Peter Gizzi Book order

Fourteen Jack Spicer poems connected with the notion of music. The chapbook was designed and printed by Ron and Graham Macintosh in San Francisco from a typescript made available by Peter Howard.

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reckons with the transformative power of elegy, through poems of lament and love In March 2021, Peter Gizzi was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease. This book is what followed: composed slowly and painstakingly, though for Gizzi with unprecedented speed; written with an eye as much to his own impending mortality as to a decade of losses of friends and family, yet suffused, beautifully, with music and light. The book's broad subject is elegy, which Gizzi calls 'a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.' Here, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. And then, as we read, it is as if we have left our bodies, are looking down on them from above, and find - as Rae Armantrout has put it in an appreciation of this book - that 'everything is fine, better than fine.' In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament, but also - as it has been for centuries - a work of openness, and a work of love. 'Gizzi's best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for... He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen' The New Yorker

Jack Spicer (1925-1965) ist die mysteriöse Größe der amerikanischen Poesie. "Jack Spicer", schreibt Stefan Ripplinger im Nachwort zu seinem Buch mit Spicers serial poems, die er hier im Original und seiner Übersetzung präsentiert, "schrieb keine Gedichte, er hielt Séancen ab. Verse werden Verkündigungen, Repräsentationen Vergegenwärtigungen von Abwesendem, Herabrufen von Fremdem, Vergänglichem. Bürgerliche Dichtung dagegen spricht gewöhnlich aus der Intimität eines unergründlichen Ich. Ein solches Ich zu besitzen, bestritt Spicer vehement, kein Autor sei er, keine Autorität, sondern bloß ein Behälter, ein Auffänger, ein Medium, Diener höherer, abscheulicher Mächte. Geboren werde einer in seinen Gebeten, in seinen Anrufungen, in der Sprache, aber immer nur als Phantom. Seine Gedichte seien ihm von Gespenstern oder - damit es nicht nach Spökenkiekerei klingt - Marsmännchen 'diktiert' worden. Er glaube an ein 'Jenseits', an ein Jenseits seiner selbst. Seine Verse sind Irrläufer aus den Steppen von Gedächtnis, Gesellschaft und Sprache."

"Like all of Spicer's best work, After Lorca is "an argument between the dead and the living." He was haunted by Jean Cocteau's image of Orpheus as a poet taking dictation from the beyond through radio broadcasts only he could hear-he liked to say his own messages might be coming from Martians. But as he wrote in his 1965 book Language, "The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios/ don't develop scar tissue.""-- Provided by publisher

Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American masterBe Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display.

Exploring themes of grief, beauty, and the interplay between poetry and death, this collection of poems delves into the complexities of human emotion. The work is noted for its tonal precision, revealing fresh sensations and meanings through the poet's careful attention. It serves as a poignant reflection on sadness and light, continuing the profound exploration initiated in the author's previous acclaimed collection.

This New and Selected introduces one of America's most significant contemporary poets to a European audience.

Soulful and intricate lyrics make this Gizzi's strongest book to date

The lifework of a preeminent New York School poet

A new lyricism for the twenty-first century Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015) Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader's companion at http://petergizzi.site.weleyan.edu.