Some Values of Landscape and Weather

by Peter Gizzi

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."

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2003

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

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We depend on early sun, clement
weather, afterward comes thunder.

In a notebook, the relative timidity
of observation can be brutal."

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like Gizzi, was happiest w/ the longer poems; a good shift from Flynn. Long poems, leading to the epic, have been dominating my thoughts lately. Kenny Goldsmith touches on this issue, yet oh so indirectly, with the idea of "Day." To summarize if you think you "read" the newspaper everyday, you're ignoring the truth. A daily newspaper is a 500 page book; you do not read a 500 pages in 20 minutes over coffee. Yet the idea that we can have poems which make up totalizing gestures about "life," or smaller "nationalisms," or smaller "socio-economic perspectives," or smaller "individuals" and contain them in a 15 line lyric poem is also just as much a fallacy. (Which is not to say I don't like the lyric, I love it.) But as we continue to acknowledge these things in continuous postmodern shifting relationships the only way to accurately get close to representation/realism/whatev of this has to come through longer, thus epic, poetry. Now contrast this with our attention spans: how are we to keep the attention of a public that can barely sit thorough a music video on YouTube without seeking further instant gratification, and it seems that a longer piece must be increasingly more fragmented. The LANGUAGE movement seems to suggest this strategy didn't/cannot work, based on all of the tension and hatred it has subsequently fostered in the contemporary poetry reader. I ask now, what next? How do we achieve the epic thru appropriation and fragmentation and do so in a different manner than Kenny G?

Gizzi isn't there, but he's doing this nodding gesture with his head. You know, in his poems and stuff.

[C.S. Carrier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally rad.

[Konstantin R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

[rating = unfinished]
I was recommended this book by my poetry teacher and found it, at first, rather good. I liked the language, which had an imagist direction to it, and I though his observations were original. But a few pages in, the poet turned all vague and experimentally postmodernist (which I cannot stand).