V. Penelope Pelizzon
May 2005

Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000) won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her new poems and nonfiction essays have appeared recently in The Hudson Review, Field, The New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Fourth Genre. She is now at work on a long poem, The Monongahela Book of Hours, which has been supported by a 2004 University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Fellowship, the 2003 Campbell Corner Award and a 2002 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant. Pelizzon’s critical essays on film and photography have appeared in journals including The Yale Journal of Criticism, Post Script, and American Studies. Since 2002, she has been on the faculty at the University of Connecticut, where she directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches courses in literature, visual culture, and film.


Statement of Poetics

For years I’ve been returning to Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell, toying with his comparison between human languages and the collective work of certain social insects. To paraphrase his observations, termites construct prodigious dwelling mounds that can reach twenty feet in height. Individual termites live only a month or so, yet colonies can expand the same mound for sixty years or more. In its lifetime, then, a single termite will only build a tiny portion of the whole. In fact, individual termites can’t build anything; alone, they scurry around aimlessly, swearing under their breath and dropping their balls of mud. It’s only when enough get together that some chemical language tells them to pile their mudballs together and build up—and thus the arching structure of the mound develops.

Like the tiny, short-lived termites in their colossal nests, individual humans experience a fraction of their language’s structure for a fraction of its existence. Unlike the termites (we presume), we are more conscious of the labyrinthine building we inhabit. And so during our lives—infinitesimal in relation to a language’s duration--we can play with the architecture.
Personally I’ve found experiences that forced me to confront the architecture of English as influential to my writing as studying prosody. Functioning for extended periods in another language—a language I still don’t speak well—brings everything heretofore natural about English words and syntax into sharp relief as a construction, something so strikingly peculiar it might have been built by bugs. (And the architectural metaphor comes home every time I ask at a pensione in my childish Italian if I can have a stanza.) For me, it’s necessary to lose English periodically in order to recognize the particular shape of the rooms I inhabit.

Originally published in Phoenix Rising: The Next Generation of American Formal Poets (Textos, 2004).

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