My Note On Peter Grizzi’s Poem In Defense Of Nothing

 In Defense of Nothing

Peter Gizzi

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.

I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.

I guess this highway will have to do and the cars

     and the people in them on their way.

The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.

It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine

     hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.

This sky with its macular clouds also

     and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

Me: 

The speaker describes the quiet weight of things by taking in their ordinariness and flaws yet accepting and appreciating them with a mix of resignation and admiration. So he describes the fragmented landscape: trailers, highways, and a crooked eucalyptus tree. 

The repeated "I guess" is effective understatement that posits a kind of hesitant embrace of flawed ordinariness, imperfect, not completely knowable, but sufficient. 

The speaker evokes the present as an encroaching force and highlights time’s flight, while his mention of incomprehensible atoms and molecular bonds adds—what to call it?—“prosaic mystery” to the ordinary, unknowable amazing undetectable workings forming the ordinary. 

The imagery of “macular clouds”, hinting at eventual blindness, and the “broken electric tower” continues the idea of imperfection, now tainted by decay. Yet isn’t the poem's tone one of quiet acceptance, a defence or nothing, suggesting that a fractured world "will have to do”?

Isn’t there drama in this constrained lyricism? Isn’t there the intimation of the value of a kind of—again what to call it?—existential humility and of reconciling ourselves to limits, imperfections from which paradoxically we can derive value and meaning—again, the defence of nothing.

In the last line the phrase "one line broken free,” has some reverberations. It seems to join rupture or brokenness with freedom. It suggests dysfunction and disconnection. So it  concludes the flaws set out in the preceding imagery. 

Yet, doesn’t “broken free" create an unexpected shift, as if the brokenness leads as well to a release or an escape and, so, new possibilities? 

This concluding tension resolves what the poem is about, the acceptance of flaws and brokenness in the ordinary that match all that in us and yet is the ground for the meaning we can give to our lives, including being the ground for possibilities, possibilities arising from brokenness. 

And so we have the defence of nothing.

The poem’s title defends that which we might dismiss and reject.  So “nothing” is that which we don’t value, as in they’re nothing to us, the merely prosaic. But yet we can elevate them with a reluctant embrace. The poem defends these nothings, asserting their worth which is at one with the little they are to us.

And too, the titular nothing being defended points to a deeper sense of absence, a metaphysical one, the nothingness of all things, our inclination to meaninglessness, to nihilism, populated and suggested by detritus. 

But the world weary speaker is at peace with all that might be thought to objectify that feeling of utter emptiness. 

In his half hearted engagement of it—his repeated “I guess”, in his observation of flaws and brokenness that also reflect what is going on inside him, he too breaks free.