I first met the poet Peter Gizzi during a summer in which I was reading the work of Ezra Pound and listening to the droopy folk-rock singer J. J. Cale, both exclusively, both incessantly. I am not sure which of these things bemused Gizzi more; perhaps he found the pairing itself comically incongruous. He is someone who believes that each poet has her own music, and that rhythm imparts a heavy significance, both on the page and off. Last week, when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—a choice that vexed some purists—Gizzi was joyful. “The one person I was hoping to get the Nobel Prize in Literature was Bob Dylan,” he said.
Gizzi’s own taste in records runs toward the scrappy and insoluble: Jason Molina, the Clash, Townes Van Zandt. A few weeks ago, we met for hamburgers before a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s new documentary about Iggy Pop and the Stooges, “Gimme Danger.” In the restaurant, “Born to Run” blared from the house stereo; Gizzi periodically checked the Red Sox score on his phone—and he explained how he internalized the hierarchy of music over words as a kid at Catholic mass, where the liturgy was often in Latin. “Sound before sense,” as he put it.
Gizzi, who is fifty-seven, has published poems in this magazine and many others. He has been the poetry editor for The Nation and co-founded, with Connell McGrath, o•blék: a journal of language arts. He was born in Michigan, raised in New England, and now teaches and writes in the Pioneer Valley, in western Massachusetts. Earlier this month, “Archeophonics,” his new and masterful seventh book of poetry, was named a finalist for the National Book Award. The collection features an epigraph from the poet James Schuyler: “Poetry, like music, is not just song.”
“Archeophonics” is a made-up word but is easy enough to decipher via its constituent bits: ancient voices. The book is about sound and time, and was inspired, in part, by twenty seconds of strange, wraithlike singing—a disembodied voice caught warbling a portion of “Au Clair de la Lune,” a French folk song, on April 9, 1860. The sample was captured by a Parisian bookseller named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville using a phonautograph, a device that he invented about two decades before Thomas Edison developed the phonograph. Scott wrapped a strip of paper around a cylinder, slowly rotated it above an oil lantern until it went black from smoke, and then used two styli (one moved by the vibrations of a tuning fork, the other by a membrane that shook in tandem with his voice) to cut into the soot; the paper was later placed in a bath of alcohol-based fixative. The idea was merely to make a visual representation of sound. Scott never devised a method of playback, meaning he likely didn’t know that he had inadvertently created the earliest intelligible document of the human voice.
Almost a century and a half later, the paper was discovered and played by an audio historian named David Giovannoni, who used optical imaging and a so-called virtual stylus to read the etchings. The sample sounds like a child trilling nonsense from inside a tornado: quavering, vertiginous. Yet there’s something deeply gripping about it, this emanation from elsewhere. “The fact is it’s recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke,” Giovannoni told the Telegraph in 2008. I can see why the story might appeal to a poet. Impermanence, permanence, voices on a continuum. Flesh from air.
“I’m just visiting this voice” is how Gizzi’s title poem opens.
Gizzi has been attracted to archaic modes before. Last year, he explained to The Paris Review that “Periplum,” his first book, was named after “an ancient form of navigation, a kind of mapless way of moving through space, of reckoning.” The word is also used by Pound in “The Cantos,” a one-hundred-and-sixteen-piece poem that took Pound forty-seven years to finish, though “finish” still feels like too definitive a term. (The first complete version was published, by New Directions, in 1970.) “The great periplum brings in the stars to our shore,” Pound wrote in Canto 74. A mawkish reading of the line suggests that all dreams can, in fact, be realized. Gizzi is not a sentimental poet—not even close—but there is a great deal of hope in “Archeophonics,” by which I mean the book makes me feel open, awake to certain beauties, to the mercurial nature of being, to rejuvenation, however it manifests.
Gizzi himself is not an acolyte of Pound; if anything, he is engaged in a complicated, sometimes critical conversation with the entire history of letters, including his own. His work is to face, to engage with, to articulate the present—the ways in which he has changed, the ways in which everything is always changing. (“It’s the same but different, / different now / the mouth knows the bit, / the taste of it,” he writes in “Reverb.”) His best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for.
In “Release the Darkness to New Lichen,” one of my favorite pieces in the book, Gizzi makes a handful of disclosures:
Like much of Gizzi’s work, the poem contains questions, most of them rhetorical, all of them searching. His poetry hinges on the Socratic notion that questioning is the only way to extrapolate any meaning from the world and, subsequently, the only way to shape or reshape a mind, a heart, a body. The concomitant self-implication is important, too—the admission of unknowing. I find the practice beautiful, generous, and healing to read. (Gizzi himself would likely prickle at this soft language.) I can’t help but think of the poet and monk Thomas Merton: “Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.”
Gizzi is not an explicitly religious poet, but he is prone to blurring the lines between different states of being—to questioning whether there even are different states of being—and his poems often inhabit those liminal spaces. (It seems notable that his last book was titled “Threshold Songs.”) “What if it were all music?” he wonders in “Civil Twilight.” I get the sense, reading him, of a figure standing on the edge of a field at night, squinting into the blackness, listening, trying to reason out where he ends and it begins.
“Archeophonics” is perhaps Gizzi’s most personal book; it is tender, lyric, strange, and chatty. He writes from a place of deep intimacy with loss, as if he has locked eyes with “the fragility of the world and of being,” as he described it to me recently. (His father was killed in a plane crash when he was young; his brother, the poet Michael Gizzi, died in 2010.) He addresses those feelings of loss and rebirth by conjuring odd and unexpected visions. In “When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy,” he writes, “I am making my way in some dark room / looking for other structures to love”—a piercing summation of what it feels like to navigate grief. And then he follows with an invitation for wilding, for a bold and brazen rediscovery:
Or this, from “Strangeness Becomes You,” a poem about impoverishment, and anger toward the rich:
Though Gizzi is speaking directly here to the anguish of certain disparities—all the failures of the so-called old language and the ways it ties us to cruelty, idiocy (“I hate that, when syntax / connects me to the rich,” he writes)—the poem works, for me, as a lesson in empathy. It is also exceptionally hard to shake off the phrase “fuck-you sky,” which I have imagined for myself at least a hundred different ways (usually sunny, cloudless).
Other times, it’s the jagged musicality of a series of words that feels important; the rhythm makes something unexpected well up. In the ecstatic thirteen-part series “A Winding Sheet for Summer” (a “winding sheet” is another archaic phrase, a fifteenth-century term for a burial shroud), Gizzi writes:
Though there is a nearly propulsive quality to the book—it is focussed on reinvention, reëmergence—certain words and phrases deliberately repeat, like a needle stuck in a groove. (Styli, too, are frequently evoked.) These are usually allusions to outdated objects and systems, and the ways in which we gather, mourn, and give them new value: the old document, the old language, the archive, the archival. The old apple and the used bookstore. “The days go and are gone.” Gizzi’s work is not nostalgic (there are poems titled “Google Earth” and “Instagrammar,” mentions of CVS and of light being “dope”) but instead positions its narrators as more aware than ever of the things they don’t and can never know—no matter which way they venture through time.
This facilitates a curious distillation—a sense of what actually endures, of what might one day emerge from our own smoke. Like this, from “A Note”:
For me, this moment is Gizzi’s most profound reckoning with time. He identifies the thing we’re all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen. Did you love?
