Peter Gizzi, Fierce Elegy

 

Roxy Music

The old language reminds us of traditions; of nights, of tapers billowing by the window; of balmy and aromatic breezes; recalls historically, our girl asks for a poem; each week or so says, where is my poem, you don’t write no more, sluggard; I say, I don’t care, when I see you and we buckle and your shirt is on the chair and the room is blowsy, poetry don’t matter; after, when I saw you in the mirror, I wrote: poetry died today.

The latest from American poet Peter Gizzi is the collection Fierce Elegy (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), a collection that, as the back cover offers, “reminds us that the elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love.” Gizzi is the author of numerous collections, including The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) [see my review of such here] and Now It’s Dark: New Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], as well as co-editor (with Kevin Killian) of my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], and the hush and halting breaks and lines that make up this collection demand a slowness, a slowing down; the pleasure of absorbing slowly every phrase and morsel of unexpected lyric turns, meanders. “When the face you carry / is not your own,” he writes, as part of “I’m Good to Ghost,” “and the history in this / is a history of / haunted ground.” Through a suite of sharp turns, Gizzi composes an elegy that surrounds the heart through short Creeleyesque lines and phrases—even to the point of a poem titled “Creeley Song,” is “composed primarily from the titles of books by [American poet] Robert Creeley”—offering a language both new and old. His elegies are meditative, as a calm once the chaos has settled. As the poem “Ecstatic Joy and Its Variants” writes:

as the old arguments, humans, how they rhyme,
stutter, get lost

this is also about conversations with the dead,
the only honest definition of silence

surely you are not listening to the words I am singing

about the last day of my life, the gift of blood,
the perfect text

are not all the sounds on my lyre about you

This is a lyric that works through an optimism, even through the elegy, which itself suggests a looking back, a loss; one that perseveres. Or, as the poem “Romanticism” ends: “Today I am in love / with a dead letter office at sunset. / Leaves, veins, ribs, sunsets, / all turning to letters. / These letters becoming / a love poem, why not?”