Threshold Songs

by Peter Gizzi

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music of speaking and being spoken. Check for the online reader's companion at

Genres: Poetry

105 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2011

About the author

Educated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, poet Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007), and Artificial Heart (1998).

Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”

(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)

Reviews

[H]

Everyone told me how good this was and yet I still feel I was ill prepared. Stunning.

[John Allen]

Peter Gizzi is one of the most talented poets of our generation as he proves with this sparse, phenomenal collection, "Threshold Songs".

Gizzi's style is dizzying in the same way that a painting beginning to drool is dizzying--his phantom like dissection table of poems, really in no one fixed form, is like reading a chat between a man and Kant's "The Thing In Itself". Example, and my personal favorite:

"A GHOST CARD FOR ROBERT"

What do you see when you see a dress sounding in deep indigo, a head made of text, a paper halo torn about the head.

What do you see when you see the shape of a hare and a galaxy, a river and some rushes, when you see the outline of the hare and its positive adrift.

What do you see when you read left to right, a cartoon boy on a cartoon lawn, arms outstretched, when you see the word SUN in block capitals over there, a shaft of whiteout above the hare leaping into an unked heart into a ghost boy into a green ray into space.

You'll see the read and blue shift, you'll see orbiting patterns, and now you see a woman buried in sepia with child."

This is verbal wizardry at it's highest, recalling Wallace Stevens at his most obscure and most brilliant, and Hart Crane at his best. One could too easily categorize this as "conceptual poetry"--I think that pigeonholes what Gizzi has accomplished here. It is a manifesto of sensory deprivation and acclimation, a waterboarding of complacency, a pyrotechnic show of prosody--all that and more. Absolutely recommended to any lover of poetry.

[giuseppe manley]

quite pleased, although I only grabbed a copy on a random whim. I have a copy of my vocabulary did this to me but haven't ever really read gizzi's work other than "gray sails" in perloff's "poetry on the brink." "gray sails" is certainly a highlight, alongside "a note on the text," "apocrypha," "tradition & the indivisible talent," and "true discourse on power."

I like the voice and aesthetic that gizzi cultivates throughout the book, am very fond of it, though I find it missing a certain energy at times. it isn't a callow voice, but one tempered and slowed in some ways by its temperance where it might otherwise dance lightly. think sherilyn fenn swinging her hips in twin peaks, voices whispering in the dark like the beckett epigraph (my guess was ill seen, ill said, but apparently it's company; fitting). naturally, perloff's claim is that this is due to it being "poetry on the brink."

there are a lot of things going on in the book, and most of them interesting. "pinnochio's gnosis" is probably the closest i've ever seen someone come to something that wouldn't appear too out of place in the tennis court oath, which is basically commendable, but I'd say I enjoyed it a bit more.

[Gordon Hilgers]

Drawing from past traditions of minimalism and Language Poetry, Gizzi takes the unfamiliar to open readers to new ways of looking at the world. In that nonfailing light, Gizzi takes us to the threshold, the edge, the opening into a world only he can provide us. The difference between Gizzi and his poetry is a line he deliberately obscures, and the crispness of his imagery fuses with natural qualities so completely that we see the work of genius in process. Process, as well, is an important word to remember while reading this poet's work, mainly because his poems refrain from solid reality into a sort of processional quality that advents the sacred. I highly recommend this book to poets who are looking for something beyond the quotidian imagery many poets continue to utilize.

[D]

Abstract, beautifully lyrical reflections on the wonderment in the everyday and on the borders we cross over: life to death, the understood to the unknown. Gizzi poses questions with answers that can often only be siphoned through experience. He asks readers to step back and observe the world surrounding them, capturing specific moments too easily overlooked. These *are* songs-songs of amazement and of appreciation, songs of despair and discontent seasoned with humor that surprised me and made me laugh right out loud. There's a certain alchemy coursing it's way through these poems. I am glad I purchased this book because I am sure I will return to it often. I already have.

[Michael]

from Threshold Songs by Peter Gizzi

A Note on the Text


The good poets defy things
with their heart

This is how a fragment
enters the people

Don't say beauty say the beautiful
say the people

Say it is through chants that writing
entered the people

Their imagery and love of nature,
englutted flowers

This place of fleshlessness
Here is my song

the only recourse of sun
Even its smallest syllables

can be sown into the mouth
It is on the tongue the sun abides

Two syllables fastened
to each end

To stretch the vocal pattern
Its linenlike thread

[Laura]

Hey shadow world when a thing comes back
comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself
what then
what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses
what fortune what fate
and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky
by water and wind shaken
I am born in silvered dark

Hypostasis & New Year

[Momo]

Sometimes these poems leave me suspended or baffled, not always able to follow the leaps leapt or to find grounding in the spaces opened between words, lines, and thoughts, but I enjoy Peter Gizzi's poems very much nonetheless. I admire this mind working, puzzling, figuring out, or simply being certain in its uncertainty. And the closing poem, "Modern Adventures at Sea," knocks me out.

[Husayn]

buy this book. Obsessed with negative space in a brilliant way

[Alana]

4,5

[Rebecca Valley]

These poems surprised me with glints of absolute glaring truth. They made me cry. So many of the poems are beautiful in their entirety. A favorite collection of mine.

[Max Urai]

I didn't dislike it but I could make head nor tails of this book

[cytrynawksylitolu]

demokracja to darwinizm i trzeba to zrozumieć, klasa!

[justin]

hala di ko gets...

[Adam Sarlan]

Gizzi touches me with his exploration of the string that joy and grief are constantly tethered too. Gizzi talks about the inevitability of death, but also remembering the happy moments of our loved ones when they face death. Throughout the book, Gizzi expresses many moments and instances of joy he’s felt with one he’s lost, but poses a question that remains unanswered by many: how do we learn to live without our loved ones, and does life ever mean the same to us?

[Greg Giannakis]

Nothing compares to Basement Song, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. His voice is quite different than what I expected.

[Jesse]

... what is the role of art if any /
within your particular emotion machine

[Donnie]

I got Through It...