Caleshu Anthony - In the air: essays on the poetry of Peter Gizzi

IN THE AIR

IN | THE | AIR

Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi

EDITED BY ANTHONY CALESHU

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS | MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2018 Anthony Caleshu

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by April Leidig

Typeset in Garamond by Copperline Book Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Caleshu, Anthony, editor.

Title: In the air: essays on the poetry of Peter Gizzi / edited by Anthony Caleshu.

Description: Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017018704 (print) | LCCN 2017019569 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577481 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819577467 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780819577474 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Gizzi, PeterCriticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PS3557.I94 (ebook) | LCC PS3557.I94 Z67 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018704

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CONTENTS

| ANTHONY CALESHU

| MICHAEL D. SNEDIKER

| CHARLES ALTIERI

| KACPER BARTCZAK

| MARJORIE PERLOFF

| HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL

| SARA CRANGLE

| JEREMY NOEL-TOD

| OLIVIER BROSSARD

| DAVID HERD

| RUTH JENNISON

| LYTTON SMITH

| NERYS WILLIAMS

| PETER MIDDLETON

| PHILIP COLEMAN

| LEE UPTON

| DANIEL KATZ

| DAN BEACHY-QUICK

| ANTHONY CALESHU

| AARON KUNIN

| GRAHAM FOUST

| BEN LERNER

| COLE SWENSEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this collection of essays came about during the Poets and Critics symposium dedicated to the study of Peter Gizzis work that took place on the weekend of May 2830, 2012, at Universits Paris Est Marne-la-Valle, Paris 7 & 8, and Institut Universitaire de France. Im grateful to the organizers, Olivier Brossard and Vincent Broqua, and to the symposium contributors, particularly David Herd and Daniel Katz, who have been generous in conversation and scholarship over these past five years. Additional enablers of my thoughts and writing about Gizzi include Edward Clarke and Philip Coleman; I remain especially grateful to Philip for supporting my residency at Trinity Long Room Hub (Trinity College, Dublin), where my own chapter herein was redrafted. Once the idea for a volume of essays was in the air, the poets and critics approached were enthusiastic, and Im grateful to the contributors who made time to write so meaningfully about Gizzis work. It must be an awkward position to be the subject of a book, and great thanks are due to Peter Gizzi, himself, for his clarification of certain points as well as his willingness to be interviewed several times over these past few years. Thank you to the publishing team at Wesleyan University Press, particularly Suzanna Tamminen, for her invaluable support of contemporary poets and poetry. Thank you to my own institution, University of Plymouth, for research time and funding, enabling various trips in the UK, USA, Ireland, and France, as well as for supporting the hosting of conferences dedicated to contemporary poetry at our home campus: Poetry and Public Language (May 1820, 2012), and Contemporary Poetry: Thinking and Feeling (May 2022, 2016). And finally, an acknowledgment to my family, Ciara, Parker, and Caleb, for always giving me reason to love this ball Im riding on around my loves and my loving (to use the words of Peter Gizzi).

SOURCE ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION | ANTHONY CALESHU

In the Air

The Poetry of Peter Gizzi

In the air Peter Gizzi finds and makes poetry. He closes the first poem in his first collection with an exclamation, Into blouse of // Air go there! (PEROP, 3), and in his second collection writes of speech becoming air (AH, 12). In his third and fourth books, language materializes in the air further, and then further again so that it takes on a determined physicality: The font is still. / A fanfare of stone air (SVLW, 38); the words scroll onto air (OUT, 25). I want to bypass his fifth for a moment and cite from his sixth single collection, Archeophonics, which demonstrates just how grammatically malleable a poetic space the air can provide and be. As the subject of verbs, the air is eaten and climbed (ARCH, 6, 71), consulted and composed (I always consult the air before composing air, ARCH, 67). It is modifier and modified (air conditioner, Crisp air, 12), and subject of homophonic puns (ancestral airs, from A Garden in the Air, 49). The air can transform the hackneyedthese trees are not real they grow out of air (34)and the air, itself, speaks: Fuck, the air said (16). As a trope, the air serves as that poetic domain where Gizzi has continually investigated the matter and manner by which the poetic tradition is extended: I wanted out of the past so I ate the air, / it took me further into air (59). In and through time, air becomes that idiomatic place of our future: Our future is / in the air (43). All the while, the air isnt just external to us, but the air [is] inside me / inside you (A Ghosting Floral, 47). This makes the poem a place of tension between exterior and interior experience.

Which brings me back to the collection I havent cited from yet, Gizzis fifth, Threshold Songs, where to be thrust into the air is to be thrown into the songs we hear and the songs we likewise sing. There is a spike / in the air / a distant thrum / you call singing (TS, 1). Songs exist at that threshold of outer and inner reception and rendering. Like air, song is not a passive term or space for Gizzi. Beyond lyric meditation or utterance, it articulates a euphonically conceived way to actively mediate and modulate the plural voices by which we constitute ourselves and our world. Or as Gizzi puts it in The Outernationale, So many strangers / alive in a larynx (OUT, 93). Songs in the air demarcate a threshold between life and death, self and other, physical reality and imagined construction.

There is a long poetic tradition about sourcing poems or songs through the airfrom the Greeks, to Blake, to that father of modern American poetry, Emerson: For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down.

Emersons air became Whitmansand like Whitmans every atom, the air for Gizzi is both private and public, both a literal and a metaphorical expression of the interior consciousness by which we think and feel, and the exterior world in which we live and breathe. Gizzis is the air of Dickinson, Pound, Stevens, Niedecker, OHara, Ashberyin part, its the same air that Gizzi shares with contemporaries such as Elizabeth Willis, Julianna Spahr, Lisa Robertson, Mark McMorris. Its the air of abstracted subjects and personalityan anecdotal and yet impersonal (and plural) I that makes for a montage of selves and experiences, for poems that are aurally enhanced and tangibly descriptive, poems that transcend context by multiplying meaning within a tradition that appropriates and subverts its (re)written language.