<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Dear Friends,<div><br></div><div>Last Friday, the Working Group had a intense conversation with poet/artist/cirtic Marjorie Welish. Soon I will be forwarding the minutes from that session.</div><div><br></div><div>In the meantime, I wanted to remind people that we will be meeting again next Friday, Oct 23, to discuss the work of Peter Gizzi. We have distributed copies of Gizzi's latest book, The Outernationale, and that text will be the focus of our discussion. We will be meeting from 3-5.</div><div><br></div><div>Gizzi is one of the most significant lyric poets of his generation. His work blends together a fierce interest in what might be conceived as an American trajectory of poetry and poetics that is infused with a Continental (particularly French) inflection.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Let me provide Gizzi's official bio:</div><div><p>Peter Gizzi was born in 1959 and grew up in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts. He holds degrees from New York University, Brown
University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books
include <i>The Outernationale</i> (Wesleyan, 2007), <em>Some Values of Landscape and Weather</em> (2003), <em>Artificial Heart</em> (1998), and <em>Periplum</em>
(1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks,
folios, and artist books. His work has been widely anthologized and
translated into numerous languages. </p>
About his collection <i>Artificial Heart,</i>
the critic Marjorie Perloff has said: "In his visionary quest, his raw
emotion, and his New York school spontaneity, Gizzi performs a clinamen
that relates him to O'Hara, Ashbery, and, beyond these poets, to
Rimbaud and Hart Crane.... a master of the <i>mot juste</i> and of sound structure. Most of the book's poems... are as memorable as they are moving and spare."
<p>Gizzi has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation
of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the
Centre International de Poesie Marseille. His honors include the Lavan
Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships
from the Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance
Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. </p><p>His work as an editor includes <em>o•blék: a journal of language arts</em>, <em>The Exact Change Yearbook</em>, and <em>The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of <a href="http://www.poets.org/jspic">Jack Spicer</a></em>.
He has taught at Brown University, and the University of California,
Santa Cruz. Poetry editor for <i>The Nation</i>, he is currently on the faculty of the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.</p><p><br></p><p>--A radio interview with Gizzi is here:</p><p><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/XCP_148_Gizzi_10-14-07.mp3">http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/XCP_148_Gizzi_10-14-07.mp3</a></p><p>--A review of Gizzi's <i>Outernationale</i> can found here:</p><p><a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/palattella.php">http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/palattella.php</a></p><p>--2 very useful interviews with Gizzi are available here:</p><p><a href="http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_gizzi.php">http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_gizzi.php</a></p><p><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/gizzi/gizzi_kunin_interview.html">http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/gizzi/gizzi_kunin_interview.html</a></p><p><br></p><p>--An essay by Gizzi on poetry, avant-garde film, and "the art of assemblage" is here:</p><p><a href="http://www.sienese-shredder.com/3/peter_gizzi-jack_spicer_bruce_conner_and_the_art_of_the_assemblage.html">http://www.sienese-shredder.com/3/peter_gizzi-jack_spicer_bruce_conner_and_the_art_of_the_assemblage.html</a></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Then, Gizzi will be reading Thursday Nov 5 here on campus and joining the WGCP to discuss his work on Friday, Nov. 6 from 3-5.</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Before closing, we'd like to strongly recommend the following event, which should be of particualt interest to members of this list:</span></font></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; ">On Tuesday, October 20, 2009, Piotr Sommer will give a public reading, “Overdoing It and Other Poems,” at 4:30 pm in Room 208 of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, New Haven.<span> </span>Mr. Sommer is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including <i>Things to Translate</i> and the career-spanning collection <i>Continued</i>.<span> </span>His poems, hailed for their spontaneous, colloquial style, often play with ironic “<span class="SpellE">intermeanings</span>,” teasing out language in lyrical observations of everyday life.<span> </span>As a translator, Mr. Sommer has produced editions of D. <span lang="CS">J</span>. <span class="SpellE">Enright</span>, Seamus Heaney, Frank O'Hara, and Charles <span lang="CS">Reznikoff</span> as well as rendering into<span class="GramE">Polish</span> the poetry of John <span lang="CS">Ashbery</span>, John Berryman, John Cage, <span lang="CS">Kenneth</span> Koch, Michael <span lang="CS">Longley</span>, Robert Lowell, Derek Mahon, and James Schuyler.<span> </span>He has also published two books of literary essays and is editor of <span class="SpellE"><i>Literatura</i></span><i> <span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">na</span></span> </i><i><span lang="CS">Świecie</span></i> (Literature in the World), a Warsaw-based <span lang="CS">magazine</span> of <span lang="CS">international</span> writing.</span></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><br></span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">More to come,</span></font></p><p><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;">Richard Deming, Convener </span></font></p><p><br></p></div></body></html>