‘There is a majesty to grief’: TS Eliot’s poetry prize winner Peter Gizzi | Poetry

WThe TS Eliot prize came as a shock to the American poet Peter Gizzi. “I had no expectations,” he says. “All I know is that I was overwhelmed.” In fact, the 65-year-old says he almost cried when his name was read out for his collection Fierce Elegy.

When we speak the next day – Gizzi is speaking over Zoom from Valencia, where he flew to see family after attending the ceremony in London on Monday night – he is clearly still emotional. The prestigious poetry prize has special meaning for him, as he has long felt an affinity with TS Eliot. Indeed, Gizzi and his friend, the poet and scholar JH Prynne, even made a pilgrimage to the village that features in the last poem of Eliot’s four quartets.

“When I came to England in 1994, Jeremy (Prynne) asked ‘what are we going to do?'” I said Little Gidding wasn’t far away and he said: ‘Yes, that’s right. We are going out for a picnic,” says Gizzi. “We went the next day and read the four quartets in the churchyard.”

Often described as a “poet’s poet,” Gizzi has long been a major figure in American poetry. Born in Michigan in 1959, he put off going to college and was instead part of the New York punk scene. At the same time, he read the poets who still have a strong influence on him: Allen Ginsburg, Rimbaud, Keith Waldrop and John Ashbery. Their work helped shape his view that poetry is “like friendship. It’s a very intimate art. It happens one poem at a time over a lifetime.”

Poetry first entered Gizzi’s life under tragic circumstances when he was 12. His father died in a plane crash in 1972. It was a year later when his late brother Michael, also a well-known poet, wrote a piece called Requiem in Marchthat Gizzi was made aware of the possibilities of what poetry could do.

“The poem had the lines, ‘if it was only a plane crash / why didn’t you walk away from the wreckage'” It was the “first true thing anyone had said” in the wake of the crash, Gizzi says. “I was just so angry when people had tried to comfort me. But I realized that poetry is the road. A light went on and I’ve never stopped reading it.”

Gizzi’s 11 collections of poetry have seen him move from conscious attempts to engage with politics to something more introspective. “I realized I didn’t want to be a trumpeter,” he says. “I don’t want to just respond to the news. This is a false path. I don’t want to follow this.”

But he finds it difficult to emphasize that this does not mean that his later poems are autobiographical. “My poems are lived. The ‘I’ belongs to all of us. I mean, Peter Gizzi is there, but he’s just part of it because the pronoun we share is wounded and sprung with so much historical consciousness. So many associated voices speak through it when we use it. The language is bigger than me, it is older than me. It does not live in me – we all live in it.”

This shift has also been due to Gizzi losing a number of friends and family members over the past 15 years, including his mother and both of his brothers. Many of the poems in Fierce Elegy attempt to understand what might be beyond death; an image that often comes back is the attempt to see into the invisible. For Gizzi, this ties in with the idea that the elegy can be a tool that helps us understand that there is much about living and dying that is beyond language.

“I believe that joy and sorrow are a very complex ecosystem. We cannot have one without the other,” he says. “I also find elegies joyful because there is a majesty in grief. And the majesty is understanding the mystery of this thing we call being.”

And why are they particularly “hard” elegies? “I imagine that violence in this case is an act of vulnerability,” says Gizzi. “I believe that elegy can take a broken heart in a hard world and turn it into a hard heart in a broken world.”

The sound is also decisive for how Gizzi’s poems affect the readers. While many of the short lines in Fierce Elegy may seem to make it a struggle to feel the rhythm of the poems, he is actually asking you to hear and feel the musicality that underlies them. “Sound is sculptural, you can live inside a piece of music,” he says. “So I’m really interested in poetry that has a musical quality.”

Gizzi believes that Fierce Elegy resonates with so many readers because of its deliberately pared down language. “George Oppen, the great American Objectivist poet, said, ‘I like all the little words: tree, house, hill.’ And I started thinking, well, these are the words we live in. Could I say more by saying less? Poems are as much about what’s not there as what is there?”

What is for Gizzi right now is a celebratory dinner with his family. Before he leaves, he reiterates how grateful he is for the award and the recognition it has given him. “I love my job. I believe in my job. It’s my life. I stand by it.”