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Jonas van de Poel on ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’
Poetry up close: Peter Gizzi’s visionary poetics
April 16, 2015
Content-wise, ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’ is characterized by a meditative immediacy that becomes almost sage-like, a sublime mantra of existence, filled with colours, hues, flowers, gemstones and heavenly bodies. The directly personal opening lines, ‘Is this what you intended, Vincent / that we take our rest at the end of the grove’, move into the pivotal and apocalyptical, ‘The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear / the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun’. Dominated by a tone simultaneously reflective and outwardly directed, Gizzi’s poem discusses the liminal landscape that separates the ancient and the present, darkness and light, the seen and the felt, heaven and body.
In a style that comprises entire lines of verse into staccato notes of oracular authority, ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’ is reminiscent of the great visionary British poet William Blake and, most specifically, his ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (which you can watch being read here by Marilyn Manson!). Ephemeral and sincere, the brutal memento mori in the lines, ‘To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die’, is ameliorated through others such as, ‘The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside / and let us not forget indigo and the warmth of that’. Ultimately, ‘the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing’ is found in the poem’s body itself, as well, transforming Gizzi’s poetic prophecy into a self-fulfilling one. Make sure to listen to Poetry International’s audio recording of Gizzi reading ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’, created during the 2014 Poetry International Festival – as well as our recording of Samuel Vriezen’s composition inspired by the poem, performed by Trio Scordatura. And read more of Gizzi’s poetry on his poet page.
Jonas van de Poel is the current web/editorial intern of Poetry International. In addition to studying at the University of Amsterdam, he is a poet and co-founder of the Amsterdam Writers Guild.
I once heard the great American poet Peter Gizzi (Pittsfield, 1959) utter the inspirational words: “So long as there have been soldiers, there have been poets.” His poetics can be described as both heavily inspired by inner experience, as well as almost militantly visionary; both characterizations are evident from his brilliant poem, ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’.
‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’ consists of 14 stanzas of 11 lines each. However, instead of 154, the poem only has 77 unique lines of verse. At the end of the seventh stanza, in a phenomenal narratological about-face, the poem repeats its last line, reverses order, and retraces its steps all the way to the opening sentence. Most exceptionally, this reversal is enacted without any resulting syntactical or grammatical inconsistencies. At the turning point, the reader’s perspective is forcibly shifted from what was presumed to be a cohesive narrative poem, to a poem consisting of isolated building blocks composed circularly. This magical gestalt switch is all the more compelling for not diminishing the poem’s force nor urgency in any way.Content-wise, ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’ is characterized by a meditative immediacy that becomes almost sage-like, a sublime mantra of existence, filled with colours, hues, flowers, gemstones and heavenly bodies. The directly personal opening lines, ‘Is this what you intended, Vincent / that we take our rest at the end of the grove’, move into the pivotal and apocalyptical, ‘The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear / the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun’. Dominated by a tone simultaneously reflective and outwardly directed, Gizzi’s poem discusses the liminal landscape that separates the ancient and the present, darkness and light, the seen and the felt, heaven and body.
In a style that comprises entire lines of verse into staccato notes of oracular authority, ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’ is reminiscent of the great visionary British poet William Blake and, most specifically, his ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (which you can watch being read here by Marilyn Manson!). Ephemeral and sincere, the brutal memento mori in the lines, ‘To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die’, is ameliorated through others such as, ‘The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside / and let us not forget indigo and the warmth of that’. Ultimately, ‘the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing’ is found in the poem’s body itself, as well, transforming Gizzi’s poetic prophecy into a self-fulfilling one. Make sure to listen to Poetry International’s audio recording of Gizzi reading ‘Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures’, created during the 2014 Poetry International Festival – as well as our recording of Samuel Vriezen’s composition inspired by the poem, performed by Trio Scordatura. And read more of Gizzi’s poetry on his poet page.
Jonas van de Poel is the current web/editorial intern of Poetry International. In addition to studying at the University of Amsterdam, he is a poet and co-founder of the Amsterdam Writers Guild.
© Jonas van de Poel
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