National Poet Comes to Mason

By Broadside Staff Writer Ethan Vaughan

George Mason University hosted well-known poet Peter Gizzi last Thursday, April 10, in SUB II. The Massachusetts-born writer arrived at 7:30 p.m. and briefly spoke before reading a group of 11 poems in a presentation that lasted slightly longer than an hour.

Gizzi was introduced by Mason assistant professor Sally Keith, a creative writing instructor at Mason’s graduate school who is a fan of the author and whose students, she said, expressed a desire to hear him speak after reading passages from his book, The Outernationale, in class.

During the event, Gizzi read nine poems from the 2007 collection “To Be Written in No Other Country,” “Edgar Poe,” “Lessons in Darkness,” “The Moonlight Defense,” “The Outer Nationale,” “Untitled Amherst Spectre,” “That’s Life,” “Homer’s Anger” and “On What Became of Matthew Brady’s War Photographs.”

The literary pieces addressed abstract themes and discussed the intricacies of perception as in the work titled, “The Moonlight Defense.” A brief reading of the phrase, “Yes, solar wind, now windows bloom/The body waves beyond itself/Not all speech unuttered equals silence/Nor a dropped curtain signals an end,” was read to the audience.

Other lines were more specific such as, “On What Became of Matthew Brady’s War Photographs,” focused simply on the topic of what happened to one photographer’s glass negatives after the Civil War.

Some of the poems took a moderate road, combining the ambiguous and concrete, as in the literary work entitled, “To Be Written of No Other Country,” which confronts some of the problems of modern American society in a minimalist fashion, “Now it is time for the scratch ticket/To bruise the inner wishes of single moms/For night to be enough for the pensioner/And his ‘buster’ in TV light/If we were to answer the geese overhead/Would we ever find a home/Lost as we are in the kiddy section of Wal-Mart?”

Gizzi was born in Pittsfield, Mass. in 1959 and attended the State University of New York at Buffalo. He teaches poetry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Gizzi described himself as nervous on Thursday evening upon rising to address a crowd significantly larger than the organizers had anticipated; approximately 100 people crowded into a conference room in SUB II, where they’d been moved after smaller quarters overflowed.

“I’m a human being,” he said, preparing to speak. “I get nervous.” Gizzi shared with the attendees a special treat– two poems, each written approximately two months before, that have yet to be published. The selections, which he said were somewhere between “teenage power ballads or Seasonal Affective Disorder,” had not been read at any public setting before he unveiled them to the Mason audience.

He said that the debuts entitled, “Hypo-Stasis in New Year’s” and “Tradition in the Indivisible Talent,” were darker in character.

Mason graduates, such as 2006 graduate Maliha Malek and 2007 graduate Rahima Ullah, returned to campus to see Gizzi and said that they mostly liked the experience.

“I enjoyed the poems, but I wished he would have talked more about the writing process,” explained Malek. “He did say that he narrates life the way he experiences it, as opposed to describing it in retrospect, and I appreciated that aspect of it.”

“I come to a lot of visiting author events, and I think it’s awesome that Mason has this,” said Ullah, who said that a plus of the program is its openness to the community as a whole, not only to Mason.