Peter Gizzi


Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Life

Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan to an Italian American family. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. 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.
By the late 1980s, he was waiting tables, reading and editing o•blék: a journal of language arts, 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 that working within an institution offered." 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.

Poetry

In 1992 Peter Gizzi published his first full-length collection, "Periplum" which won praise from critics. 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.
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".
The collection "The Outernationale" investigates language, knowledge and experience but combines this with an implied political stance.
"Threshold Songs" 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".
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.

Awards and recognition

In 1994 he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. Gizzi has also 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. He has received fellowships from the Howard Foundation, The Grants to Artists award, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In the spring of 2011, Gizzi 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.

Books

Archeophonics
In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011
Threshold Songs
The Outernationale
Some Values of Landscape and Weather
Artificial Heart