Search results for ""Author Peter Gizzi""

SOME JOY FOR MORNING Now the connection with spring has dissolved. Now that hysteria is blooming. Says every day I want to fly my kite. Says what's a grammar when you is no longer you. My world is hydrogen burning in space and in the fullness of etc. I have read the news and learned nothing. I try to understand the whooshing overhead. But for a little light now. I didn't realize the tree was weeping. How was I to know I am not alone. Wild light. The poems in this brilliant follow-up to the National Book Award finalist Archeophonics, are concerned with grieving, with poetry and death, with beauty and sadness, with light. As Ben Lerner has written, "Gizzi's poetry is an example of how a poet's total tonal attention can disclose new orders of sensation and meaning. His beautiful lines are full of deft archival allusion." With litany, elegy, and prose, Gizzi continues his pursuit toward a lyric of reality. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom.

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The powerful new collection from legendary American poet Peter Gizzi, reckoning with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and loveI am awestruck, dumbfounded a masterwork' Ocean Vuong''Transcendent ... He identifies the thing we''re all searching for'' The New YorkerIn Fierce Elegy, Peter Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.

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Gathered from over thirty 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 enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. Sky Burial is an immensely valuable introduction to his work.

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The poetry and drawings of Robert Seydel’s imagined persona S., another persona invented by artist and writer Robert Seydel, was a recluse who kept a great library which he suddenly abandoned along with a manuscript of poems and a slim stack of drawings. These poems--hypnotic, distilled, obsessive and playful--are written by Seydel as S., whom he devises as a naïf, suffering bouts of madness and apophenia. Seydel described S. in his notebooks as "a small ghost who lived alone in an apartment in a house in Amherst, on a gray street and around the corner from Emily Dickinson's manse on Main Street. He wrote prolifically--these small songs & in a journal & drew as well, small strange drawings of heads like hillocks that stare out from the small valleys of the Holyoke." Siglio and Ugly Duckling Presse have collaborated to publish the complete cycle of poems along with a full-color 32-page booklet entitled "Maybe S." that reproduces the drawings made by S. as well as handwritten excerpts from Seydel's notebooks that reveal the creation and revisions of this persona and the mysterious, permeable universe to which he belongs.

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Clark Coolidge’s book-length meditation on a crystal—long considered a masterpiece of American avant-garde poetry—returns in a new edition.“No other poet ever has so exquisitely, and sometimes also turbulently, written sheer sonic wonder into poetry.”—Lyn Hejinian, author of My Life and My Life in the NinetiesIn the summer of 1982, Clark Coolidge received an unexpected gift of a crystal; small, clear, entirely unexceptional, the crystal nonetheless provoked the poet into writing what has long been considered his masterpiece, The Crystal Text (1986). A durational poem composed over the course of 10 months, in daybook-like entries of varying length, The Crystal Text is multifaceted and elusive, constantly interrogating itself. Is it a meditation on its titular object like Keats’s “Urn” or a radical investigation of the limits of language as a signifying system? Is the poet channeling the crystal to access its message or is the crystal channeling the poet, drawing language from him to fill its colorless emptiness? Is it dictation or improvisation? Is the poem a record of its own crystalline growth or does it capture the process of consciousness itself? The Crystal Text refuses to resolve the questions it raises but rather inhabits its various possibilities simultaneously, resulting in one of the major works of late 20th century American avant-garde poetry. This new edition includes a preface by poet and scholar Peter Gizzi and an afterword in which Coolidge discusses the text with poet Jason Morris and City Lights editor Garrett Caples. Associated with the New York School and subsequently inspiring the Language Poets, Coolidge remains one of the most singular and original American poets of our time.

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One of the most notable members of the New York School—and its best-known woman—Barbara Guest began writing poetry in the 1950s in company that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest’s poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest’s remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing—seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

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