The Poetics of Peter Gizzi: Navigation by Celestial Bodies

Navigation by celestial positioning has been as useful to seafarers as to poets. As a result of Peter Gizzi’s newest book of poems, The Outernationale, it is possible—perhaps necessary—to generalize further about the art of locating oneself by approximation of arcs of distance and nearness in relation to true places of heavenly bodies. For clarity, we will assume navigation to mean navigation in the ancient sense—without maps—marking a point within a plane by application of the ancient periplum.

Peter Gizzi’s early book of poems was titled Periplum and other poems—but I will not discuss that work in detail—and mention it only to suggest that the idea of the periplum guides that work, and continues to do so, though it transforms in his newest book under something like Whitman’s “procreant urge of the world.” But what world Gizzi might present is strangely a world apart. It is as if the poet guiding himself by periplum must not only be guided by meaningful points in a cultural atmosphere, but also necessarily be apart from his destination, outernationale in a way (outside the nation’s music), to sing his way along.

Sometime around the 12c BC, upon the decline of Cretan sea power, came the Phoenician sailors. From the seaboard of Syria to the eastern shore of the Red Sea, they spread outward—from southern Africa to southern Britain, sailing by periplum. Periplum—I will define by quoting Gizzi’s definition in an interview in Jubilat—is:

“A form of reckoning, a form of navigation, the way Odysseus moves through The Odyssey—it’s a navigation between the stars and the coast. And it’s also the narrative of a journey that maps itself that way. For tens of thousands of years, we moved through space not with maps but by knowing where the sun was, and that star, and that point of that mountain. Which meant that you knew where the most intimate people in your world were—your lover, your ancestors, your children—by the farthest point in space.”

We have evidence, of course, that the technique predates Homer because it is already available to Homer’s hero, Odysseus:

“Placed at the helm he sate, and mark’d the skies,
Nor closed in sleep his ever watchful eyes.
There viewed the Pleiads, and the Northern Team,
And great Orion’s more refulgent beam;
To which, around the axle of the sky,
The Bear revolving, points his golden eye,
Who shines exalted on th’ethereal plain,
Nor bathes his blazing forehead in the main.”

We who suffer Pope for lines like the last—like Odysseus keeping the Great Bear on his port side, as Calypso bade him—do so to chart our way in relation to a point, an event, a moment, a command, a corollary, a body in the sky, and our people in relation to it. Gizzi, who begins his book with “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me” suggests that a reference point of his is Walt Whitman. The string of contingency-laden “ifs” that birth the book in tenuous solemnity are marked by an indifference to consequence. The poet positions himself in declaring himself outside a conclusion:

“If problems of identity confound sages,
Derelict philosophers, administrators
Who can say I am found
If—then what?”

We get no answer. In a way, much like Whitman, this poet is inconclusive. And who can say that conclusion is a mark of understanding? Silence must invariably follow such a question.  What the poet presents can only be what he knows. The body and the idea of the body, as this poet puts it in reference to his body, “the surf breaking and the picture of a wave,” places it in two places at once. Whitmanesque, he tells us, “I too unwind in the most circuitous fashion.” So where, under such ruse, can a body stand? Gizzi tells us where he stands:

“If I am a bridge I am standing on, thinking,
Saying goodbye to myself
When I stood by the water of life
Thinking of my life, pine boughs
The hill next to water”

The incident of “if” plays a critical role—because “if” here is not only incident—“if” is also possibility. The possibility of being a bridge becomes the incident of being a bridge.  If becomes when. This bridge becomes a bridge in the possibility of its incidence. The poet charts their way according to possibilities imagined, reified and acted upon.

But when we are in the ifs—so unsteady over the sea’s body—we must learn, as Gizzi puts it, to say, “so be it.” Defiance is indeed becoming to a poet in the Whitmanian line. But what American after Whitman was so defiant as to defy Whitman? Pound is another great point in Gizzi’s chart. Pound who writes in the Cantos:

“Periplum, not as land looks on a map
But as sea bord seen by men sailing.”

This is celestial navigation before Pythagoras—errancy in its supreme. The next poem in Gizzi’s book is the “The Quest.” The first lines:

“It’s true, the horizon empties into
a throat, a vibrato escaping its orbit
in the form of a string”

Pounds first lines in The Cantos glow in the horizon. But the body is emphasized here as the poem’s total orbit. The poem’s music transmits through it. We return, as I recently commented to Gizzi after a reading in the Yale poetry series, to the troubadours. The body demurring Pythagoras for a system of systems that is errant and resonating. The history of nautical astronomy hangs in the balance–Al Battan, Al Hazzan, Delambre, Douwes, Krafft, Inman, del Rios, Airy, Lyons, Dunthorne, Merrifield, etc., as well as stars of poesis, which were so unwilling to lend to each other any part–it is remarkable that Gizzi brings them together: Whitman and Pound, to mention only two. We see them in Gizzi’s sky as co-equal lodes, and all under the aegis of the personal body.

Finding course between celestial positions on an ever-shifting body—body of water and physical body present—Gizzi brings together a great field of resonance in the language of navigation: We must reckon with him, if today we are to sing with the water streaming over our hearts.