Peter Gizzi (born 1959 in Alma, Michigan) is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Life
Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan to an Italian American family. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Gizzi has said that he "internalized the hierarchy of music over words as a kid at Catholic mass, where the liturgy was often in Latin".Amanda Petrusich, "Peter Gizzi, a Poet of Sound and Time". The New Yorker, October 17, 2016. After graduating from high school, the poet delayed going to college and took a job in a factory winding resin tubes and in a residential treatment center working with emotionally disturbed adolescents. Working overnight at the treatment center, Gizzi read George Oppen's Collected Poems, along with H.D., Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Federico García Lorca, Baudelaire, Rimbaud "and almost anything published by Burning Deck." Living in New York City, in part to keep in touch with the punk scene, he walked by the St. Mark's book store one day and his eye was caught by a reprinted version of BLAST, with its shocking pink and diagonal title. He picked up a copy and read the manifestos. "I was home in that synthesis — Punk and Poetry had merged and I knew at once I wanted to edit my own journal and so I did," he later wrote. Gizzi, Peter, "Inside / Outside: Poets in the Academy", article in The Modern Review which identifies it as having been delivered when Gizzi was on an "AWP Panel, Chicago, March 2004", Winter 2006, "Volume II / Issue 2", accessed January 28, 2007
By the late 1980s, he was waiting tables, reading and editing o•blék: a journal of language arts, which he founded in 1987 with Connell McGrath.
In 1991, he started editing the lectures of Jack Spicer for publication and went to SUNY Buffalo with support from Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe, "and with the financial support (meager as it was) that working within an institution offered." In 1993, after eight years and 12 issues, he left o•blék, which soon folded.
Gizzi has taught at Brown University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 2001, he has been a professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts Amherst. For several years, he was poetry editor at The Nation. He also is on the contributing editorial board to the literary journal Conjunctions. He is the brother of deceased poet Michael Gizzi.
Poetry In 1992 Peter Gizzi published his first full-length collection, "Periplum" which won praise from critics.Kaspar Bartczak, “The Artifice of Personhood and the Poetics of Plenitude in Peter Gizzi's ‘Archeophonics’”. ‘In The Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi’. This was followed by "Artificial Heart", a collection which enhanced Gizzi's reputation as a lyric poet writing as a modern troubadour in a style which is allusive and oblique.Marjorie Perloff: “Review of ‘Artificial Heart’. Boston Book Review, 5-6 (August 1998): 34-35.
In 2003, "Some Values of Landscape and Weather" was published. The title poem of this collection is "a sustained examination of the relationship between public and private spaces, as well as a complex reflection on war".Nerys Williams "Reading Peter Gizzi's 'Some Values of Landscape and Weather'". ‘In The Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi’ pub. Wesleyan University Press.
The collection "The Outernationale" (2007) investigates language, knowledge and experience but combines this with an implied political stance.Ruth Jennison “The Outernationale: Only Transition! or, The Politics of Unfreedom”. ‘In The Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi’ pub. Wesleyan University Press.
"Threshold Songs" (2011) is a series of poetic elegies which also investigate the role of the lyric poet and show "the voice of the poet contemplating its relation to other voices".David Herd “The Lyrical Voice as Ethical Medium”. ‘In The Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi’ pub. Wesleyan University Press.
Gizzi's collection, "Archeophonics", continued his investigation of language; the title of the book refers to the excavation of lost sounds analogous to the process of archeology. Gizzi's most recent collection, "Fierce Elegy" (2023) provides "ongoing sense of loss coupled with resistance".Harvard Review Online, pub. Houghton Library at Harvard University Critic James O'Connor maintains that in "Fierce Elegy "we find the poet writing at the height of his powers." According to O'Connor, the book’s final poem, 'Consider the Wound,' "is an achievement of singular beauty".
Awards and recognition In 1994 he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets (selected by John AshberyPeter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award ). Gizzi has also held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille. He has received fellowships from The Fund For Poetry, The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (1998), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Gizzi has twice held the position of Poet-in-Residence in the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge. In 2016 Archeophonics was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2024, he won the Poetry Award for Fierce Elegy at the 24th annual Massachusetts Book Awards. The collection won the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize.
Bibliography
Books Fierce Elegy. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2023 Now It's Dark. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2020 Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2020 Archeophonics. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2016 In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2014 Threshold Songs. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2011 The Outernationale. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2007 Periplum and other poems, 1987–92. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishers, 2004 Some Values of Landscape and Weather. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2003 Artificial Heart. Providence: Burning Deck, 1998 Periplum. Penngrove: Avec Books, 1992
Chapbooks and Limited Editions Romanticism. London: Distance No Object, 2023 Ship of State. Kingston: The Brother in Elysium, 2020 Peter Gizzi. Cambridge: Earthbound Poetry Series, 2020 The Afterlife of Paper. Los Angeles: Catalpa, 2019 New Poems. Kingston: The Brother in Elysium, 2017 Field Recordings. Cambridge UK: Equipage Editions, 2016 A Winding Sheet for Summer. Amsterdam NL: Tungsten Press, 2016 Marigold & Cable: A Garland for the New Year. Cambridge UK: Materials, 2016 The Winter Sun Says Fight. Plymouth UK: Periplum Editions, 2016 Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures. Rotterdam, NL: Studio 3005, 2015 Marigold & Cable. Saint-Martin, France: Shelter Press, 2014 In the Air. Los Angeles: Manor House, 2013 Ode: Salute to the New York School 1950-1970. Tucson: Letter Machine, 2012 History Is Made at Night. Cincinnati: Students of Decay, 2011 Pinocchio's Gnosis. Northampton: Song Cave, 2011 In Song & Story. Amsterdam, NL: Tungsten Press, 2010 Homer's Anger. Paris: Collectif Generation, 2009 A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me. Brooklyn, Ugly Ducking, 2006 From a Cinematographer's Letter. London: Tolling Elves. 2004 Revival. New Haven: Phylum Press, 2002 Fin Amor. Oakland: Tougher Disguises, 2002 Chateâu If. Paris: Slacik Editions, 2000 Add This to the House. Cambridge, UK: Equipage, 1999 New Picnic Time. Buffalo: Meow Editions, 1995 Ledger Domain. Providence: Timoleon, 1995 Hours of the Book. Canary Islands, Spain: Zasterle Press, 1994 Music for Films. Providence: Paradigm Press, 1992 Creeley Madrigal. Providence: The Materials Press, 1991
Editing Projects
My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Co-edited with Kevin Killian. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2008 The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1998 Exact Change Yearbook. Boston: Exact Change Publishers / Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1995 o•blēk / a journal of language arts. 12 issues. Co-edited with Connell McGrath. 1987 - 93
Notes
External links Peter Gizzi author page