13 May 2021—Post #1 on Now It's Dark by Peter Gizzi

Now It’s Dark by Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press 2020)

Cover image is a detail from “Woven” by Tanya Marcuse. It seems to be a photograph, permeated with darkness, of a thatch of stems and roots, with one reddish flower, and many tufty (dandelion?) seeds. Over this is the title, in orange: NOW IT’S DARK, the author’s name PETER GIZZI, and below this, in white, in a much smaller font NEW POEMS.

Peter is a friend. I met him in passing when I living in the Bay Area and he came through to visit, but I got to know him better while I was in grad school at UMass Amherst—not in the MFA program but, by virtue of being a poet, MFA-adjacent. He has been a mentor for my good friend Emily and, for a hot second, we were in a reading group with my partner, Britt, and a few friends (if you’re curious: we read Kevin Killian’s Fascination, Jay Besemer’s The Ways of the Monster, Diana Hamilton’s God Was Right, and, I want to say Ely Shipley’s Some Animal). I remember having lunch with him and CAConrad, quieting down as they shared their catalogues of loss, heart full of respect for their resiliency (which I think of as something luminous and determined—beyond mere survival). I remember also, listening to Kevin Killian give a reading at UMass at Peter’s invitation and that we walked Kevin to the car, not knowing that it would the last time we saw him. Peter hails from the poetry world that I came from, which gives me a family feeling. Just to give you some context and/or disclosure, dear readers!

But all this without having read more than a poem or two by him, so a few years back, when I spotted a copy of The Outernationale (Wesleyan 2007) at Tim’s Books in Northampton, I picked it up. And it was gorgeous! Musical in a way that I associate most strongly with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, one of my all-time favorite poets. A brief aside about Berssenbrugge: I have felt her poetry as healing, and I have read it aloud to friends to bring them ease in difficult times or to facilitate entrance into a meditative state. I love the work of many poets, but Berssenbrugge was the first who raised the question for me about the potential for poetry to enact sonic healing on a tonal level (as distinguished from healing in the sense of catharsis). I bring this up by way of explaining that The Outernationale had a very similar effect on me.

And that I picked up Now It’s Dark conditioned to expect transformative musicality and I was not disappointed. If you haven’t read the book yet, you can listen to this recording of Peter reading from it on PennSound and see what I mean. Now It’s Dark is written in an elegiac mode. The open-ended sorrowfulness of the title evokes everything from mild wistfulness at the end of day to mourning the end of a life. The book’s dedication to Peter’s brother, Tom, “also gone,” is met on the next page with an epigraph from Jason Molina: “I’ll meet you where we survive.”

Peter is a fan of Molina’s music, and what he writes about it in Salmagundi could also be applied to his own work in this book: that he, “…conduct[s] light and dark into a proper relation,” that he, “…brings the work of love into focus,” and that, “Survival and endurance are the constant cries of the new songs as he sings.” I think elegiac is an appropriate word for this work, but it doesn’t quite fit the way this book models a survival which encompasses the ongoing process of mourning and memory, undertaken amidst the likewise ongoing insistence of the phenomenal world to be witnessed and sung.

This is the grave soul-work of the poet. It is mostly thankless, and it bears scant fruit. All the more astonishing then, to be presented with all that Peter has harvested at the edgelands of the day.

Now It’s Dark is divided into four parts: Lyric, Nocturne, Garland, Coda. By your leave, I’ll write a bit about a poem in each section. Lyric begins with SPEECH ACTS FOR A DYING WORLD. Speech acts, I associate with the language-centered philosophy of Wittgenstein and JL Austin. In this title, the darkness is existential and planet-wide, but it begins with a sparrow. Perhaps the same sparrow flits through Catullus’s “Passer deliciae meae puellae” (Sparrow, darling of my girl) and Dickinson’s, “Her heart is fit for rest/- +home- / I - a Sparrow - build there / Sweet of twigs and twine / My perennial nest” that flits in this poem’s first stanza:

A field sparrow

is at my window,

tapping at its reflection

a tired

antique god

trying to communicate

The god is old, and the poet is impatient with the means of communication and, what’s more, is, like all of us, a flawed lens, warping and distorting the light that passes through. Or it’s a fine eye and a warped world. Rather, finally, that light bends somewhat in every medium of encounter. Sparrow to window to eye to mind to language to page. To eye.

How pared down is this:

as I look at the end

and sing so what,

sing live now,

thinking why not

And even at the end, which is visible to the eye, or mind’s eye, the poet can’t help but fill up on beauty which, like terror, wounds us. Beauty must be metabolized and moved through.

The world is breaking, “the polis is breaking,” and Peter already lives with a “library of loss” inside him. His head is already “stove-in,” from sensitivity to the wrack of the world. Despite all this, in his self-described stubbornness, he partakes, partially but meaningfully, of the deathlessness of lyric’s forms. “when I said work / and meant lyric”

“I thought I was done…” repeats in several lines, which I read as being in deference to the desire to transcend, ascend, descend that which is—to borrow from JL Austin—infelicitous in the apprehension and expression of being. Or maybe for it all to just finally end: “I thought I was done…” as lyric’s, “I’m getting too old for this shit.” But being just keeps calling Peter back in, and the how of this is worth close scrutiny. The last iteration of “I thought I was done…” shifts, through “glamour, and guff / gusting cloud” into this:

…I see you,

I become you

in my solitary thinging

here in partial light

when I said voice,

I meant the whole unholy grain of it,

it felt like paradise

meaning rises and sets,

now a hunter overhead

now a bear at the pole

and the sound of names

the parade of names

This is where the first poem ends, late style of the human-centered world looking back at its beginnings in the pictographic poetry in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira.

Garland is comprised of one poem in three parts called MARIGOLD & CABLE. Associatively, garland is glamour, putting a sheen on being—for some reason I think of turtle wax on a sports car. Why? A lei is a kind of garland, as is a poet’s laurel crown. A garland is a funeral wreath. Coming from Texas, I associate marigolds with el Día de los Muertos, the day of the dead, during which they are often placed on graves and ofrendas. The O of poets is a garland. This garland opens into the momentary weather:

In morning’s coloratura

a magick eye plays tricks

under the ongoing mossy

cloud-mass, exhilarating

triangles and timpani softly

in silt air, in the blanketed

nowhere of now

Illusion is part of garland’s glamour: magick eyes and, in the first poem, “a mesmer’s twirling locket.” The k on Peter’s magic connects it to Jack Spicer (did you know you could listen to a recording of poets from his famous “Poetry as Magic” workshop reading in the SFSU Poetry Center Digital Archive?) and Robert Duncan. This is the magic of a gnostic and Atlantean occult tradition.

The magic is in the music. If melody of the poem isn’t clue enough, the vocabulary drives it home: coloratura, triangles, timpani. But the word coloratura muddles the modes of perception; etymologically it is vocal coloring, giving more evidence for the validity of synesthetic variants of the old Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry). This is appropriate, since lyric poetry exists at the threshold between speech and song.

These short stanzas, taller than they are wide, each float in the center of the page. Think Susan Howe, when she leaves off essaying and starts to collage and to reduce. The stanzas are stitched together with a word or phrase appearing at the end of one stanzas carrying over, loosely at times, into the beginning of the next. Take this left hand page:

Lost in weather, in

the phenom’s auroral ting,

a sapphire core becomes

a mystic choir and

the blue fat dawn

in morning’s scatter,

a musical ground,

speckled glass reflecting

And the right-hand page:

A musical ground,

the speckled glass

reflecting the fine-string

half-tones of ens,

fabled architectures,

the cables braiding

marigolds

in string light, in

air and incense

More on the Nocturne and Coda sections next time!