My Note On Peter Gizzi’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 of 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.

On The Shirelles And Then Roberta Flack Singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”

Note to a friend:

Just listened to Roberta sing it. You’re right. It’s a wonderful reading of the song. And I cannot, like you, imagine hearing anyone singing it better. Differently and arguably more or less as well, as maybe the Shirelles do. 

Roberta’s is a mature woman’s reading of the song, haunted, to my ears, by the pain of experience, some world weariness, sadness, knowing matters all too well. Heard that way, every note she sings, every word she sings is just right. Nowhere is it overdramatic or cloying. Her reading conveys something beautifully sad. 

The Shirelles are kids, a teen ager, innocent, inexperienced, asking the same question, but, it’s, I feel, infused with hopefulness and the expectation of the possibility of a positive answer. Roberta, not so much.

It reminds me of two Shakespeare plays that I think about in relation to the theme of love: Romeo and Juliet; and Anthony and Cleopatra. Leaving aside that they’re both by Shakespeare’s lights tragedies, the first is about the intense exuberance of young romantic love; the second is about love as a game, emotion mixed with cynicism and wiles, worldliness, knowing all too well what goes on in the world, a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf quality, but love nonetheless.

Some of that to me informs the way I hear the Shirelles and then Roberta. 

A Short Note On “Close Reading” Being Applicable To Fiction As Well As Lyric Poetry

Note to a friend:

Thanks for your thoughts. 

I'm far from a theorist, but I've always had the intuition that close reading, which I take as of a piece with the New Criticism, is applicable to fiction but differs in its means from its application to poetry. 

I've always thought that there are ways to examine fiction by discussing the techniques inhering in the genre. Fiction being what it is, the analysis will be wider in a sense then that of lyric poems, as for only one example, some characters will be the antithesis of each other or might present variations on a mode of behaviour or personality type that then will have a structural or formal part to play in the work's meaning. 

It would be sterile to talk only in these ways about great books to the exclusion of their sweep, depth and breadth. But as part of the way of coming to full critical terms with them, especially in teaching them and writing about them, I'd argue for the necessity of such close reading. 

That’s not to be put to the exclusion of broader cultural readings of the kind you mention at the foot of your email. 

Now, I may just be trapped in the ways of the New Criticism as that's how literature was taught to me. But in my own way, I've kept thinking about it. 

Lastly, I'm persuaded in this by the way I did my 125  page MA thesis on the novels of Mordecai Richler, even to the occasional point of taking bits of prose and examining them closely with a view to then building them up to fit within what thematically is going on in the book. In fact my essential point was to show how overall formal changes from novel to novel—-say from picaresque comedy to satire to black humour—match the changes in each book's world view.

One Approach To Lyric Poems: A Brief Note To Someone I Know

Here’s one way I think about and often respond to lyric poems. They’re soliloquies, a progression of consciousness, from first word to last. Their poetry in good poems—charged language, imagery, repetition, coupling, symbolism, metaphors, metre, rhythm and the like—works in unison with that progression as form becomes meaning. Simply paraphrasing poems is a start, perhaps a necessary but insufficient condition of understanding a poem, where understanding is a continuum of depth.

Incoherence In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing?

 I just rewatched Do The Right Thing, 1989,  with my 2024 eyes. It’s provocative. 

From Wikipedia:

“Lee has remarked that only White viewers ask him if Mookie did the right thing; Black viewers do not ask him the question. Lee believes the key point is that Mookie was angry at the wrongful death of Radio Raheem, stating that viewers who question the riot are explicitly failing to see the difference between property damage and the death of a Black man.”

I wonder if the movie goes beyond what Lee intended. It seems he wants the right thing done and, if so, it raises the question, what is that? 

The movie famously ends with the two contrasting quotes:

MLK’s: a preachment against violence to get justice, and for the need for love and understanding; 

and Malcolm X’s, more wiggly: bad people in America hold the power and that violence might be justifiable if the issue is self defence. 

Lee seems to cite MX for the idea that for American Blacks in 1989, violence is self-defence against white racist power, and, therefore, is intelligence rather than violence.  

Isn’t it thematically notable that the movie begins with a lengthy sequence of Rosie Perez dancing aggressively including boxing sequences in the dancing, all to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power?

Wikipedia says:

“”Fight the Power’ is a song by American hip hop group Public Enemy, released as a single in the summer of 1989 on Motown Records. It was conceived at the request of film director Spike Lee, who sought a musical theme for his 1989 film Do the Right Thing.” 

I take all this arguably to suggest that  Lee had in mind the vindication of MX’s quote. 

Why else the opening sequence? 

Why else the thematic incorporation of Public Enemy’s lyrics? 

Why else in what Wikipedia reports Lee said, that Mookie‘s trashing of Sal’s window is an understandable reaction to Radio Raheem’s death? 

The whites in the movie in the persons of Sal and his sons are shown as propertied and hardworking, with Sal and his younger son not prejudiced and his older son, John Tuturro, an out and out racist. The white cop Long is racist, one homicidally so. Ponte, the other cop, not so much.

Lee shows the Blacks in a largely negative light. Many are unemployed. Mookie, the movie’s protagonist, is an irresponsible loser, unable to hold on to a job, living off his much more responsible sister. He’s quite indifferent to his son, and seems only to come around to see his baby son’s mother Rosie Perez when he wants sex, after which he’s gone for a week at a time.

His racist son aside, Sal is a benevolent man, proud of his business and accommodating to his customers so long as they are respectful to him and of business. 

His keeps harkening back to a past when he and his 25 year old business were accepted in the neighbourhood, welcome and trouble free.

So I say Buggin’ Out is wrong to demand Sal hang pictures of Blacks on his Wall of Fame rather than only pictures of Italians. 

He’s wrong to try to organize a boycott of Sal’s on that basis. 

And I say Sal is in his right to insist Radio Raheem turn off his boom box inside the pizzeria, to which Raheem takes unjustified exception. 

 In the result, Buggin’ and Raheem at night insist the Wall of Fame have Blacks. Sal again tells  Raheem to turn his radio off.  Raheem refuses. Buggin' insults Sal and says he’ll  shut his pizzeria down. 

Sal explodes. 

He demolishes Raheem's boombox with a bat. 

Raheem attacks Sal. 

And the violence worsens till the cops come and Long kills Raheem leading to Mookie trashing Sal’s window and sparking a riot that leads to the pizzeria being burnt to the ground. 

I argue that all this dramatizes hopelessness and tragic intractability, both exploding into meaningless destructive violence and loss, with a fair amount of sympathy going to Sal.  

This view of the movie supports MLK’s quote and cuts against MX’s. So why, again, the opening sequence of fighting the power? 

Why does Lee present the issue, at least according to Wiki, as the loss of property as against the death of a black man, when the movie shows them both as terrible occurrences in that intractable hopelessness? They ought not be pitted against each other.

Does not this tension point to incoherence?

Either, it seems to me, Lee’s film either works thematically against itself or Lee has, however explicitly, subtly dramatized the impossibility of doing the right thing.

My 1989 eyes saw the latter of those two possibilities. My 2024 eyes incline to the former of them. 

An Example Of A Difference Between Literature And Mere Writing

 Here’s an example of a difference between mere writing and literature. 

I’m reading Rogue Cop by William McGivern. 

His protagonist, a bent cop, Mike Carmody, has just worked out and before that has played handball. 

After, he relaxes, exulting in how good his body feels. And yet he’s enjoying his first cigarette of the day. 

Then right after come descriptions of things being “clean”, the weather, certain interiors. 

A central conflict in the novel is between Carmody as bent  and his late father as righteous and his brother Eddie, also a cop, as righteous. 

In mere writing, the oddity of smoking after vigorous exercise, and the contrast between the surrounding cleanliness and Carmody as dirty consistent with the central contrast between Carmody and his brother and father are simply there.

In literature they’re intended, purposeful, in order to amplify and enrich the novel’s themes. 

Exchange On UCLA Anti Israel Encampment And Anti Semitism

 L:

What if a muslim claims a deeply and sincerely held religious belief that the state of Israel has no right to exist because muslims have a religious duty to spread their faith throughout that territory. If someone were to criticize this view, would it be fair to label that person as islamophobic? 

What if someone asserts a deeply held Christian Orthodox belief that Ukraine is the godly-ordained territory of Russia?  And there was a pro-Ukraine encampment, and they wanted to exclude people who held those views. Should those protesters be stigmatized with the label of  "anti-Christian"?

The question goes to the right of the protesters to cordon off a section of the campus in order to establish a zone for protest, education, and mutual support. Maybe there shouldn't be a zone where others who are considered to have "repugnant" views cannot enter - it's a university and a public space. 

But to label the encampment anti-semitic on those grounds alone is unfair.

Me:

I don’t get the relevance of your examples to events at UCLA or to Zionism.

Any Muslim who religiously believes that Israel has no right to exist is anti Semitic. In fact, most anyone who claims Israel has no right to exist, whether claimed religiously or not, is anti Semitic. Criticism of this view in the case of a Muslim isn’t Islamophobic: it’s being factual, true to what counts as anti Semitism. 

If a Russian Christian believes Ukraine is the God-given territory of Christian Russia, then pro Ukrainians who reject that are not anti Christian. If pro Ukrainians exclude such Christians from a public space, then they’d be wrong. They’re not, however, anti Christian despite the exclusion.

We must separate two issues:  lawfulness of protest; and content of protest.

People can legally protest in public spaces.

Commandeering some university grounds unlawfully is, well, unlawful. And more so if the protest is civil disobedience, the precise meaning of which is law breaking with willingness to take penal consequences. The lawfulness or illegality of protest is separate from content.

Whether a lawful protest or not, if the content is that Israel has no right to exist, that Jews have no right to a homeland state born of international assent, surviving as such with increasing assent and functioning with all the hallmarks of a sovereign state for almost 80 years, then that content is anti Semitic. It’s vivid anti Semitism. Israel is prominent in Judaism’s meaning.

Here your second example falls off. Christianity is a set of beliefs and earthly realities. The application of those beliefs in one geopolitical instance, Ukraine as part of Christian motherland Russia, is as nothing in relation to the whole of Christianity. It doesn’t begin to come close to exhausting its meaning.

Judaism is likewise a set of beliefs and earthly realities. Granted, one can be a Jew and not a Zionist, but the proximity of Zionism to Judaism is such that if Zionism is eliminated from the meaning of Judaism, then Judaism is hollowed out. 

Moreover, while Russia having a God given right to Ukraine is morally, geopolitically and objectively objectionable, and while the position that  Israel shouldn’t exist is similarly objectionable, the latter’s converse, that it should exist, is righteous.