Some Values of Landscape and Weather

by Gizzi, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780819566645
• ISBN10: 0819566640
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-08
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

Author Biography

PETER GIZZI is the author of Artificial Heart (1998), Periplum (1992) and numerous chapbooks. He is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and in 1994 he received the prestigious Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Table of Contents

1 FORENSICS
A History of the Lyric	3	(14)
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear	3	(3)
The ethics of dust	6	(2)
In the garden	8	(2)
To his wife far off in a time of war	10	(1)
A history of the lyric	11	(2)
Coda	13	(4)
2 WILDERNESS
Add This to the House	17	(1)
Dumbbell	18	(1)
Stars of Track and Field	19	(1)
Some Values of Landscape and Weather	20	(5)
Overtakelessness	25	(1)
A Man of Letters	26	(2)
The Deep End	28	(2)
Hawthorne	30	(1)
Wind	31	(1)
Imitation of Life: A Memoir	32	(4)
Take the 5:10 to Dreamland	36	(2)
Edgar Poe	38	(1)
Lessons in Darkness	39	(3)
A Film by Charles Baudelaire	42	(2)
Redon	44	(2)
To Be Written in No Other Country	46	(1)
Revival	47	(6)
In Defense of Nothing	53	(4)
3 NERVES
Masters of the Cante Jondo	57	(12)
4 INDUSTRY
Etudes, Evidence, or A Working Definition of the Sun Gear	69	(12)
5 SONG
It Was Raining in Delft	81	(1)
Fin Amor	82	(13)
Château If	82	(2)
An Allegory of Doubt	84	(2)
Something in Blue	86	(1)
Just a Little Green Untitled	87	(2)
Plain Song	89	(3)
Reverse Song	92	(2)
Local Forecast	94	(1)
Beginning with a Phrase by Simone Weil	95	(3)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	98