Peter Gizzi | |
|---|---|
 Peter Gizzi, 2020. | |
| Born | 1959 (age 63–64) Pittsfield, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | Brown University, New York University, University at Buffalo |
| Genre | Poetry |
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.
Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan to an Italian American family. [1] 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". [2] 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. [3]
By the late 1980s, he was waiting tables, reading and editing o•blék: a journal of language arts , [3] 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." [3] 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 The 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.
In 1992 Peter Gizzi published his first full-length collection, "Periplum" which won praise from critics. [4] 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. [5]
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". [6]
The collection "The Outernationale" (2007) investigates language, knowledge and experience but combines this with an implied political stance. [7]
"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". [8]
Gizzi's most recent collection, "Archeophonics", continues his investigation of language; the title of the book refers to the excavation of lost sounds analogous to the process of archeology. [4]
In 1994 he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets (selected by John Ashbery [9] ). 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. [10]
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Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
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The Collected Books of Jack Spicer first appeared in 1975, ten years after the death of Jack Spicer. It was "edited & with a commentary by Robin Blaser" and published in Santa Rosa, California by Black Sparrow Press. A primary document of the San Francisco Renaissance, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer has arguably reached the status of a twentieth century "classic" and helped to define an emerging countertradition to the prevailing literary establishment. Since this edition has gone out of print, it has been updated, revised and republished as My Vocabulary Did This To Me. The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, Edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian.
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Andrew Zawacki is an American poet, critic, editor, and translator. He was a 2016 Howard Foundation Fellow in Poetry.
o•blék: a journal of language arts was a small literary magazine founded by Peter Gizzi who co-edited it with Connell McGrath. The magazine published a number of poems often not in the mainstream but recognized for their excellence. The magazine ran from 1987 to 1993.
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David Chaloner was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival, and a prominent British designer.
