[Wgcp-whc] Peter Gizzi discussion--Oct 23

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,

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.

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.

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.


Let me provide Gizzi's official bio:
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 The  
Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather  
(2003), Artificial Heart (1998), and Periplum (1992). He has also  
published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books.  
His work has been widely anthologized and translated into numerous  
languages.

About his collection Artificial Heart, 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 mot juste and of sound structure. Most of  
the book's poems... are as memorable as they are moving and spare."
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.

His work as an editor includes o•blék: a journal of language arts,  
The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The  
Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He has taught at Brown University,  
and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Poetry editor for The  
Nation, he is currently on the faculty of the University of  
Massachusetts at Amherst.



--A radio interview with Gizzi is here:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/XCP_148_Gizzi_10-14-07.mp3

--A review of Gizzi's Outernationale can found here:

http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/palattella.php

--2 very useful interviews with Gizzi are available here:

http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_gizzi.php

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/gizzi/gizzi_kunin_interview.html



--An essay by Gizzi on poetry, avant-garde film, and "the art of  
assemblage" is here:

http://www.sienese-shredder.com/3/peter_gizzi-jack_spicer_bruce_conner_and_the_art_of_the_assemblage.html



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.





Before closing, we'd like to strongly recommend the following event,  
which should be of particualt interest to members of this list:

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.  Mr. Sommer is  
the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Things to Translate  
and the career-spanning collection Continued.  His poems, hailed for  
their spontaneous, colloquial style, often play with ironic  
“intermeanings,” teasing out language in lyrical observations of  
everyday life.  As a translator, Mr. Sommer has produced editions of  
D. J. Enright, Seamus Heaney, Frank O'Hara, and Charles Reznikoff as  
well as rendering intoPolish the poetry of John Ashbery, John  
Berryman, John Cage, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Robert Lowell,  
Derek Mahon, and James Schuyler.  He has also published two books of  
literary essays and is editor of Literatura na Świecie (Literature in  
the World), a Warsaw-based magazine of international writing.





More to come,

Richard Deming, Convener


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