Episode 82 Findspot Unknown by Peter Gizzi

 

Peter Gizzi reads ‘Findspot Unknown’ Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/82_Findspot_Unknown_by_Peter_Gizzi.mp3 This poem is from:

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi

Available from:

Fierce Elegy is available from:

The publisher: Penguin UK

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

 

Findspot Unknown by Peter Gizzi

Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin.
Sound carries on water.
My subject is the wind.
To take umbrage at what a tree can do,
watching one single birch
become lightning stunning the sky.
Landscape is a made thing,
to see the mind seeing itself.
To see thought, a wing
in night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
when the power’s on.
Everything disporting.
A furred wand upon nothingness.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

 

Interview transcript

Mark: Peter, where did this poem come from?

Peter: Well, I favour archaeological terms simply because I think they give depth to poetry, and I believe that depth is an important part of this art that it’s been with us forever, from the beginning.

So ‘Findspot Unknown’ is something that you’ll find in a museum. In fact, I found it in the British Museum years back. And you’ll go to an artefact, it’ll say ‘Assyria 800 BC.’ And then you’ll come to the next artefact, and it says, ‘Findspot Unknown.’ And that really got me because it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. That’s an artefact of unknown origin.’ It’s a thing, and it’s a mystery, right? So I began to think, it’s like, ‘Oh, I get it, a poem is an artefact from an unknown origin.’ It’s a mystery, right? But then I wrote the poem, then I was reading it, like, a year later. I was reading it somewhere, and I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m an artefact from an unknown origin, you know.

And the unknown part is really important to me, Mark, because to me, the role of the poet is to remain a mystery in the face of violence. I don’t want to respond in kind to the news. I used to write poems that were more kind of overtly political, but, I began to say, ‘I don’t want to just bang a drum and respond over and over to this heedless noise that comes in.’ And I began to dial in the larger piece. So I am interested in the poem beginning in mystery and ending in mystery. And along the way, it gives features or begins to depict that quality of unknowing to find some other type of meaning rather than the language we use every day to communicate, right? I wanted to communicate something much larger and stranger.

So one last thing about the title poem, or the beginning poem, excuse me, is that every first poem in every one of my collections is the first poem of that collection. And for whatever reason, it creates an enabling fiction, meaning it’s, like, a false engine, but in fact, it’s a real engine that allows me then to imagine an open space that then I can wander into, that I can continue to write into because it has an idea that’s capacious, large enough that I can continue to keep refreshing it.

Mark: I love the fact that it opens, like you say, in mystery, in what we don’t know, and that you’re… I mean, throughout your work, you’re writing into the unknown, into the invisible. Death features very strongly in this collection, obviously being called fierce elegy.

Peter: Sadly, in many collections in the last decade or more.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And, I’m just thinking because some listeners to this show are very familiar with contemporary poetry, others are quite new to it. And, if somebody is new to contemporary poetry and they come to this and they’re feeling a little disoriented or maybe even intimidated and trying to find their bearings, could you say anything to them about how to find their way into it and not feel bad?

Peter: Certainly. So when I was young and starting off and the poetry captured my imagination, I always read things that were just ahead of me. Let’s say Emily Dickinson. It’ll always be just ahead of us. And I found that kind of useful because what I realise is, when someone’s reading a poem or hearing a poem, you get what you get. There’s no right, wrong answer ever, you receive what you receive, whatever lights you up at certain moments that make you think, then you’ve got it.

And then, like everything, it needs to be reread. It needs to be revisited because it does create a mystery that’s just ahead of what I might know. And that’s actually a really lovely thing because what that means is the poem is always present. It’s always alive. It’s always signalling to us something new. And the more that I’d read a poem, let’s say by John Ashbery the a great American poet, let’s just… or Emily Dickinson, basically the advanced guard in American poetry, I keep finding things. And I think it’s okay.

And ‘intimidating,’ I don’t accept as a concept. People need to let that go! As though a poem has a kind of lesson it needs to… you know, like, a mathematical equation. That’s never the case. And when it’s taught that way or imagined that way, it instantly shuts it down for someone.

Poetry is about not knowing and accepting the fact that you don’t know and that you don’t get it all at once. And that’s a beautiful thing because if it’s any good, you can keep returning to it. And so poems that I don’t favour that are very popular in culture are the ones where you know where you are at every moment because what happens is the content is delivered, and finally, the poem is disposable. And sadly, that’s true of most popular poetry.

And I find it a real disservice to this profound art that is the human record to make the bar so low for someone to discover their interiority. I just find it… It just makes me so angry. It’s such a disservice to all the women and men for centuries who have worked at this, right? Everybody’s got ideas, everybody’s got feelings, everybody’s got a story to tell, finally, that has absolutely nothing to do with poetry.

Mark: Amen. I think, you know, you mentioned the news. We’re living in a world where there are so many strident and fixed and opposing opinions, where there’s so much pressure to have a position and to feel like you’re on top of things and so many people offering hot takes and very strong viewpoints. To me, I always find poetry a wonderful antidote to all of that because life is a condition of unknowing, of mystery, of being in uncertainties. You know, Keats talked about negative capability, that we don’t know –

Peter: A favourite term of mine. A major, major, term of mine. And I like what you’re saying, Mark. You’re absolutely on it.

So, why elegy then? This leads me into that unknowing, that mystery piece, okay? So elegy, to me… Or particularly, let’s start with this. In the 21st century, in this totally degraded digital age of this culture that’s overtaking us, right, we’re outmatched, it’s not really helpful, because what happens is there is constant noise coming in over the barricades into your soul. And we live in this time of these massive, distorting, accelerated, interlocking crises with zero resolution. Just look at the news each day that’s coming now out of America. It is just a nightmare. I’m outmatched.

So, elegy then, interestingly enough, becomes a very reasonable tool to understand objective reality. And what I mean by that is we can all agree about periodicity. We can all agree that nothing is here forever. We’re just passing through. That we’ve been given this incredible miracle to be on this amazing planet circling around a star in a galaxy of 400 billion stars in a universe that we can just see, our viewable universe, that has something like, I don’t know, three trillion galaxies.

So what am I trying to say? Nothing is here forever. We will lose people, and we too will go. And death does not really frighten me anymore because I’ve helped so many people cross over. What I realise it is, it’s a part of life, not the opposite of life. And we shouldn’t be afraid, right? It’s what it is to be.

But more importantly, we can agree that nothing is here forever. All matter is in a state of constant change. And that’s not just me, or my family, or my loved ones, it’s animal kingdoms, it’s ecosystems, it’s languages, it’s civilisation. Everything’s just passing through, right? And the whole human record from the beginning is not even as long as the life of a gnat or a mosquito in the face of the sun. We are basically a mirage. And to accept that condition of being.

Sure, it’s a mystery and it’s not knowing, but it gives us the opportunity to accept the majesty of being, the gift of consciousness, the gift of being able to be here just for a moment. So it should teach us to be good to one another, to embrace one another, to love in the face of that condition that will be gone. And so that’s why I think the elegy is a reasonable way. We can all agree. The news, nobody can agree, right? But this fact is true. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So when I hear you read this poem, what I hear is the voice of a really human voice trying to come to terms with this or speaking his own truth about how this is. There’s also an element of the dramatic monologue.

Peter: Yes.

Mark: I mean, I’m curious about, as a poet, how do you find your way into writing a poem like this? Does it start coming to you? Do you have to go out and look for it?

Peter: Well, I mean, this came to me from the world, and I think the majority of what I write comes from the world. And the beautiful thing is that I get to put these various things for my sensory data and emotional interiority. I get to bring them together in such a way as to create a very unique, way to be in a moment in the world.

And so, it does come to me, Mark, because for me, language is bigger than me. It’s older than me. It doesn’t live in me. We all live in it. It basically rents us. And when I’m writing, I’m an open vessel. I’m an open vessel. So what I mean is when I say ‘fierce’ in this instance, for me, ferocity can be reimagined as an ultimate radical holding open to dilate, right, to be vulnerable and accept that as a beautiful strength because I’m not going to be here forever. I’ve seen my entire family pass through, right? So I’ve accepted that hard fact, but I’ve also seen it as a gift to have me open and basically see. It gives me eyes. Grief gives me eyes. And so in the end, I’ve transformed my sorrow into a joy.

And so when I write, it comes to me. And I use the pronoun ‘I’. I favour it at times. And what I realise is ‘Peter Gizzi’ is just a tiny piece of that pronoun, right? We all share it. It doesn’t even belong to me. It belongs to all of us. And what that means is that pronoun is wound and sprung with so much historical data, with so many affiliated voices. And I’m interested in bringing in that striation, that depth, that layered quality. And that’s what I mean by archaeology, which I mentioned earlier.

Mark: So the ‘I’ can be the reader as much as the poet?

Peter: Absolutely. And Arthur Rimbaud, the great child poet of the 19th century in France, who stopped writing at 19, who’s forever younger than us, forever, you know, he was a child genius, an enfant terrible, but a beautiful letter to the seer that he writes to one of his teachers. He says, ‘The poet must be a seer,’ but then he says, ‘I is an other. I is an other. It’s not me,’ right? I mean, selfhood is random, you know. It’s random to become a self in some ways, you know. And in other ways it’s indelible because we love.

Mark: And I love what you say that language rents us. It reminds me of Auden’s comment. He said, poets should be humble because our raw material is public property.

Peter: That’s lovely. He’s absolutely correct in that, right? Also, the Beat fiction writer, William Burroughs, said, ‘Language is a virus from outer space.’ But I’m saying…

Mark: It probably was for him!

Peter: …if you’re really into this thing from the beginning, right… When I started out, it was an act of will, you know. But as you go along, what this teaches you is how to listen. And as you go along, you learn how to listen. And that’s an amazing gift of a life, right? So that’s what I’ve learnt to do, is to witness and receive, right? But I don’t write autobiographical poems. I don’t name-check my dead because I realise my story is everyone’s story.

And the thing is, my journey, Mark, in poems and in life, and it’s, you know, not easily won, it’s taken a life, is that I want to be the right size. I don’t want to be bigger or smaller than anyone or anything. I just want to be tuned. I want to be the right size.

Mark: When you talk about being tuned, I mean, one of the things I really like about your work is your ability to have so many different registers within a single poem. I mean, we’ve got ‘the codes, / a litany of survival. / Thus spoke the silvered asphodel / next to the factory ruin.’ And then a few lines later you’ve got the humour of ‘to take umbrage at what a tree can do.’ I assume there’s a pun there on shadow. And then we get very kind of…

Peter: We get ‘thou’.

Mark: We get ‘thou’, right!

Peter: That’s massive.

Mark: And then after thou, we’ve got very American demotic. ‘It was kinda real and kinda not./ Can’t see it today.’ Some poets would have a filter, and they’d say, ‘Well, this language needs to go in this poem, and this one can go in this poem.’ but you evidently, you don’t tidy things up.

Peter: I don’t know what my problem is. It’s just how it is for me because… You know, I was thinking about this. People have been asking me this recently, I mean, and throughout my life. But I’m not saying this is a… I’m not, like, writing this in stone about how I work, but you know what I’m beginning to imagine, a nice way to phrase it, is that I am interested in the relocation of the high lyric voice. I’m interested in relocating it into everyday demotic speech. And yet, I don’t want to lose that incredible depth that I am working in the most profound, gifted art of the human record, which is sacred to me. And I don’t want to let any of that go either. It’s important to me to always understand that I am within this medium, which, in fact, Mark, is deathless. And I’m just a piece of this massive song. And what an incredible privilege that is.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, through this, throughout the whole collection and obviously the previous volumes of your work, I don’t think anyone could be in any doubt of the seriousness of intent and the ambition and the sensitivity and the… I don’t know, there’s that indefinable lyric quality that shines through. And yet I love the fact that it can coexist. It can have – ‘It was kinda real and kinda not. / Can’t see it today.’ – that this actually is part of daily life and daily speech as well.

Peter: Poetry is part of daily life, you know. To me, Mark, poetry is the art of being closer. It’s an intimate art. It’s a human art, right? And to me, like, reading a poem that I didn’t quite get at 17 that I keep reading my whole life and I get more and more from it, it’s like poetry is like friendship. It happens one poem at a time over a life. Nobody gets it all at once. I certainly haven’t.

And I’m still learning from this art. I haven’t written in over a year, by the way, or even more. And sadly, that’s my practice. It’s embarrassing to say, but I really don’t know how to write a poem anymore. I’m totally lost. I’ve forgotten. And, it’s embarrassing, right? Because if I were a violin player, I’d just pick it up and play. Sadly, my practice is ungainly and perhaps untutored and a little homespun. But what that means to me is, what I’ve learnt to accept that is when I get that poem that begins a book, I’m starting all over again from the beginning. So what it means is, I guess, the benefit of it, it keeps me green. It keeps me constantly beginning. I’ve learnt to think that’s an okay place to be.

Mark: Yeah. I took a class with Don Paterson once, and he said he spends most of his time not writing poetry.

Peter: Yeah, that’s true.

Mark: And it’s a weird thing about poetry. That’s the thing you can be known for and yet spend… And he said, the other thing is, the better you get at… once you get an idea at knowing how to follow through and capture that, the less time it takes.

Peter: Perhaps, yeah.

Mark: But what I think I’m hearing from both of you as important is to be alive to that moment, not to try and churn it out and fake it at other times but to be absolutely honest.

Peter: Because you know when you fake it, you know when you fake it. I mean, the poetry I read, why do I read it? There’s a wager there. There’s an honesty, there’s a striving, there’s a reaching, and… Can I continue on this thought?

Mark: Yeah, please do. Yeah.

Peter: Okay. So what I’ve come to learn is that all the poets that I love, the action for them is just ahead of them. That’s right. They’re just ahead of period style, they’re just ahead of what they can manage, they’re ahead of authorial intention. It’s just ahead of them. They’re reaching, right? They want surprise, they’re discovering something. So in fact, what I’ve come to realise is tradition’s not behind me shoring me up, it’s ahead of me. Tradition is ahead of us. That’s where it lives, that’s where the action is. It’s always just ahead of us. And if I subscribe in this model, which I’ve learnt to do, it means that, for me, writing is just an occasion to rise to.

Mark: I like that. I mean, we’ve got T. S. Eliot’s famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ He liked to say that when a new poet comes along, they reconfigure all the poets of the past. But you’re even going further than that. You’re saying those poets from the past are actually ahead of us.

Peter: Always.

Mark: And that we should be looking ahead.

Peter: And that’s what’s beautiful.

Mark: Right? And trying to follow. That’s a lovely way of looking at it.

Peter: You know, I have a poem in Threshold Songs that’s called ‘Tradition & the Indivisible Talent.’ Yeah, it’s riffing off of… I mean, Eliot is someone you encounter when you’re young, correct? And in the beginning, you’re in high school, they always give you ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ And as a 17-year-old, you’re like, ‘This is weird. I’m trying to tough this out.’ You know, now I read it, I’m like, ‘I don’t really like this poem anymore. It’s okay. It’s a period piece.’

What I really love of Eliot is the Four Quartets. Now there he came to something so magnificent. You know why? He let go. It was no longer ‘T. S. Eliot’. He let go. When he’s young and making that poem, he’s aware of what he’s doing. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an act of will. But where he went is transcendence. It spoke through him. He took anonymous pastoral verse, and he kept it anonymous. He kept it transcended. Now that’s where that gentleman found his art. And I speak as a practitioner of 40-plus years. I do know what I’m speaking about. Now, people can argue with me, I know I’m right.

Mark: Amen to that. No argument here. Four Quartets is one of the cornerstones, but one of those you keep coming back to, as you say.

Peter: Oh my God, yeah.

Mark: And okay. So focusing a little bit more on the formal choices you’ve made here. You’ve got these very short lines, and that’s quite characteristic of several poems in the collection. Could you say something about that choice? Was that there from the beginning? Did that evolve as you were draughting it?

Peter: Well, it’s interesting. That’s the only question I ever get asked in England. Now, America, they never ask that question. Here, all the time. Okay. So what I favour about that particular line, A, it’s my instrument, it’s how it comes to me, it comes to me in lines. Everybody wants me to write a memoir. If I told you my life, you’d be like, ‘Wow, you should really write a memoir.’ It’s not my art. And thought comes to me in pieces, in fragments, right? It comes to me with the constituent parts of the world of seeing and feeling, and then I begin to put them into a rhythm, in a sequence that’s bigger than what I want. It’s bigger than me. Poetry is bigger than me.

And I love that, that it’s deathless. And somehow, I found my way into this magnificent achievement of the human record. What a gift, what a privilege. You know, it’s great about the prize. I’m very happy, deeply surprised, but it’s kind of, like, a happy accident. It’s not why I do this, right? I do it for this other way of being in the world. It’s such a privilege to be a poet.

Let’s go back. You want me to stay talking about form? Okay. So what happens with a shorter line, right, is that you can take a long thought, a long idea, and by breaking it in this way, it creates momentum. It creates rhythm. It becomes percussive. It becomes physical, and through that physicality, becomes human presence, becomes a body. And so I like that it becomes… it keeps turning, it’s more curvy, it’s more like how consciousness exists in our mind, right, as opposed to this perfect soliloquy. Again, I just combed it all out for you. And then what am I? I’m bored out of my mind. That’s not what I’m interested in. But yeah, I favour that line.

Now, why is it a British question and not an American question? Very simply. This is a lesson for your listeners here as a pedagogical moment from an old poet. Okay. So 1922 is the tsunami of modernism with The Wasteland, tsunami, right? But there’s a doctor in his early thirties practising medicine as a paediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey. And that happens to be the great William Carlos Williams, one of the cornerstones of modernity, master. He had a problem with The Wasteland. He couldn’t stand Eliot, right? But that’s a good thing because that’s called the unavoidable rivalry of contemporaries. And that’s a really useful tool because if somebody writes something that puts you on notice, that’s a good thing. Why? The whole art goes up.

When people write low-bar autobiographical, poor-me bullshit, then nobody’s learning anything. It’s just all about me, right? That’s not what poetry is. That’s what I’m saying, when it’s finally not about your story. Okay. All right. That’s another thing.

But Williams reads it, has a problem with it, and then he writes a book called Spring and All, which comes out in 1923. It’s published in 300 copies, printed in Dijon, France, by Robert McAlpin for Contact Editions. Many of them were destroyed at the border. It’s a paperback book from 1923. And the line that all American poetry lives on is not The Wasteland. It’s Spring and All. When he breaks into that idiomatic American line, which is short and staccato, it’s like a miracle.

You know what they do in history? ‘On this day in history…’ Well, on this day in history, William Carlos Williams, a paediatrician in his third floor, invented what would become contemporary poetry. So I call 1923 the Quiet Revolution of Poetry, as opposed to the tsunami. Does this make any sense?

Mark: Thank you. I love that.

Peter: Was that a clear moment for your listeners?

Mark: Yes, yes. It will be. And I’m sure the American listeners will be more familiar than the British ones, but it’s really… you’re absolutely right because with Williams, what you get is much closer to actual speech.

Peter: And yet what he’s writing about is just out there. Yeah. Yeah. And the other guy I love in ‘23 is Wallace Stevens with Harmonium, another cornerstone. It’s interesting. Those two stateside modernists, a doctor and a lawyer, had everything to do with the shaping of American poetry. It’s interesting. But the gateway drug for me, I’m just going to admit, was Ezra Pound. That was my gateway drug into poetry.

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m just going to say very clearly, he can write. Everyone agrees. Everyone that likes him or not, everyone agrees. And that includes T.S. Eliot. What he writes about Pound is beautiful. He gets it. He sees the achievement despite his insanity, you know. And his unfortunate political views as he got older, that, to me, if you actually read the transcripts or read his time in St. Elizabeth’s, the madhouse they put him into, he is completely paranoid schizophrenic. He’s out of his mind, right? He really is insane. People have Hitler complexes, they have Napoleon complexes, they have Christ complexes. You know, it manifested him in an ugly way, but you know, we live in this age of neurodivergence. We have so much room for PTSD. How about the First and Second World War broke him? How about the fact that he lost his mind?

Plus, his project is so mad, it’s so massive, nobody could contain it. But we need to have a little sympathy for people losing it, right, as opposed to judging them, you know, in this moment of, like, ‘I don’t want to read that person because I didn’t like their politics.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Don’t read them, don’t like their politics. And now you’re just going to let go a whole era and not know about it,’ because we don’t know what the cobbler or the baker or the butcher thought in their era. We know about these people because they were public.

Mark: Well, we would be letting go…

Peter: Sorry, I’ve left the building here. Yeah, go ahead.

Mark: No, we’d be letting go of a lot of poets if we had to put them through that filter.

Peter: And then the real question I tell my students is, what are they going to say about us, Mark? We know that 49% of the planet lives on less than $5 a day. That’s, like, 3.4 billion people. I have shelter, I have food, I have heat, I have mobility, right? That’s not true for the majority of the world. What the hell am I doing about it? I said, ‘What are you doing about it?’ How about nothing? We are all on the wrong side of history, just saying.

I just want to say, Mark, I’m very delighted that you have this podcast and you take the time to really consider what a poem and what poetry can be in our lives. You know, that’s a great service that you’re doing for all of us. And what I would say to your listeners is don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Step into the poem and find a new world. Find a new world in yourself and in others. It’s an amazing tool for opening. So when I say ‘fierce elegy,’ I like to say that the elegy is a mode that can take a broken heart in a fierce world and turn it into a fierce heart in a broken world.

Mark: Thank you, Peter, for sharing your poetry, your world and your passion with us today.

Peter: Thank you for having me.

Mark: It’s been a real eye-opener listening to you just as it is reading the book, Fierce Elegy. So let’s listen again to the poem you read for us today, ‘Findspot Unknown.’

 

Findspot Unknown by Peter Gizzi

Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin.
Sound carries on water.
My subject is the wind.
To take umbrage at what a tree can do,
watching one single birch
become lightning stunning the sky.
Landscape is a made thing,
to see the mind seeing itself.
To see thought, a wing
in night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
when the power’s on.
Everything disporting.
A furred wand upon nothingness.

I get it, it was good to leave the world,
to find myself in thou.
There’s a lot to be said
for seeing in the dark,
and more to the light
when there’s nothing to see.
If I write about the moon,
it’s because it’s there.
I am landlocked, surrounded
by rivers and lakes, pills and leaves.
I saw a better life, it was far off ,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff .
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast-like shadow in the glass.
If I brought back every feeling I had
where would I put them,
what could they mean
to this world on the floor?

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of night.
Like when I found you
in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people
and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

 

Fierce Elegy

‘Findspot Unknown’ is from Fierce Elegy, published by Penguin UK.

Available from:

Fierce Elegy is available from:

The publisher: Penguin UK

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

 

Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023) Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a Finalist for the National Book Award; all published in the United States by Wesleyan. In 2024 Penguin UK published an edition of Fierce Elegy which was awarded The T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. He is the series editor of the four volume of The Collected Works of Jack Spicer. He teaches Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

 

Photo © Carol Lollis 2025

 

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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