In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

by Peter Gizzi

A new lyricism for the twenty-first century

Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)

Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance―in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader's companion at

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary

244 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2014

About the author

Educated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, poet Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007), and Artificial Heart (1998).

Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”

(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)

Reviews

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intriguing and sometimes challenging book of poems. Gizzi is more in the experimental school of poetics, not my preferred aesthetic, but this was a rewarding read nonetheless.

The very first poem, "Periplum", sent me to the dictionary to find out what periplum meant. Turns out is a made-up word from the poet and essayist Ezra Pound, the great modernist, and it means: "about or around a journey." Okay, so Gizzi has written a journey poem...and while I still don't what his poem "means" exactly, the language and rhythm grabs the attention. So too with the poem "Toy"...no clarity about what the poem is about, but it has wonderful lines in it like:

You are done in by sunrise and rightly so
And those renewed theatrics of skyline

Undo the hygiene of the visible body
Unlike a dove closing its wings at dawn

Go with a simple song, unbind yourself
Making sure to hide your giddy surface



I'll admit that there are long stretches in the book that fail to fully engage, lines and lines of stream-of-consciousness writing like eavesdropping on an interior monologue........but then, often in the middle of such lines, Gizzi suddenly drops wonderful lyrical meditations like this:

Remember the day
you first took in the night sky?
I mean really let it enter
and unfold along the interior
when the architecture of the body
resembles a cauldron for a dying star,
twinkle, twinkle inside, and inside that
a simple hole. So now you know
what it is to be sucking air,
to be walking upright, to love.
Why not enjoy the day,
this moment to moment thing,
and the furnace above sending
you messages: breathe, dummy.
Birds do it and the rest of the ark
all following the great blank of what's next.
What's next is courage.
To take it all in and feel it for keeps,
that persons you meet
have a hole too and a twinkle.
Embrace them and have a meal.
Look straight into their impermanent flash,
the nervous-system tic of their talk..
Welcome their knowing
not knowing their coming and going.

In another poem, Gizzi concludes that "beliefs dictate syntax." I'm not certain what all his beliefs are, but they make for an interesting syntax indeed: complex, singular, personal, intellectual, disorienting, yet oddly humane....these poems are not a nihilist pose, but an author speaking a particular kind of crafted language that preserves and records many "somethings"....even if the title of the collection claims to be in defense of nothing.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this book, especially the earlier sections. Something happens around The Outernationale, however, where the poems get real polished, maybe too much so. It's like if a punk band with a raw, rough sound, suddenly added a string section.
Which is fine. I just prefer the earlier, more raw stuff.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://artsfuse.org/127059/fuse-poetr...

[Daniel Oster · Rating 2 out of 5]

What... was this???

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. Picked this up after one of his poems in the Atlantic spoke to me. Must have been an anomaly because there were very few here that resonated with me.