Review: Gizzi's Deep Deadpan

Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 2009)

As promised in the last installment of this adventurous blog, a review of a slim volume by a real live living poet currently, perhaps right this very minute, writing poems. The back cover copy consists entirely of questions, the first of which glosses the collection’s title and provides as good a key to these poems as any: “Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan?” The poems, which tend not to pose questions but, instead, to juxtapose declarations, wear just such an expression, playing with the multiple meanings and opposed affects that cohabit words and phrases in ways that at once grin and grimace.

Take “About Face.” Please. The title combines military command and modifying phrase, the imperative to reverse direction and the invitation to consider the visage. This sets two stages on which the poem acts out. First, we get reversals: “No sooner am I out the door than I want to be home reading.” And second, though the seriality I’m suggesting betrays the simultaneity the poem actually performs, we get reflection on, via reflections in, pre-fabricated chunks of language, as when the speaker compares his face to a “full-grown narcissus” (flower and flower’s namesake), says he cut off his nose (not to spite his face but to identify himself) and professes his love for “being busted in the mirror.” There’s a resulting insight from all that the poem narrates: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.”
The pun linking vision and subjectivity (eye/I, captain) is a Romantic truism, but the adverb that opens this last line links it to (self-)reflection in the complex mirror of cliché, and the closing sentence reels the life of one’s own mind in a language suddenly foreign, one for which we require the helpful trot of translation.

But see, I’ve done this thing that writing about poems like Gizzi’s often does. I’ve made it sound patently un-fun. These poems, though, are fun, and funny. Like this here cautionary example a friend and collaborator sent, making clear the importance of knowing where strings of words come from. Sometimes punnily funny, though by this I don’t mean to demean as we often do when pointing out a pun. Every line in “Cloistered in an Oyster,” for example, riffs on the reality of mollusk life as it’s embedded in phrases like “mother of pearl” and “oyster bed,” in words like “shuck” and “clammy,” but leaves the leer of Tragedy just visible behind its Comic lightness. And still more fun are the poems, like “Raging Balls” or “Attention Deficit Flypaper,” where things get a little blue (another word whose connotations combine the limning of loss and the gladdening of glands), that come admirably clean about the masturbatory character of this linguistic play (though with the strong sense that both masturbation and play get bad reps by not being taken nearly seriously enough). Check out the latter of those two poems in its entirety:

The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.
Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.
Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.
Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.

Gizzi does a lot just with sound here (suggesting a connection between matriculation and masturbation, for example), but the real fun, it seems to me, is in the various ways we can read a phrase like “Like an aphrodisiac in daycare.” Similar to such a substance in its infancy? As if such a substance were distributed to a gathering of infants? And the choice we make here determines the simile’s modification of the main clause. The first way might suggest that he, in a kind of erotically related infancy, instead of cutting teeth cuts (that is, develops) his eyes on the tear-inducing fumes of onions, while the second suggests that “he” is hamstrung by an incapacity to act on urges chemically induced (or, as the last line tells us, inhibited).

I’m having fun playing with these lines, but there’s no reason why I should have all of it. There are plenty of copies of New Depths of Deadpan to go around. Go get your own, and see what you can make of “Clouds Nine” (mild insult to Rumi-quoting New Agers?) or “Hours Dismembered” (Herrick and Marvell mashed up with Damien Hirst?), or “Night-Blooming Gramophone” (in just what way do “Rats know what good sex is”?). And then tell me in the comments section.