Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015)
Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five 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’s poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader’s companion at http://petergizzi.site.weleyan.edu.
Table of Content
FROM PERIPLUM, AND OTHER POEMS
Song of the Interior Begin
Periplum
Blue Peter
Still Life With Automobile
Thirty Sentences for No One
Poem for John Wieners
Despite Your Notices
Psalm
Deus ex Machina
Song of the Den
Periplum VII (A Valentine)
FROM ARTIFICIAL HEART
New Picnic Time
Toy
Another Day on the Pilgrimage
Speck
Will Call
Ledge Domain
Lonely Tylenol
Reed
Caption
Pierced
Fables of Critique
A Textbook of Chivalry
FROM SOME VALUES OF LANDSCAPE AND WEATHER
Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear
The Ethics of Dust
A History of the Lyric
Add This to the House
Some Values of Landscape and Weather
Overtakelessness
Hawthorne
Edgar Poe
Revival
To be Written in no Other Country
In Defense of Nothing
Lessons in Darkness
It was Raining in Delft
Fin Amor
Beginning With a Phrase
From Simone Weil
FROM THE OUTERNATIONALE
A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me
The Quest
Stung
Untitled Amherst Specter
A Telescope Protects its View
That’s Life
Nocturne
Vincent, Homesick for The Land of Pictures
Wintry Mix
Saturday and its Festooned Potential
The Moonlight Defense
Bolshevescent
The Outernationale
FROM THRESHOLD SONGS
The Growing Edge
Lullaby
Hypostasis & New Year
Eye of the Poem
Snow Globe
Analemma
This Trip Around the Sun is Expensive
Basement Song
Pinocchio’s Gnosis
Tiny Blast
Tradition & The Indivisible Talent
Apocrypha
A Note on the Text
Oversong
History is Made at Night
Bardo
Modern Adventures at Sea
Fragment (To the Reader)
About the author
Peter Gizzi is the winner of the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for his book Fierce Elegy. He is author of many collections of poetry, including Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award, Threshold Songs (2011), and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Marjorie Perloff has called him ‘a master of the mot juste and of sound structure;’ Robert Creeley, ‘one of the most exceptional poets of his generation.’ Adrienne Rich has said ‘his disturbing lyricism is like no other;’ and John Ashbery thought him ‘the most exciting new poet to come along in quite a while.’ He lives in Holyoke, MA.
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