In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi

Description

This first critical book of essays on the poetry of Peter Gizzi shows how his work extends the traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism while also reclaiming the living presence of the “lyric” in its capacity to sing of the human predicament. Gizzi is author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including most recently Threshold Songs and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016. Lauded contributors, including Ben Lerner, Michael Snediker, Marjorie Perloff, and Charles Altieri, explore Gizzi’s poetry for its embodiment of an American tradition—extending the poetics of Whitman, Dickinson, and Stevens, amongst others—while also exhibiting a twenty-first-century sensibility, perpetuating a new grammar and syntax to capture our place in the world today. Each essayist, in turn, works through close-readings of some of the most important poems of our times, enriching our understanding of a poetry of the mind which never loses track of what it means to feel. Cover......Page 1 IN THE AIR......Page 2 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 CONTENTS......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 10 List of Source Abbreviations......Page 12 INTRODUCTION | In the Air: The Poetry of Peter Gizzi......Page 14 PART I | TRADITION AND INTERTEXTUALITY......Page 26 1 | Gizzi’s Romantic Exportance......Page 28 2 | Gesture and Philosophical Reflection in the Poetry of Peter Gizzi......Page 40 3 | The Artifice of Personhood and the Poetics of Plenitude in Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics......Page 59 4 | Peter Gizzi’s Poetics of Contingency......Page 69 5 | Gathering the Poem: On Peter Gizzi’s “A Telescope Protects Its View”......Page 82 6 | “Tradition & the Indivisible Talent”......Page 91 7 | “To Speak in This Place”: Peter Gizzi, W. S. Graham, and English Poetry......Page 103 PART II | LYRICS AND ETHICS......Page 120 8 | Peter Gizzi’s Hypothetical Lyricism......Page 122 9 | The Lyric Voice as Ethical Medium: Peter Gizzi and the Contemporary Polis......Page 144 10 | The Outernationale: Only Transition! or, the Poetics of Unfreedom......Page 165 11 | The Bewilderment of Peter Gizzi’s “Plural Noises”: Toward a Poetics of Citizenship......Page 176 12 | “This further sound, scratch of pen to parchment in a flight of democracy”: Reading Peter Gizzi’s “Some Values of Landscape and Weather”......Page 191 13 | Peter Gizzi’s Radical Irony......Page 204 14 | “turning words to return a world”: On Peter Gizzi’s “Pierced”......Page 218 PART III | AFFECT AND ALLUSION......Page 230 15 | Recognition, Affect, Resistance: The Poetry of Peter Gizzi......Page 232 16 | Peter Gizzi’s Emotion Machine......Page 245 17 | To Arrive in Zeno’s Thought: Reverie On, Thinking In, Peter Gizzi’s “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me”......Page 257 18 | Divine Allusion and Refraction: Beginning, Ecstasy, and the Dead in the Poetry of Peter Gizzi......Page 269 19 | Love at Both Ends of the Western World......Page 288 20 | “Trembling my standard returned”: Two Versions of “Hard as Ash”......Page 296 21 | From Seeing to Saying: On Peter Gizzi’s “It Was Raining in Delft”......Page 309 AFTERWORD | “Sonic Sense”......Page 314 About the Contributors......Page 322 Index......Page 326