances:



  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',

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  
doing something rather than merely saying 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 Queen Elizabeth'. 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 Queen Elizabeth1 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 performative utterances.

+++



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.



Gizzi described himself as a “product of books that took [him] out of  
his mother’s home.”  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.  For these reasons,  
Gizzi has memorized a great many poems in that it rescues the past and  
transforms it into the present.  Keeping such work in the mind keeps  
it alive.  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.  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.  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.  Thus, in a poem like “Protest  
Poem” the lines insist on what the poem is not.  “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.  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).



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.  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.

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.  At every  
moement, Gizzi made clear that poetry is an art in which the stakes  
are always as high as they can possibly be.



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.





Just a reminder: we meet again on Dec. 5 to discuss the work of one of  
Gizzi’s teachers in graduate school, Keith Waldrop.



Until then,

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator



  
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