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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571755 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2025 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 104 |
| File size: | 628 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Growing Edge
There is a spike in the air a distant thrum you call singing and how many nights this giganto, torn tuned, I wonder if you hear me I mean I talk to myself through you hectoring air you're out there tonight and so am I for as long as I remember I talk to the air what is it to be tough what ever do you mean how mistaken can I be, how did I miss it as I do entirely and admit very well then I know nothing of the world can see it now can really see there is a spike a distant thrum to the empty o'clock autumn litter it's ominous, gratuitous the asphalt quality these feelings it's Sunday in deep space and in the breeze scatters, felt presences behind the hole in the day, sparks ominous spike I've not been here before, my voice is looking for a door this offing light reaching into maw what does it mean to enter that room the last time I remembered it an un gathering every piece of open sky into it the deep chill inventing, and is it comfort the cold returning now clear and crystalline cold I standing feet on the ground not under it I frozen and I can feel it to meet incumbent death we carry within us a body frozen ground what does it mean to be tough or to write a poem I mean the whole vortex of home buckling inside a deep sea whine flash lightning birth storms weather of pale blinding life
Lullaby
Everyone's listening to someone in the air and singing knows every chestnut from way out when the mourning dawn of living each apple and every atom in the tooth actually small circuits uncover vast spaces even if invisible you see the picture field and the lightning is there a difference between a photograph of a child and what memorials what or what is the role of art if any within your particular emotion machine the limits of thought and seeing perhaps it explains water is one way to apprehend air the morning light is in us a stinging charge in the mouth this is something everyone feels at least once here before you started listening to the song at the beach and soldiers by a desert if anybody looked we are all stranded by the shore of something I mean to say seeing pictures inside as they are
Hypostasis & New Year
For why am I afraid to sing the fundamental shape of awe should I now begin to sing the silvered back of the winter willow spear the sparkling agate blue would this blade and this sky free me to speak intransitive lack —
the vowels themselves free
Of what am I afraid of what lies in back of me of day these stars scattered as far as the I what world and wherefore will it shake free why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy for a while flagrant and alive
Then what of night of hours' unpredicated bad luck and the rot it clings to fathomless on the far side in winter dark 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
Of what am I to see these things between myself and nothing between the curtain and the stain between the hypostatic scenes of breathing and becoming the thing I see are they not the same
Things don't look good on the street today beside a tower in a rusting lot one is a condition the other mystery even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing a towering absence vibrating air
Shake and I see pots from old shake and I see cities anew I see robes shake I see desert I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day the day inside night as tones decay and border air it is the old songs and the present wind I sing and say I love the unknown sound in a word
Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve of a dying word of impish laughter in the midst my joy I compel and confess open form my cracked hinged picture doubled
I can't remember now if I made a pact with the devil when I was young when I was high on a sidewalk I hear "buy a sweatshirt?" and think buy a shirt from the sweat of children hell I'm just taking a walk in the sun in a poem and this sound caught in the most recent coup
Eclogues
This clock entitled, simply, my life, speaks at irregular intervals so loud there isn't room for a boy.
Few celebrate the interval inside the tock others merely repeat fog. The unhappening of day. The sudden storm over the house, the sudden houses revealed in cloud cover. Snow upon the land.
This land untitled so much for soldiers, untitled so far from swans.
Sing. Flag. Boy. Idyll. Gong.
Fate disrupts the open field into housing starts, into futurities neglected corners and mites.
This again, the emptied anthem, dusty antlers, pilsner flattened.
To do the time, undo the Times for whom?
Bells swinging. The head rings no. No.
The space inside is vast.
The prayer between electrons proportionately vast.
The ancestry between air and everything is alive and all is alpha everywhere atoms stirring, nesting, dying out, reforged elsewhere, the genealogist said.
A chromosome has 26 letters, a gene just 4. One is a nation. The other a poem.
Eye of the Poem
I come to it at an edge morphed and hobbled,
still morphing. There is also the blowtorch grammar's unconquered flame.
That may sound laughable but we'll need strength.
We'll need the willow's flex,
the flapping windsock.
We'll need every bit of solar wind, serious goggles.
This is the snow channel and it's snowing. Hey,
you wanted throttle,
you wanted full bore.
Stay open to adventure.
Being awake is finally a comprehensive joy.
Stay open to that nimbus around the back porch reverie,
every parti-colored aura on cars left and to the right of you.
Ascending through the core I am silly with clarity.
Born of air I am and the dappled buttresses in this vacuum glisten.
I remake my life.
What pressure animating giddy coil.
What not the flutter, every ting and flange calling to you.
A bright patch over the roof on the jobsite singing itself.
Snow Globe
This house is older than the lilac trusses glistening in winter ice,
older than the pack of Winstons on the wire chair,
older than the chair as well as this glass of water holding water. Is it older?
The house lurks under the sky, which has stood over it.
A time when this patch was a field, deer maybe shat in it, grazed a few leaves from a sprig, now fallen.
The house is covered in fresh snowfall, lovely in reflected mercury light,
its weary glow damaging to the cardinal flirting between branches of a stalled ornamental maple. Where is my head in this data? All this indexical nomenclature. It's not reassuring to know the names tonight,lousy and grigri and non.
Just words to fill space older than a house, a bird, this glass and my hand.
How I Remember Certain Fields of Inquiry (and ones I only imagine)
To feel it. A draft from a room opening next to the head. A prism lit momently and by its glow I know me. It plays through me. It at the back of me. Plato wasn't wrong shadowing me.
Analemma
That I came back to live in the region both my parents died into that I will die into if I have nothing else I have this and it's not morbid to think this way to see things in time to understand I'll be gone that the future is already some where I'm in that somewhere and what of it it's ok to see these things to be the way they are I can be them have been them will be there, soon I know why I came here to be back here where my parents went I know that I'll be there to join them soon it's ok to think this way why shouldn't I whose gonna say I shouldn't a doctor, some friend I have no wife in this at night, late, the dark myself at the ceiling the arguments continue I'm with it, it's with me I am quelque chose something with birds in it a storm high above Albany I am ghost brain I sister to all things cruelty the mouse-back gray of every afternoon and your sorrowing now that you're gone and I'm here or now that you're here and I'm gone or now that you're gone and I'm gone what did we learn what did we take from that oh always dilating now that you're here and also gone I am just learning that threshold and changing light a leafy-shaped blue drifting above an upstate New York Mohican light a tungsten light boxcar lights an oaken table-rapping archival light burnt over, shaking
Fragment
When you wake to brick outside the window when you accept this handmade world when you see yourself inside and accept its picture when you feel the planet spin, accelerate, make dust of everything beneath your bed when you say I want to live and the light that breaks is an inward light when you feel speed of days, speed of light if one could fancy vision then let it be of you let it be thought breaking in your view
This Trip Around the Sun Is Expensive
Shipboard is what winter is
what isinglass moonlit wave
winter is Winter surf all time booming
all time viscous air not black, night winter dark blooming
surfs of winter ice
No time away from igloo ice
Winterreise hubba hubba like
This trip around the sun is expensive
To work the proud flesh
Wound bright
Shipboard is what winter is
what isinglass moonlit wave winter is
Winter surf all time booming
all time viscous air not black, night winter dark blooming
surfs of winter ice
Gray Sail
If I were a boat I would probably roll over If I were a prayer
If I were a beech stave Beech bark If I were a book
I would sing in streets Alone in traffic
If I had a gown I could be heroic With a flowering mane
If I had a boat I would eat a sandwich In broad dazed light
I would come visit As a holy book If I were a boat If I had a prayer
On Prayer Rugs and a Small History of Portraiture
If water were to boy as boy is to bird then swim in air the folktale might go.
This day opens a keepsake. Closing and opening unlike a keepsake
the face in the portrait is still no longer itself a dusty satellite
decaying in its orbit around my polarfleece.
* * *
I am angry today, that the face, the transmissions the being alive not being
is so easy to imagine or why there is a grain to the voice
a striation in blackness calling, gnarled and throbbing like ...
* * *
I awake to like
to light on grass, the ungoverned sheen of grass lit out this window the day is
gorgeous. The day is thrilling in the good old sense of that word when the world sat by the fire. The fire is
raging, has raged, was raging.
* * *
The figure in green blossoms too next to every rotting blade,
every bleating sow, bird de-
caying with an aroma of green, word transmogrophy-
ing green, the mint
in the flame, the heat of the brain expiring steam, steaming thought
and the piles stacked archival thinking pyre.
This is the drudge of fire.
* * *
I am alive today, yes alive not being alive
being with the lost ones and the living lost within the lost hours lost faces lost who find
tendrils of smoke and shoots bursting forth in rain, from rage raining wavering bursting sight
this way and that plume this day that day. Where was I?
* * *
Every day a portrait. Every day a point. A pirouette into aught
awe, off-centered asymmetrical lighting alive in contrast, alive
to contest. Away in itself in itself a way out of here
of transport panning the scene or skein of sight the syncroflash of being sparrow.
Wholly exhausted sparrow poor little sparrow of figured time
conferenced addressed flattened beatified fallen to my knees
forgive my indulgence calling you on the carpet by the bookcase, this figure
all the time falling forgiving not forgotten.
A "Buddy Poppy" for Mike
words lines face feign trace strange
rain pain end the sun
the sun
Undersong
When the bottom drops out of August when the bottom drops and the summer disc burns deep in its bed when nerves sing, blaze, and flame their circuit when the bottom of August sticks out and clouds above change shape when bodies inside spin and change shape the bottom falls and meaning peeks out with chagrin the hot skin of August no longer sending messages of summer birds no longer at rest when the winds pick up and the cool air is just behind it all the bottom of the news story reveals itself the story is cold
Pinocchio's Gnosis
The season folds into itself, cuts a notch in me. I become thinner. My heart splinters and a wooden sound invades the song, interrupts my ire. Today the planet is mostly dirt, mostly water — forget about my lyre. And if you look close everywhere coming to the surface, bare trees, bare yard showing through.
* * *
The wind is blowing west. The wind leaning, the trees sway, the clouds there. Grief is an undersong, it has its region naturally like a river valley spilling over like a nest inside the inside of feeling. Roughed. Go west originally came from ghost stories and not the campfire kind but a real ghost and a real story bleeding.
* * *
In my father's house I killed a cricket with an old sole. Funny how being dead troubles the word. I am trying to untie this sentence, to untidy the rooms where we live. No words in the soup, no soup in this sky, no more history written onto onionskin, peeling onion skins.
* * *
If I decide to laugh all the time I'll surely rid myself of tears. Why accept less than a joke, teasing lone from the lonely, bending the guy into guidebook. Hey you, Mr. Sacer interpresque deorum, how about a good bray, a laugh track in sync with your lyre? No?
* * *
Tears too form a roaring truth on the rolling green. Sure it's a nice day. A splendid day when joy met doom, the entire forest wept. Is not the tree more beautiful than the wood, the crown more lovely than the grain? There is an order. Small things assert themselves.
* * *
Once we understood velvet suggested elegance and distinction or my ruddy cheeks were more chevalier than clown or sawdust, din and clatter, tin cymbal. But today you have no joy for yesterday's plaything. Sumptuous velvet has lost its bloom. The rider is now that "funny man," his ceaseless chatter.
* * *
All the world's a stooge. The secret and silent world worn from abuse and those surfaces abrading imagination. The patient world of the abandoned daydream so gay and corrosive. We have entered the semantics of useless things.
* * *
I am trying to untie the anvil sitting on my head I call my heart. This is a new sensation. I mean sing song bang bang behind my eyes. You've heard this rhyme before.
* * *
In came a fisherman, he wanted a bride, we held up a seal and gave him a stamp, then hit him with a sickle, let go a little spittle, threw him off a bridge, then peed on the wall. With a magical broom, the wind sang sweep, like an oar in air we ascend. We power the instrument and apply a salve, uncover the ghost behind fig. Mistake it for an omen then quiet the cloud, the cloud just there seen through a cataract. We wallow in shallow, stick to the surfeit, singularly tremble, are immune to sting. We consult the leaves and measure the air.
* * *
It was a simple mallet. It spoke simply, whammo, blam, I understood perfectly. Its oscillations filled the dark in waves of blue, some green and felt like no other mallet in my life. Its use was not significant only its shape, after all it was a tool.
* * *
Sunday, the silver of asphodel will not save me. If only I were rich. I could write "happiness."
* * *
If Monday a whole world begins, if to build a flower, if naked at the base of a sycamore, if animated camouflaged bark, if a tear in front of a weather-swept lens, or if laughter at the banquet-crazy table, if eyes opening an ingenious fire, if only to paint this ray only.
* * *
I had been working the mine for scraps of dust. Head bent for years. When I came up the years had gone. The world was not the world and children were whizzing past me now, with blurred exuberance and CGI forcefulness. What to do as the boards rotted and gave. The paint peeled, macadam lumpy.
* * *
What is a man but a papered miscellany, a bio furnace blowing coal, a waste treatment plant manufacturing bluster, an open signal full of seawater, a dark stranger turning over the dark next to you.
* * *
Friday ends in a burning shack. A humpback oratorio spewing roses. The swashbuckler enters from the right singing his pantaloons off. The glint off his sword performs a vast speech, the torch inside an idea, pinwheel sparks squealing on the commons, simply exhaustion after a long day with small children. Hats airborne.
* * *
This body only lasts for so many days. It's got a shelf life. It's got time-lapse, time-based carbon life. There's you and it and now you are it. That's the paradigm. Dream and enter this evolutionary atmosphere, highly susceptible to laws of gravity, entropy, falling at a startling velocity. Flying is out or so significantly not the same as to be pretty much out.
* * *
It wasn't meant to be this way. Let me do this now. I don't want to do it again. Let it be said I made an attempt to give relief to the dark. It didn't work. Won't work. Don't really want it to work. It's hard to say. Old as the world itself, war toy and doll, born from necessity to do grown-up work. To slumber in a dark full of memory and figure, to yellow on shelves in catalogs, to become a fit subject for a poem. To be classified, mistakenly, for always.
* * *
Dreams are such a solid state and then porous and then heavy wet air evaporating, you know: the Blue Fairy walked the bridge-rail over concrete gardens, below her cars and cows packed tightly, sliding, screeching before waking into the sparkling air of modern poetry.
* * *
And so the singer cast a shadow. It was like every other shadow and so we were comforted. The song was summer itself. Green and a special blue went into all of us. We sat and sweated in our chairs. It wasn't exactly pretty when the song, the green and blue, went into our heads.
* * *
In chairs we continue the odd alignment of earth in its bearings, the dirt inside bread, spinning and adjusting our breath. But enough of the singer and the special song of summer. We were tired of you, grew tired of these greens and blues, tired of the ray's long sad decline. It bent way down and didn't feel special anymore.
* * *
It wasn't meant to be this way, the wind leaning, the trees sway, the stars there. Take the long walk home past shadows, alleys, and culverts past streets in midnight past footsteps out there. Take the long walk take the verdigris the periwinkle above it the soot and sirens and odd laughter in the park. Take the promise and transform the man. Look hard into the air.
* * *
The shadow cast a singer. It was like every other shadow and so we were comforted. But who would stay the same even if the ray's report is the same. I am changing and you know about this too. The fuzz haloed with heat lines in a cartoon. I am summer the shadow the song and the solstice. Green and a special blue went into all of us.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Threshold Songs"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Peter Gizzi.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
<P>The Growing Edge<BR>Lullaby<BR>Hypostasis & New Year<BR>Eclogues<BR>Eye of the Poem<BR>Snow Globe<BR>How I Remember Certain Fields of Inquiry (and ones I only imagine)<BR>Analemma<BR>Fragment<BR>This Trip Around the Sun Is Expensive<BR>Gray Sail<BR>On Prayer Rugs and a Small History of Portraiture<BR>A "Buddy Poppy" for Mike<BR>Undersong<BR>Pinocchio's Gnosis<BR>Basement Song<BR>Tiny Blast<BR>A Ghost Card for Robert<BR>Moonlight & Old Lace<BR>Tradition & the Indivisible Talent<BR>Springtime in Rutledge<BR>Lullaby <BR>A Penny for the Old Guy<BR>Apocrypha<BR>A Note on the Text<BR>True Discourse on Power<BR>Oversong<BR>History Is Made at Night<BR>Bardo<BR>Modern Adventures at Sea</P>What People are Saying About This
"Gizzi's poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world."
— Rae Armantrout, Poetry Foundation, Best Books of 2007
“Threshold Songs, as the title suggests, pushes against both abstraction and lyric voicing, ensnaring the close listener in an intensifying cascade of dissociative rhythms and discursive constellations. Songs also say, saying also sings. And what at first seems to resist song becomes song. These enthralling, sometime soaring, poems approach, without dwelling in, elegy. They are the soundtrack of a political and cultural moment whose echoic presence Gizzi makes as viscous as the ‘dark blooming surfs of winter ice.’”
"Gizzi's poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world."—Rae Armantrout, Harriet blog, poetryfoundation.org
"Threshold Songs, as the title suggests, pushes against both abstraction and lyric voicing, ensnaring the close listener in an intensifying cascade of dissociative rhythms and discursive constellations. Songs also say, saying also sings. And what at first seems to resist song becomes song. These enthralling, sometime soaring, poems approach, without dwelling in, elegy. They are the soundtrack of a political and cultural moment whose echoic presence Gizzi makes as viscous as the 'dark blooming surfs of winter ice.'""—Charles Bernstein
"Gizzi's poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world."—Rae Armantrout, Harriet blog, poetryfoundation.org