Peter Gizzi Review by Tomm Mcarthy

It is ruination day, on the 5th floor of 535 West 22nd Street and there are some words that are being said. The crowd has just heard To the Secret in both French (its original language read by its author Franck Andre Jamme) and in English (with Norma Cole reading her translation) and is now taking a brief siesta before the the final reading is enjoyed. There is beer provided for free with the purchase of a ticket which is now being enjoyed. Audience members speak to the poets who’ve just read and the air is relaxed. Brew bottles clink necks as Jamme and Cole laugh with each other, and smiles form on other faces who are un-voyeuristically watching the scene of intermission unfold, climax and settle.

The audience re-seats itself, some seats are switched, but for the most part things have settled more or less back to the way they were before the break. The host steps up the podium to introduce the final poet who is named Peter Gizzi. Gizzi is compared to Ashberry, but characterized as being more interested in form. His work is described as enacting piercing, not describing it and then the audience (or at least those who had not prior been introduced) meet at last the very honored Peter Gizzi.

“Beginning with a phrase from Simone Vae,” Gizzi evokes.

From this point on, the audience is wrapped. Students are taking notes. Patrons nod their heads with the beat his speaking makes. There is laughter at some lines, and sometimes, between poems, when Gizzi snarkily quips at the audience. The smiles of the tension and relief of his verses, sore their faces.

But what is most interesting about Gizzi’s poetry is the sudden transition his poetics can take from vague, opaque lines one has a difficult time remembering, to lines that evoke so much their imagery cannot be shaken. “Stairs that lead to the empty hall in the sky,” he says.

And he waits, knowing to let that line sink into his audiences’ skin. And when it has he continues but the audience is still in that empty sky-hall until they hear him say:

“The wobble of light on woodgrain.”

Then they’re caught there for as long as the poet can hold them, by the smell of warm wood he’s made, and the feeling of shaky heat rising off of it.

What may fascinate those uninitiated to the world of NYC poetry, is that Gizzi is not a rockstar, none of the poets are. When approached after his reading, the poet humbly and excitedly accepts grace, repeats names of poems that people praise. After the night draws to a close, this creator of worlds inside his audiences mind, puts on his jacket and is human.