A Comprehensive Music: Peter Gizzi with Ariana Reines

I’ve wrestled with hysterical despair for most of my adult life, and for some reason—I’m still not sure why—it’s poetry that answers and consoles my yearning for something deeper than mere comfort. For consolation and, frankly, for fuel. It’s a literal power source, poetry—something that makes my system run more correctly. That makes my system run at all. If I could explain it I would.

Peter Gizzi’s poetry has always met and realigned me in the places and states I feel most inconsolable, and his newest book, Fierce Elegy, is flamelike and precise in its energy. A rhapsodic and beautiful talker, Peter Gizzi the person is as inspiring and invigorating as his work—he gives me life, as the kids say. I caught up with him last month.

–Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines (Rail):  When I first read Fierce Elegy I was less sad and shattered than I was rereading it last month, and I found that the poems only deepened in their meaning, quality, and capacity to console me.  I find your work immensely consoling—which is to say precisely the opposite of merely comforting, soothing, or placating. Your poems, not only the poems in Fierce Elegy, but actually all of them, reaching back to your earliest work—actually seem to give more and deepen the graver—or more engraved-upon by life and experience—your reader is. This is actually a quite beguiling and mysterious quality of your art, and one that I profoundly admire. What are your thoughts on consolation, and how do you feel about your poems being a source of consolation for the reader?

Gizzi: Poetry is such an incredibly ancient technology. If a poem is any good, it’s always good. I am extremely moved by what you say: that the experience of reading my poems only deepens. Nothing could make me happier, Ariana. Thank you for saying this. I certainly relate to this experience myself as a reader of poetry throughout my life. Poetry might be like friendship. It happens one poem at a time over many, many years and continues to blossom in my body. Poems are companionable. One would hope that the voice is always being discovered, always happening. Poetry is a gift of presence, intimacy, mystery. These three aspects are something I favor in the works I love. So am I consoled or is it an act of recognition? The gift of loss is a gift of sight and empathy that allows for a fuller comprehension of being. Whether it be a lost love or someone passing on, these events only deepen our senses, enrich our sense of compassion and joy. Tears soften the heart.

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve drifted between the sensation of having a life—a rich, satisfying, complex, highly articulated life—and wondering if it’s all been some strange accident or apparition, none of which pertains to me, where I am fatally alone, lonely, invisible, not here. I blur between the two sensations constantly. I learned very early on that I can be here and not here and that falling into that fathomless gap between these two poles leads to a meaningful place of “not knowing,” a generative place to discover new sensations or architectures of feeling in a poem. Some might call it sadness. I don’t. I call it consciousness and like to think of it as a comprehensive music. If you've lost a lot of people in life like I have, you begin to have a stereoscopic view. I learned very young this double sense of all at once being here and not here. And so I like to use that threshold experience to compose for me what I call reality, the reality of being in a constantly changing state. To accept that periodicity is a useful tool to understand objective reality: all things are in a state of change and are not here for very long. Nothing is. And while the world is in a state of constant renewal, it is equally also in a state of constant loss. I’m not just talking about humans, but about other species, ecosystems, languages, cultures, civilizations, etc.: everything is subject to this law. So elegy for me is a useful way to speak to this reality and to accept the mystery of life, its preciousness and precariousness. Perhaps what you call an experience of being “consoled” by my poems is the experience of recognition of the basic universal fact that while the world is constantly renewed, it is also constantly in a state of loss. And if my poems carry sorrow, I also find that there’s equally a joyfulness in them. The concept of joy for me is amplified by the knowledge of constant change and loss. To me that recognition is a form of love.

The long poem in my new book, “Consider the Wound,” speaks to this: “to consider wounds that grow through life, illuminate, / and expand into a primal struggle // to be able to say, I was here // an everyday annunciation the wound lifts from sorrow, / and it grows, taking years to love // a wound in all its glory.” And the feeling of disconnection, of rupture, I mentioned above, these “not here” feelings that rend me from the world, are equally important and enable me to see, objectively, the world and its constituent parts. This ‘goneness’ is an important way to measure one’s sense of personhood. What I allow myself to experience helps me to see myself from afar. So perhaps it is not a rending, but in fact, a reformation, a fulfillment of self.

Trying to unpack the idea of “my voice” in my poems, or the intimate address that is speaking in my poems, I would say that I don’t speak, but rather that I am spoken. I think the first line of my poem “Archeophonics” captures it quite accurately: “I am just visiting this voice.” I hear two things happening here. First off, the pronoun “I” doesn’t belong solely to Peter Gizzi. It belongs to all of us. We share it. It is a cipher. I am just visiting this pronoun for a brief moment in time. I believe this pronoun is deeply wound and sprung with affiliated voices and the depth of historical consciousness. The neologism, “archeophonics,” simply implies the archeology of lost or buried sound. It’s what we poets do: we bring the poets who came before us back into the world of light and speech. One of the very great emotional and intellectual experiences I have is my abiding and undying love for another’s work. Those artists who gave us wings, as it were.

I’ve always imagined that I am an ethnographer of my nervous system simply because it’s peopled with the living, the newly gone, and the long gone. We are ethnographers of the invisible world. It constitutes the “everyday underworld” we all carry inside us. This underworld is not some spooky thing over there in the far distance. It’s what we are made of and it animates our emotional life. It is both an agony and a majesty. It’s what we carry every day. I like the lines from my poem “Findspot Unknown”: “Like when I found you / in the back of my mind. / I am talking about people / and the night. / People inside the night. / The night and what we are made of. / The things and the people. / The signal and its noise.” We carry them and the conversation continues in our consciousness for years to come. In many ways the conversation is much more intimate and productive as these voices of the dead we carry within us become seamlessly braided with our own voice, within our mouths when we speak. I have a line in Fierce Elegy: “this is also about conversations with the dead, / the only honest definition of silence.” That seems right to me.

Rail: Very much so… considering the wound, then, in the literal light of your expansive poetics, please tell me about the weather on the sun. You’re the only person I know who consistently posts about it.

Gizzi: I love this question, as I have always been a space nerd. The sun has been in an increasingly active solar cycle. It will peak in July 2025. A solar flare can reach well over 60,000 miles into the air. Last year we had an extreme Coronal Mass Ejection in which a piece of the sun broke off. Astronomers were unconcerned, but it was alarming to think that a piece of the sun can break off—yikes!—and the various images that come back from the Hubble and Webb telescopes are a little unsettling. The benevolent disc we see in the sky from here is actually a raging mass of fire and gas and magnetic energy; it looks angry in these photographs and somewhat unstable. And yet it illuminates and is a benevolent force.

It’s interesting that it takes 100,000 years for a photon to reach the surface of the sun and then only eight minutes to reach us. So that means a ray of sunlight is actually 100,000 years and eight minutes old. So can we say then that light is time? To think that we measure through our telescopes the distance of other stars and galaxies in light-years. It’s always fascinated me that light is always belated when it reaches us. It’s haunting that we experience the engine that sustains the life on this planet and drives the vegetable kingdom as belated, a kind of revenant. The entire human record from the beginning until now isn’t even as long as the life of a gnat in the face of the sun. We’re kind of a mirage. It’s a deep mystery to be here.

Rail: “The life of a gnat in the face of the sun!” Dude. So good. Talk to me about ferocity as mode and the Fierce Elegy as you practice it, in this book and perhaps in every book and every poem you have written.

Gizzi: I’d like to think of the elegy as a primary form, a first form, elemental, and a way to properly memorialize someone or something we’ve encountered, whether a lover or someone who’s gone. I don’t think of the elegy as a particularly sad form. I think it’s a proper form. What I mean is that it’s a proper way to pronounce love or say goodbye or remember. I’ve always believed that if we forget what we’ve lost, then we’ve lost everything. It’s a pretty simple equation. And because elegy often deals with the periodicity of a life form, it speaks to fragility and often intimacy. To memorialize is an act of love. So it’s not sad to me. It’s useful. Necessary. And because the lyric poem has existed for millennia through one rotten kingdom after another and through many changes in technology and its delivery system, I would like to believe that it is a fierce form in the way that it has endured and insisted on intimacy and love. And I believe that elegy is a form that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world. For me, ferocity in this instance can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery, and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, a radical holding open. I believe it is the role of the poem and the poet to remain a mystery in the face of violence.

Rail: This is in some ways about the ways in which autobiography converges with your poetry while the poem itself, as you practice it, does not do autobiography. Tell me about the space and role of grief in dilation and the great capacity of reality itself. Your elegy could be like a science of grief, rather than its mere record…

Gizzi: It’s true. I’ve never written autobiographical verse. If I narrated or named some of the profound losses that I’ve experienced in my life, it would somehow cheapen them, and it would be really unsatisfying to me. It would not properly respect the irrevocability of the event in my life. Loss gave me eyes. It’s allowed me to respect others’ pain and suffering. To be able to see their suffering and respect it and not judge it. In the end, it softened my heart in a very intellectual way. Early loss allowed for a premature initiation into the sublime, and I’ve grown up with a native understanding of irrevocability. These are very powerful and great gifts, to be able to mourn and celebrate inside a work of art. As Alice Notley wrote in one of her elegies: “I love as I figure.” I think it would be disrespectful to my sorrow to name it thus. For me, it’s just allowed me to become more human through time. As I said, to remain a mystery in the face of violence.

Reines: Will you talk to me about kinship? I’m thinking not only of your brothers Michael and Tom but your poetic lineages more broadly—and telescoping out from there (sorry, space nerd)—your many musician and artist friends and the influence of all the arts on your work writ large. And since we’ve already been talking infinity and I’m thinking about your kind of—can we call it spiritual kinships in family and culture?—I also wanna ask you—personal hobbyhorse—is all good art countercultural? Or, what does it mean to be countercultural?

Gizzi: I think your hobby horse question is interesting. I’ll begin there. I’d like to think that innovation is our tradition. What do I mean by that? I think all enduring art that gives us wings, as it were, whether it be poetry or film or music or painting, etc., is always just ahead of us. When I was younger, I always favored work that was just ahead of me. Still do. It was speaking to me, and created an enigma in me, a mystery, a horizon, and a world to live within. There was always more to find—or, rather, I should say, there is still always more to find inside it. When I think back on reading, let’s say, Emily Dickinson, the work is still ahead of us. It’s still traveling, still a living environment and a deep mystery. So tradition is, in fact, not behind me, shoring me up. It’s always just ahead of us. I would like to think it gives me an occasion to rise. This model of discovery has always worked for me simply because it creates energy. Energy is presence. Presence is something that’s living. It’s not somehow ontologically fixed in a cabinet of curiosities. Instead, it’s boundless and restless, troublesome and precarious, just like life itself.

As to your other question. I’ve always been interested in all of the arts. Cinema, for instance, is a major language for me. And I believe that lyric poetry and cinema share many elements: speed, a compression of time, a quick cutting, and therefore, a rhythm of images. It’s a sensational language and by that I mean it’s hyper-expressive. Music is a lifeblood and, like poetry, it is expressive and sensational. Musicality in a poem is important, and for me, an essential part of how it operates and expresses its emotional reality. That the language is sensational. That it engages the senses. I believe in sound before sense. That is to say, I believe that meaning is made fundamentally by the sound structure of the poem, its sonic reality, as much as by what is being said. Even a prose poem has a rhythm.

You invited me to relate this to my family. When I was a boy, and had to go to Catholic mass with my father, who was extremely devout and also a scientist and very much believed in the empirical data of the world (these things were not at odds for him), I was happy to be there with him because I loved him. The mass at that time was in Latin. And when the priest began to sing the liturgy, I found it extremely moving. I did not recognize the words that were being sung or know their particular meaning. But I did know that something enormous was being claimed. That some expression of a mystical concept was being sung. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t fully understand it because I completely understood it within my body (whether I accepted its terms or not, which I didn't). When I was five, I had a kind of similar experience listening to Bob Dylan with my older brothers. I understood the lyrics, but the impact of it, the reality of it, was entirely in his grain of voice and in the rhythm and attack, it was momentous. I was moved.

My father favored the arts and turned me on to painting and architecture and classical music, as well as to “taking in the world around me.” It was a kind of game we would play. He would point to something, like a tree for example, and ask: “What do you see? Describe it to me. How do you think it works?” This important interaction is one of the ways in which I began to read the world by its constituent parts. And perhaps this is why I think the fragment in the poem is so intriguing, because we build something out of scraps of sound and observations to make something living. It’s magical as is all the life around us. Life on this planet is magical. There’s no other way to think of it. It’s profoundly sad that the human is such a dark invasive species.