To come across reviews or criticism
of any one of Peter Gizzi's collections,
be it his first, Periplum, published
by Avec Books in 1992, or the three books that followed,
Artificial Heart, Some Values of Landscape and Weather,
or his latest, The Outernationale,
is inevitably and quite regularly
to come across swells of admiration and praise.
Variously, his work elicits words
like passionate, baffling, numinous, plaintive, unnerving,
quixotic, generative, and haunting.
It's an appreciation that carries over
to his diligence as an editor, most recently of The House
that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures
of Jack Spicer and My Vocabulary Did This to Me:
Spicer's Collected Poetry, two volumes
and a four-volume project that have been widely hailed
as some of the most important curatorial work in the past 50
years.
For these endeavors and others, Gizzi
has been recognized with a number of honors, including
the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy
of American Poets, as well as fellowships
from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts
and the Guggenheim Foundation.
But let me return briefly to the poetry
by way of an excerpt from an interview, one in which
Gizzi is reflecting on his time in residency
in Marseille, France.
He says, "The past is always visibly haunting the present.
You see a building that begins in the first century,
the second floor's from the 13th century,
and the third floor is from the 20th century,
some incredible piece of architectural genius.
Everywhere you look, the Modernist notion
of parataxis or collage surrounds you.
There are always structures being worked on.
Wherever you go, there's no vista
where there's not some crane or some team
of people rebuilding something.
People are actually repairing the view."
The surprise and delight Gizzi registers here,
and so elegantly, that people are actually
repairing the view gets right at the heart of Gizzi's project.
At a creative destruction or onbuilding,
that is also one of the more ambitious impulses
in all of contemporary poetry.
On the one hand, to acknowledge how
poetry is haunted by textuality, while on the other,
to insist that poetry remain vulnerable to emotion
and determined to know something, anything, however
fleetingly.
This, I think, begins to explain why Gizzi is already
lauded as one of the best poets of his generation.
He's a reconciler, a poet intent on repairing the view.
Like Wallace Stevens, a poet to whom he's often compared,
Gizzi is a poet of the imagination,
one for our moment.
If not romantic, than perhaps remantic,
deft at delivering pleasures, both sensual and intellectual,
even--
or maybe especially, when composing out of doubt.
"I am far, and I am an animal, and I am just
another I-am poem, a we-see poem, a they-love poem,"
he writes.
"The green.
All the different windows.
There is so much stone here.
And grass.
So beautiful each translucent electric blade.
And the noise.
Cheers folding into traffic.
These things.
Things that have already been said many times, leaf, zipper,
sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade."
It's a huge pleasure to be able to introduce to you tonight,
Mr Peter Gizzi.
[APPLAUSE]