Peter Gizzi, A User’s Guide to the Invisible World: Selected Interviews, ed. Zoe Tuck

 

Though I’ve given you some of my personal backdrop of the periods in which I composed some of my work, it’s not that I narrate my biography in any of these poems. I don’t really write about my life. I write out of my life and where I am at a given moment of thinking and feeling. I mean to say, you don’t need to know my story to get the work, i.e., to fully engage with it. I’d like to call it a feeling intellect. I feel it’s more useful, and more honest, to interrogate rather than explain away an ungovernable, complex emotional state. I favor sensation over autobiography. It’s like I’m an ethnographer of my nervous system. (YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE—2020 “NATIVE IN HIS OWN TONGUE: AN INTERVIEW WITH POET PETER GIZZI” JESSE GODINE)

I’m appreciating the insight into American poet and editor Peter Gizzi’s writing and thinking through A User’s Guide to the Invisible World: Selected Interviews (Boise ID: Free Poetry Press, 2021), edited with an introduction by Zoe Tuck. Gizzi is the author of numerous books and chapbooks, including Fierce Elegy (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020) [see my review of such here], Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014), Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007) [see my review of such here], Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992), 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]. Moving through his website, it is frustrating to be reminded how much of his work I’m missing (I’ve reviewed everything of his I’ve seen, if that tells you anything), but interesting to realize that Wesleyan University Press published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (2018), a further title I’d be interested to get my hands on, especially after going through these interviews.

I’m intrigued with what American poet and editor Martin Corless-Smith is doing with this venture, the handful of titles he’s published to date through the Free Poetry’s “Poetry and Poetics Series” [see my review of Cole Swensen’s And And And (2022) from the same series here], apparently accepting manuscripts and pitches on a case-by-case basis. A User’s Guide to the Invisible World: Selected Interviews, produced as volume two in this ongoing series, compiles nine previously published interviews with Peter Gizzi from 2003 to 2021, from The Paris Review, Poetry Foundation, jubilat and Rain Taxi, conducted by writers, critics and poets such as Ben Lerner, Aaron Kunin, Levi Rubeck, Matthew Holman and Anthony Caleshu. As editor Tuck writes as part of their introduction: “Why interviews? Biography can too easily become hagiography (Gizzi would be the first to insist that he’s a person, not a saint), and memoir carries with it the impulse to smooth life’s unruliness into a single consistent narrative. If readings are poetry’s official ritual, interviews are the cigarette outside: intimate and unrehearsed. What’s more, the interview is a relational form. And the various interlocutors in this collection—a precocious undergrad, notable contemporaries, life-long friends, people from places where Gizzi has traveled—call forth distinct facets of his life and work.” There is something really interesting about hearing the author’s thoughts in their own words, as well as, as Tuck suggests, a directed thinking through not only conversation, but multiple conversations. The portrait that emerges of Gizzi is one that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with his work, providing a deeply thoughtful and engaged reader and thinker, one who has read widely, is open to new influences and ideas, and holds firm to his influences, as well as providing curious echoes between interviews (given the range of dates is within a particular boundary of sixteen years, that certainly makes sense). As Gizzi responds as part of an interview conducted by Ben Lerner:

As Ted Berrigan said, “I write the old-fashioned way, one word after another” or, to quote Pound, “put on a timely vigor.” As long as there is soldiery, there will be poets: “I sing of arms and the man,” Virgil begins his tale of the west; sadly, the relation between war and song is a venerable tradition. I own it. There is no easy “app” to the muses. I suspected that your original question about the “perils of singing” was connected to the many discussions, debates, and attacks on the lyric as a substantial form of thinking (I almost wrote “thinking”). Why should I apologize for, or give up on, one of the most flexible and dynamic forms of poetry? So I can download my work? I mean, what do they call the guy who graduates last in his class at a fancy med school? Doctor. It’s scary. But it’s the same for poetic practice. And as is the case with all disciplines, it’s always a question of ambition, of how well it’s done, right? Like every good poet before me, I accept my responsibility to my vocation.

 

Ongoing notes: late August, 2019

Where has it all gone? I feel like summer barely began.

Here's what the young ladies looked like a week-plus ago, with Clare Latremouille's horses.

Northampton MA: Zoe Tuck was good enough to send along a copy of her recent chapbook Soft Investigations (Daily Mayhem Books, 2019), a small collection made up of the prose/essay-poem “[Typical Trans Kenkyusha Sortes]” (a piece that won the Stacy Doris Prize and first appeared in Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review), the extended/fragmented lyric “Fly into a page,” and the lyric accumulation “Friday 19 April 2019.” The first piece really struck my attention for how she manages to weave together references to Community, Robert Duncan, Berkeley Breathed, Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, among others, in a way that plays with multiple directions, odd connections and the direct line of thought. As she writes:

I don’t want to be lonely, even in my poems—especially in my poems, so I started to fill them with quotes from other artists. Didn’t you know that was coming next? Like when Troy in “Community” says that he gets lonely in the shower. That’s when I listen to podcasts about the death of the author or dance in translation and I struggle to make out the tinny sound of my phones speaker over the whirr of the ventilation fan while I lather my armpits with peppermint soap.

The other day I decided that I would hold up Roland Barthes as my model because he’s smart and he writes purdy. And who hates Roland Barthes? Aside from that New Yorker reviewer with the bee in his bonnet (you have read 1 of 4 free articles for this month).

2 and a half years of grad school and I still don’t want to be a man and something vague about phenomenology.

San Francisco CA: I only discovered recently that Canadian poet Lisa Robertson had a chapbook out with American publisher Krupskaya, her Starlings (2017). Starlings is a suite of poems that is “one part of wide rime,” a project that, as her author biography writes, “is her ongoing lyric study of troubadour poetics.” Did I mention that the thirty-page chapbook is also available online through their website as a free pdf download?

Yesterday I cried. It was artless and good.

Spring has its own agony, truly

It involves convolution

For the nudity of one kiss

Joy suffers measure

How tiring it is to disagree with everything!

Then we go visiting, throw our tender runners

Over forest-rim

Starlings. We are breaking into a vast derelict space.

We are the Starling scene in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

A caged Starling is repeating in the voice of a Child “I cannot get out.”

I’m fascinated by Roberston’s exploration into some of the origins of contemporary lyric through the tradition of the troubadour, something that easily links to her earlier work on the pastoral, but one that isn’t always explored by those engaged with more experimental types of writing.

some were at the edge of language to

couldn’t live. Some were at the core of

language so couldn’t live either. What if

we forget about language, move into

the natural history of the idea

of guts? Guts or rosewater, very

similar. Rosewater or rime. Uncountrying

by means of rosewater. To make a natural history

of rosewater, penetrate

borders

San Francisco/Santa Barbara CA: The first I’ve seen by Santa Barbara poet, editor and country singer Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the chapbook JULIAN (Krupskaya, 2017), clearly missing out on numerous full-length titles, including gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), Advice for Lovers (2012) and Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017). There is some thoughtful play in the language of Brolanski’s poems, composing direct statements that shift, switch, bait and twist, including the poem “butterflies are stupid,” the title of which caught my attention immediately:

a butterfly is an example of an idiotic image

not one to idolatrize

they are former worms I guess, not-worms

I was telling nick yesterday about the dangers of idolatry

I gave the example of a butterly like

oh I saw a butterfly you saw a butterfly isnt it magical like

making fun of myself

then I gave another example to holi over coffee at the good earth

he “often” talks about tattoos people shouldn’t get

especially if they don’t have any tattoos yet

I said yeah like a butterfly on your neck

he said oh weird you say so the lyft driver I had yesterday had a butterfly

tattooed on his neck, here, he indicated the throte

and no other tattoos at all at all

then for some reason I was moved to tell you my own

story about the butterfly landing on me

again and again while I was in a patch of sun and outlifted my limbs

I compared it to the rat-dove and its wing

that literally swept over me touched my head touched my hair

like beaudelaire’s wind of the wing of madness

the word he uses is ‘I’imbécilité’  it turns out

the wind of the wing of imbecility or idiocy

but a butterfly is an example of a thing not to idolatrize

___

(wrong [upward arrow emoji]

but you can tell i kind of know it

hypocrite   like vernon telling of his vision

flying above all the other little christians at the campfire

just dying in retrospect in his own way to be proved wrong)

Trish Salah, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1

Impersonation doesn’t mean what you think. This is the introduction to this book, my introduction, my lyrical sexology. Lyric Sexology. This is one of the things you need to get straight. This is another, you there in your later age, your so-called 21^st century: I am not a transsexual. Or an intersexual, or a hermaphrodite. (Hermaphrorditus can write her own damn book.) I am not any of those things you have words for now. You don’t have words for what I am. What I was was this:

I was a dude.

Then I was a chick.

Then I was a dude again.

Hah. You didn’t think we said “dude” or “chick” in what you call ancient Greece, Hellas of the Hellenes, etc. Think again.

Here is what you don’t have words for: What is a seer? What is beyond knowing? How can I write you now, a now impossibly out of joint with your own, knowing you will read this? Knowing you? Or what is a sex in time? Without?

You do not have a word for snakes or gods or sexes. You only think you do.

You do not have a word for the meeting of snake sex god in one word’s divided knowing, a knowing one divided word.

Seven years is what I was as beyond, a beyond, and inside too. So, impersonation doesn’t begin to describe it, but suppose it did. Suppose

I began to describe you. (“Tiresias, impersonated.”)

I’ve long been curious about the work of Kingston poet, fiction writer and critic Trish Salah, a name I first heard during those early 1990s Montreal days of Corey Frost and Colin Christie’s ga press. Salah’s latest release is Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Montreal QC: Metonymy Press, 2017), the first Canadian edition of a title originally published in 2014 by New York publisher Roof Books. The author of a previous title – Wanting in Arabic (TSAR, 2002; 2013) – Salah’s Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 suggests the opening salvo of what will continue, at least to a second volume, if not further. There are elements here that read as memoir, something she plays with as she writes through the legendary Greek character Tiresias, and one can make a rather obvious comparison to Anne Carson writing the Ancient Greek figure Griffin in her Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998). In Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, Salah composes her own blend of book-length lyric essay and long poem on metamorphosis, gender and expectation, and one that includes references to Ovid, Glee, Ed Wood, Atlantis, high heels, mythologies, National Geographic, Gail Scott’s Heroine and the October Crisis.

Salah’s essay-poem Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is an ambitious work that combines the lyric with the narrative, writing out poems that wind their individual ways around and through each other; writing out, even beyond gender, the potential elusiveness of identity itself. Through the voice and character of Tiresias, “a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.” (Wikipedia), a character mentioned in numerous works by Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Ovid, Salah is able to explore and articulate an identity that was never fixed, but one that evolved as Tiresias did, and as his/her own situations required. As Salah writes in the poem “Godtears”: “Her break with form was primarily intelligible as wanting the impropriety of your hand / in me, sous la table, the exquisite corpse giving way to hewn simply exercises / (spoonerisms) in French or Greek.” In an interview conducted for CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts by Morgan M Page/Odofemi, Salah writes:

Viviane Namaste talks about the autobiographical imperative, arguing that when non-trans folks approach trans people, not only are they only interested in hearing our autobiographies, but they feel free to discount everything we might have to say that isn’t about autobiography. And on CBC this morning, Janet Mock remarked that the media’s treatment of trans people hasn’t changed significantly since the early 1950s press coverage of Christine Jorgenson. Mock framed her own memoir and media interventions as attempts to push back against the narrowness and othering that has come of treating trans people as if we are solely defined by our transness (as opposed to other aspects of our identities, histories, experience, expertise and interests), and also as if we are curiosities to be known about as opposed to being people one might engage with.  This relates to a point Julia Serano and Talia Bettcher make, that cis folks feel entitled to especially scrutinize and doubt trans folks’ self representations, positioning us paradigmatically as imposters or deceivers. In autobiography we appear as singular beings, at best as exceptional individuals who have triumphed over adversity to actualize ourselves, but more often as curiosities, outliers among humankind, who confirm the normalcy of the non-trans reader.

All that said, yes, it is a problem that there has not been either a critical apparatus or a broader public for our creative work, and that is tied in some ways to Viviane’s critique of the idea that the only or primary reason we might possibly have for writing is to satisfy the curiosity of, and/or educate, a non-trans public.

In a review of the prior edition at Tripwire, Zoe Tuck opens: “Trans women poets: raise your hands if you have written poems about or in the voice of Tiresias? Although I’m not sure if there are enough trans poets AND trans poets who have written Tiresias poems to call them a commonplace, I will cop to having written a few. The figure of Tiresias looms over the search for precedent.” Tuck continues:

The wit masks a real concern that has dogged transgender history and queer history before it: who can we claim, either in the past, or across cultural boundaries, as being  one of us? Put another way: is there a universal category of gender?

Through writing a whole volume through and around Tiresias, Salah is able to write out beyond the purely physical, and beyond the initial, and somewhat expected, poems that Tuck suggests have already been composed; by composing nearly two hundred pages of this first volume of Lyric Sexology, Salah manages to write through Tiresias, as well as utilize the legendary Greek figure, as a way to explore the very nature of fluidity, concerning gender, sexuality and the core root of self, bringing in all the cultural expectation, uncertainty and complications that come along with such shifting.

The simplest equations are subtraction.

A “dog never loses its savour.” Arab slavers.

Fawn smear from the mouth, eye sockets

Tell me about your history, the one to come. (“Tiresias as Cuir (on the run)”)