Peter Gizzi

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Peter Gizzi was born in 1959 and grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is an award-winning American poet. He attended Brown University, New York University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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[edit] Life and career

The cover of BLAST in 1914
The cover of BLAST in 1914

Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he 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.[1]

By the late 1980s, he was waiting tables, reading and editing o•blék: a journal of language arts[1], 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 (meager as it was) that working within an institution offered."[1] 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. He currently (as of 2006) teaches poetry workshops at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is married to poet Elizabeth Willis.

[edit] 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 Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

[edit] Work

His publications include Periplum (Avec, 1992), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck Press, 1998), Fin Amor (Tougher Disguises, 2002), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003) and The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007). He is also the creator of the chapbooks, Hours of the Book (Zasterle, 1994) and Music for Films (Paradigm, 1992). His editing projects have included the celebrated ‘little magazine’ o-blek: a journal of language arts (1987-93), and the international literary anthology the Exact Change Yearbook (1995). He edited The House That Jack Built - the Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), an important edition to Spicer's oeuvre and a companion volume, of sorts, to The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975).

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c [1]Gizzi, Peter, "Inside / Outside: Poets in the Academy", article in The Modern Review which identifies it as having been delivered when Gizzi was on an "AWP Panel, Chicago, March 2004", Winter 2006, "Volume II / Issue 2", accessed January 28, 2007


[edit] External links