L: Peter Gizzi, R: Jennifer Chang
NER poetry editor Jennifer Chang talks with Peter Gizzi, author of the poem “Nimbus” (44.2), about vertical imagination, selfhood and the lyric “I,” spending a life in poetry, and his new book, Fierce Elegy.
First, a peek inside Jennifer’s interview notes about Gizzi’s poetry: “To report the world in seemingly endless intimate observations that keep turning from clause to clause, line by line to create a kind of symphonic effect where all the different phrases are held and come to a beautiful and inevitable conclusion without easy closure.”
Jennifer Chang: I want to begin with a question about the title, “Nimbus.” The word refers to a cloud, but it could be alternately beatific, as in the halo around a saint, or mundane, as in the gray clouds in a rainstorm. Consequently, the title directed me to look up—towards the spirit and towards the sky. I also wonder about how the word “nimbus” figures into your imagination and your poetic lexicon. It appears in the poem “How to Read” from Archeophonics (2016)—”A textual nimbus, air born”—and in “Speech Acts for a Dying World” in your last book, Now It’s Dark (2020)—“the nimbus of flora.” It’s also in “Ships of State,” a poem also in that book—“the cold matter, dark, and the trans of that nimbus.” I’m curious about your relationship to this word and to words more generally. (I’m thinking, too, about the lines in “Nimbus” announcing “hunger / for the word / flower,” in which “flower” might be “the word” or might simply begin a new clause.) What does “nimbus” mean to you—beyond semantic meaning—and what do words mean to you? And how does this poem’s one-word title activate—or, perhaps, summon—the poem for you and the reader?
Peter Gizzi: Jennifer, you have intelligently answered your own questions here and better than I might. I’ve always been attracted to this word. I love its sonorous quality as well. It’s like a cymbal crash or cascade in music. While we are at it, I also like the word “cascade.” I am attracted to words that have energy and feel as though they are releasing energy. I favor the word “nimbus” because of its multiple meanings, or rather, applications. I am of course wanting both meanings with this title, i.e., an amorphous cloud formation that keeps morphing, as well as an aura, or in the case of a halo, which you mention, it signifies an imminence. Imminence or aura allow for a vertical imagination, which is important to me.
I love what Barbara Guest tells us in her magnificent essay “Poetry, the True Fiction”: “The halo has detected the magnetic field into which the energy of the poem is being directed . . . I want to emphasize that the poem needs to have a spiritual or metaphysical life if it is going to engage itself with reality.” All real art makes us reconsider tradition—not as a fixed canonical body that exists behind us or bears us up, but as something we move toward. We find it reading back through those very works that were ahead of their own time, even their authors—in the poems of Emily Dickinson or William Carlos Williams, Jack Spicer or Barbara Guest, for instance. If this model of discovery teaches us anything, it’s that tradition is, in fact, always just ahead of us, it is always an act of discovery, an occasion we rise to. I like to think of it as the night sky. When I am in a clear and remote setting and look up and can see the entire milky band I feel that I am no bigger or smaller than anything. I am the right size. I am tuned. I like what Bernadette Mayer writes at the end of her poem “Essay”: “That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes / Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing / Or on as little as one needs to survive / Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars / Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly.”
And as to nimbus as cloud forms, one of my favorite books is the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Weather. For me, weather is always an apt depiction of the interior world of emotion and imagination, it is mercurial yet real, as it can be wind swept, it can drift, be gorgeous, have pressure, release a force, be turbulent, it can break, or be destructive, it can happen suddenly, or possess a gorgeous play of light and shadow. It is constantly in motion and constantly changing. It is active and therefore energetic.
JC: Woven through “Nimbus” is the drama of the self, or the drama of the self’s formation. You gently introduce this in the third line—“the mystery / of the ordinary / becoming / the me in I”—and then later, at the center of the poem, you write:
it’s so random
becoming a self
the secret
to my own
piece of sky
behaving as
clouds do
another day
a macular blue
In one sense, this attention to a singular I, a singular self, surprised me, as I often think of the lyric “I” in your work as capacious and dispersed. The “l” in your poems can absorb so much in the atmosphere and from history, drifting in and out of different subjectivities, resisting fixity. I won’t say the “I” in “Nimbus” is fixed, but there’s a focused preoccupation, an “I” that’s delved into even as the poem expands to “a blue world / a buzz of flies / somewhere music.” In the poem’s logic, this becomes the world the “I” creates, leading us to “the psyche’s / paper-blue / hieratic light.” How does the lyric “I” function in “Nimbus” and how does the lyric “I” figure in your poetics? Is there ever, poetically speaking, a singular self or is the self forever bifurcating?
PG: I am not sure that the “singular I” you mention is necessarily at odds with an I that is “capacious.” When I am writing I don’t feel like I speak but rather that I am spoken or as I have written elsewhere, “I am just visiting this voice.” I am just visiting this pronoun for a brief moment in time. Language comes to me, not out of me. Language is so much bigger than any one of us and older than us and while it has glories of affection it also contains a ruthless history. Language doesn’t live in us, we live in it. And I feel the same way about the pronoun I, you know. We’re all attached to it, but it doesn’t really belong to me. It belongs to all of us. It’s wound and sprung with so many affiliated voices and so much consciousness.
I believe that the character I in my poems is a multiple, is me and not me, and I don’t believe I am necessarily narrating and identifying it as Peter Gizzi. What I’ve discovered is it has allowed me to enlarge the horizon in which I can write. And paradoxically, I think that’s one of the great benefits of spending my life in poetry, which is where I’ve spent my life. I think what I’ve written is my personhood. I believe that my poems are more me than me and it remains an adventure. It’s just been one of the great benefits of being a poet: discovering selfhood and realizing selfhood is bigger than my story. It’s our story. Or as Oppen tells us, “The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on. // We want to be here. / The act of being, the act of being / More than oneself.”
JC: One of the qualities I love about your work, and that’s so beautifully manifest in “Nimbus,” is velocity. It isn’t “flow,” exactly, but a rhythmic extemporaneity, each line alighting as association, distraction, fleeting and sudden insight. The poems effect the velocity of consciousness, thought. I’m reminded of Emerson’s claim in “The Poet” that poems are, at root, “primal warblings,” which feels especially true of your work. When I read your poems, I often feel that, as I’m drawn into the music, the lines come to feel like thoughts emerging from my own mind. I attribute this to the brisk interchange of short lines and enjambment—it’s like getting caught in a strong current—but I wonder if it might also be something else. Could you share a little about your composition process, from draft to revision? Where do poems come from and how do they find their form and music?
PG: Thank you for your generous take on reading my poetry, I mean, that’s the dream, to make something alive and turning. I would say, one way to achieve this in a poem is through compression, that wound, sprung quality of the lyric and what it releases—a kinetic energy. I’m interested in that energy, which for me is always musical in some way and must possess a rhythm. We know that all matter is constantly changing. Everything throughout the multiverse is in a state of change. But the one thing that remains is energy. That doesn’t go away. I’m interested in tapping into that source because it is, after all, a life force. Or when we say “nature” it is important this also includes the human species. We are all sharing the same elements of life and what my hand is made of is also everywhere to be found on this planet.
There are great discoveries being made through new digital listening devices, we can now hear sound that is outside of the human range of hearing. It turns out that everything is alive and singing both in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Elephants communicate across the African continent through subsonic sound. A whale’s song (language) can be heard for hundreds of miles, coral reefs sing, mammal families speak a dialect within their larger species’ language and female mammals have individuated language for each offspring, plants and trees respond to sound. I could go on and on. This tells us that everything is “awake” and sentient, in short, consciousness is a source we all share and it belongs to no one being. As I said, I want to tap into that source as it offers us an essential and necessary component in a poem—energy.
When I am composing a poem I need to catch a phrase and once I receive this phrase, fragment, or even a title, the poem begins to happen and I can mass language. I would like to think that by now it would be easier for me to write but it remains a mystery to me. I go months and months without a poem and I hate it. For me poetry is both a majesty and an agony. The first poem in each of my books is the first poem in that book. But as I say I need to be given a phrase or line and once it happens then I can mysteriously begin to write the book. It all comes to me. It is an enabling fiction that offers me a horizon or an atmosphere or environment. A place to inhabit and unpack an implicit concept. For instance, the poem “Archeophonics,” the title poem of that book, is an invented word that is simply the recovery of lost or buried sound. It is a metaphor for what we do as poets, we bring the poets back that have given us wings, as it were, we bring their gestures, voices, energy field, back into the world of light and speech. “Speech Acts for a Dying World,” the first poem in Now It’s Dark, allowed me to write into a space of pre-grief or better said, a futurelessness, as I wrote the majority of it while caretaking my brother Tom as he was dying of ALS alongside the psychotic, despicable, and rotten ascendancy of Trumpism. And in Fierce Elegy, the opening poem, “Findspot Unknown,” is an archaeological term, and it allowed me to accept that the poem is indeed an artifact of an unknown origin. A “real” mystery as it were.
JC: “Nimbus” is in your new book, Fierce Elegy, which just released from Wesleyan. Could you tell us about the book and how the poem fits into it?
PG: To begin with a caveat, I could kick myself that I didn’t add a section break before and after the poem, “Nimbus.” It is a delicate poem and drifts and accumulates and drifts and builds like emotional weather, etc., o well. The title, Fierce Elegy, indicates the book is a single poem and in many ways it is as I have a lot of repeated vocabulary and themes. I was interested in all the ways elegy behaves. It is such an enduring and flexible form and has existed through many eras and kingdoms and changes in technology. For me, it is a primary mode of poetry and one that has been with us from the beginning, it is a durable form, hence “fierce,” and yet it is often deeply concerned with fragility, the fragility of the periodicity of a life form (one’s own, others, ecosystems, languages, civilizations), and so therefore working within this long tradition I am always aware of the incredible depth (history) within its usage. I guess I’ve learned there’s nowhere to hide in a poem, that reality can really only be constituted by an understanding of periodicity. Nothing is here for that long.
The elegy plays an important role in the human record. I would say it is the human record. Think of all the intimacy, presence, mystery, from human to human, poet to poet, throughout time. As I wrote in my poem “Sentences in a Synapse Field”: “As long as there have been soldiers, there have been poets,” and it is a long, sad, venerable tradition. Kingdoms rise and fall but the poem endures. If a poem is any good, it is always good. It is unquantifiable to imagine all the ways and all the times the human record has pronounced the word “love” or has said “goodbye” over millennia in a poem and just how deeply significant and important this is to us as a people. If we forget what we have lost, we lose everything.
The elegy was also a form of “romantic love poetry” for centuries, and, as we know, to lament is also an act of love. It is beautiful to me that a love poem from the first century can still move us. As I said, if a poem is any good, it is always good. I love that about our art. I spent a lot of time in the lockdown listening to ’60s and ’70s soul. And at the heart of these songs, even as the rhythm drives and affects us and even if they are bright and praise the beloved, at the center is a lament for the lost love. Here too a love song is also an elegy. So, ultimately, in this book I am interested in reimaging ferocity as an act of loving, of being vulnerable, being human. A kind of radical “holding open” if you will. And I feel being vulnerable is a political act, that is, I want to remain a mystery in the face of violence.
JC: This last question isn’t about poetry and poetics, so much as it is about the citizenship that poetry inspires. When I was selecting poems for this issue, I came across some wonderful poems by Mark Kyoungsoo Bias, a young poet who I discovered, after some sleuthing, had been your student at UMass-Amherst’s MFA program. As an editor, it’s always a joy to make these connections, and that you two were equally excited to be in the same issue increased that joy. (I loved that you both shared each other’s work on social media!) That excitement struck me as so lovely and generous. It made me curious about the importance of teaching and community to your life as poet. In addition to mentoring and celebrating students like Mark, you founded and co-edited the journal o-blēk, served as poetry editor for the Nation, edited Jack Spicer’s poems and prose, and the list goes on. Relatedly, you’ve written “for as long as there have been soldiers, there have been poets,” which, to me, suggests that what poets do has the potential to be a counterforce, a disarmed and disarming force, against the structures that claim to protect us but in fact egregiously constrain us. Am I over-reading that? What does the work of community mean to you as poet?
PG: I would agree with what you suggest that poetry can be a counterforce, that being a poet is a form of civil disobedience and a pushing back at power. I mean, there’s the old linguistic joke: “What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.” We’re stuck using this language that has so much carnage and inhumanness within it. When I write I’m interested in the psycho-political, or the eco-political. There are undesirable forces that bend language, it’s a pressure, and it’s there. It’s unmistakable. I am bent too by these false linguistic acts, or these evil linguistic acts, because syntax connects me to you, to my beloveds, to my gone, but it also connects me to atrocity. What’s nice about being a poet or a writer, but I’ll say a poet, is that I get to build my own syntax. And that’s a huge thing. It’s a great marvel and a great life experience to just keep on building a syntax, because syntax connects us to the world. So much of the syntax that we’re given is the language of patriarchy. But it’s also the language of power, of labor, of commerce. It’s the clock, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. We’re stuck in this idea that time moves only this one way. The syntax of a poem can go in and disrupt that and open it up to a different time signature. That is a political act, because when it opens up to a different time signature, we’re all of a sudden in open space or in open time—call it ritual time, sacred time, fugitive time, any of these things—and I think that is a political act, because it’s disavowing, you know, the box that we’re put in. So that’s one way to understand the psycho-political.
The company of poets has been crucial to me and my survival and has been a deeply abiding presence ever since my early adolescence, from my family to my elders, to my peers, and to the newest poet, like Mark’s poetry, for instance. I’ve had the remarkable fortune of spending my civic life as an educator, having the privilege of working with so many brilliant emerging writers over so many years. When I was a boy, I saw my father’s plane crash when I was twelve. My eldest brother, Michael, who I loved and revered, who was my hero in my early life, was a poet. I’ve been really lucky because my eldest brother was a poet, and my other older brother Tom was a singer songwriter (they were much older than me). So, music and song, and listening to music and poetry has always been in my world. But I was so stunned by my father’s death and shocked that something so permanent and irrevocable like this could happen so suddenly. You can’t imagine the enormity of the sorrow in the world I learned from that, childhood ended in a day. I hated everything everyone said to me, you know, all the stuff you say to people who are grieving. And then a year later, my brother Michael wrote a poem. And in it, he said, “If it was only a plane crash / why didn’t you walk from the wreckage?” It astonished me. It was the only true thing anyone could have said. The light went on and I have been reading poetry ever since. Poets and poetry have been with me through every season and every kind of weather in my life. It is extraordinarily personal to me even though I don’t write autobiographical verse. I am here because of the work of countless poets, alive now, or long dead, and for me they are all contemporary, and they are all alive in this ongoing energetic force we call poetry, and that we all get to be a piece of this larger, ongoing, living song is a majesty.
Jennifer Chang, poetry editor of NER, is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Believer, Best American Poetry 2012 and 2022, Georgia Review, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Yale Review, and the Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses 2023. Her essays on poetry, culture, and the environment have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, the Margins, New England Review, New Literary History, Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and the Volta. She is the poetry editor of New England Review, co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Her third book of poems, An Authentic Life, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2024.
Peter Gizzi’s recent books include Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan, 2023), Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), and Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2020, Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems in the UK. His honors include fellowships from the Rex Foundation, the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018, Wesleyan brought out In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. He teaches poetry and poetics in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.