Dings Past

On Peter Gizzi, W.S. Graham and the poem as home

Cover of Peter Gizzi, Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2020)

I wasn’t planning to do another holiday post this week, because I haven’t been on holiday. But I have had Covid since I returned, and it hasn’t been very interested in letting me work. So I thought I would continue the themes of last week’s archive piece, on the poetry of place and W.S. Graham, with a revised extract from my contribution to In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), ed. Anthony Caleshu. This is the opening section of the essay, which uses Gizzi’s repeated allusions to Graham’s concept of the poem as a “place” or “space” as a way of thinking about ideas of “home” in American poetry.

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In his study of John Ashbery and English Poetry (2012), Ben Hickman observes that “if anything defined [the New York] group of poets, it was their reading habits—specifically, “their commitment to European literary and non-literary avant-gardes, and a unique appetite for the undiscovered and marginal.” Peter Gizzi, author of Ode: Salute to the New York School (2012), is an American internationalist in the same tradition. He has taken a particular interest in what happened to modernist poetry in Britain after World War II, and found a sympathetic voice in the Scottish poet W. S. Graham (1918—1986).

In 1946, Graham wrote of his belief that poems have “the power to release a man into his own completely responsible world larger [. . .] than outward solid geography.” Gizzi has long been concerned with a similar notion: that lyric poetry reimagines the idea of “home” in a way that exceeds the limits of a single tradition or place. “I am interested in nostalgia,” he has written, “but I would renovate its use: it’s not just a return to home (or origins, the texts that inform me) but a survival of home (the process of individuation).”

Ideas about the relationship between poetry, origins, and home are explored by the poem “Ding Repair”, from Gizzi’s second collection, Artificial Heart (1998). In American English, “ding repair” refers to fixing small dents in a car (or surfboard), and this offers a clue to the poem’s allusive method, which involves the rewriting of other American poems about home. Its first lines—

There are too many skateboards here, too many

waves to negotiate, the graded hills fall

too suddenly into the sea

—dreamily misremember the beginning of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel”:

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly to the sea.

Bishop’s poem, which reflects her relocation to Brazil in the 1950s, goes on to wonder, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” and ends with the traveller asking herself, “Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?”

Dust jacket of Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (1965)

Gizzi’s substitution of “skateboards” for “waterfalls” keeps us in 1990s North America, as he reworks Bishop’s questions to emphasise the role of the imagination in the political making of “home”:

Imagining another home far from here

not from where we have come but where we imagine,

where vulnerability won’t reproduce cruelty.

These lines then segue into an extended response to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Of Modern Poetry”. The original begins: