Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Peter Gizzi: Some Values of Landscape and Weather

Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2003)

[39/100]

A splendid extravagance of language, a brilliant eye for colors & for details, the objects/detritus/treasured things of the visible. Yes, the reinvention of the "lyric," whatever that means – or a loving caress of the body of the sensual world. A splendid extravagance of forms, as well, from reinventions of the cante jondo to love songs built on syntactic games. A far better elegy for Gregory Corso than one would expect – or than he perhaps deserves. (Yeah, go to it, Ed.)
***
Obviously, I've got a lot of catching up to do in this "100 poem-books" game, a lot of scattered notes from the past month or so. Entries will no doubt become shorter, as my attention finds itself diverted by, you know, classes to teach, actual assignments to write, job searches to run, etc.
***
So we seem to have missed the brunt of Fay, Gustav, & Hanna, tho heaven knows what Ike is up to out there. We have it's true been spared a direct hit for some years now, since Wilma in in 2005, and I'd forgotten, over the months since the last hurricane season, the whole fingernail-biting business of watching the National Hurricane Center website, trying to gauge whether or not (and when) to put up the shutters, making sure the flashlights are batteried up & the pantry is full of bottled water. An evolutionary adaptation, the ability to forget perfectly valid reasons that human beings shouldn't settled in particular parts of the world. And I'd forgotten, hoofing it all over Manhattan & Stockholm thru July and August, how dreadfully difficult it is to walk anywhere in South Florida without soaking one's clothes with sweat. 

2 comments:

Ed Baker said...

at least one plus to dropping out for 20 + years and living long-enough to
drop-back in (so to spek/write)

one can approach the old fresh "stuff" as though it is the new fresh "stuff"

am too set-in stone to steal from these Golden Oldies...

or offer much in the way of scholar-ship..

what did Ben Franklin say?

"neither a scholar or a teacher be"

or wuz "that" more about 'borrowing and lending'

I am partial to Eigner and Ott...

and 12,000 other poets/writers

Sisyphus said...

Someone needs to rethink the flaneur through American weather and suburbia patterns and write about it. Having lived places where there literally were no sidewalks, I'm really conscious of the ways New York City (and, I guess Chicago) are such exceptions to the American experience. And what all that means about a specifically American modernism, modern subjectivity, etc. etc. etc.