Overview
Archeophonics is the first collection of new work from the poet Peter Gizzi in five years. Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one's emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: "poetry, like music, is not just song." It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, "into transient examples of shaped behavior." Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576811 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 108 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
PETER GIZZI is the author of six collections of poetry including Threshold Songs and In Defense of Nothing. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, and artist grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry including Fierce Elegy, Now It's Dark, Threshold Songs, Archeophonics and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. He lives in Holyoke, MA.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Archeophonics
I'm just visiting this voice I'm just visiting the molecular structures
that say what I am saying I am just visiting the world at this moment
and it's on fire It's always been on fire
I'm saying this and it's saying me That's how it works, seesaw like The archive in the mouth and the archive is on fire That's the story The sun and the body and the body in the sun
It was like this just like this The world that's coming toward me And the world around me Around me are words saying this
saying fire Saying something or all of it
Field Recordings
For today's tourist, orientation is impossible
— RIMBAUD
LANGUOR
The old language is the old language,
with its lance and greaves,
broken shields and hammered vowels;
a stairway ascending into a mirror — see it climb the old helix,
beneath a scarred and chipped northerly sky,
rotunda blue.
Sing genetic cloud forms mirroring the syntax in reflection, and what would you have?
Paving stones, rhetoric,
the coping of bridges,
leanings, what is taken from res?
To reconstruct? To recognize the categories have failed? That the index was a lyre.
The lists have grown lonely, far from home,
houses of worship,
roofs, toy stores and liquor stores, names,
historical furniture,
descriptions of architecture,
patina in a fanfare city.
I have eaten the air of that city.
THRALL
The old language says the apple is the old apple,
it spoke in categories and gave her all the dance floor she needed, all those vocabularies and animal nights before her,
we see through to spotted fur.
Lithe, the taut syllables in apple and the ecstasy of naming. Or was it knowing? Windows swing open.
The chest a hammering thing.
This hammering thing, life as I've known it, know me,
is over. I might as well say it. The apples lie scattered on ground.
The earth reclaims its booty right before the eyes. So swiftly the letters replace, the letters dearrange and uncompose the self in itself.
The orchestral side is taking away me.
These letters no longer anchor.
WRAPPER FRAG
The world today is slowcore,
a rhythm section dragging.
At the moment I drag and solo in a bitten landscape,
torn vowels that sound out vowel or sadness like glitter sprinkled in a mind.
A sun-slashed parking lot,
thinking a poem stalled in the broken surround.
See the chubby kid dazed,
his spilled bike,
more debris,
CVS in the distance.
Remember me to convenience stores.
I saw this too every life of my day yet I ate, I had money,
and a car.
WIND INSTRUMENT
There were markets used bookstores trellises and brick.
These were the words I could see thinking of the body.
It's strange here all the names in me.
The gain and its foliage.
In my last rotation it was hard to tune in.
The dial was faulty.
The static lovely.
It spoke to me through a grubby transom.
Was that a cathedral bell or the air conditioner?
Crisp air coming in.
Looking out the frame I studied grass.
So many pages blank.
It's hard to look that close.
I watched from a high window while I slept.
GLITTER
Faces fly by in random litter,
as September rays hit the lawns.
The high-lit dry white shafts slightly vintaging.
The bright horizon preening in fife air.
The days go and are gone.
The night's gone before us,
a neon cursive glow.
If only to dream awhile, through an ascending scale of history, its ill begotten schemes,
statecraft, unwieldy theatrical devices.
The old language renews the pundits'
chatter, can sometimes bunch in groups,
power jumbotrons,
or one's laughter in particular.
Just now, out the car window paper flags and ballots kite.
Feel the parade air on your skin.
A cotton shirt touching it. The manufactured rays are ancient, fall through a time-gone ticker tape array.
The floats and whorls and banners above.
The old language dozing in sun.
STRANGENESS BECOMES YOU
The old language is the old language.
It don't mean shit.
It's not where you begin it's how you finish.
Everyone's got beer muscles when they're young.
Try as you must.
Break as you will.
Solo in space clinging to space.
Fuck, the air said passing a corner,
a long ropy snot hitting a gutter.
To know something and fail.
Why discount it?
The onslaught of eyes beneath a fuck-you sky.
The syntax breaks down its mangled draft and says,
one day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich.
I hate that, when syntax connects me to the rich.
REVERB
I hate how syntax connects me to shit,
or say the day is jeweled and burning,
the fires banking,
and none of its letters produce the horror at the heart of the index.
The old document hangs over the twinned stair of murder and something else —
that original slap of glove.
The project is archival,
all that blood in the mouth.
The old language could have told you,
it's too late,
we watched you die,
watched you move through shocking losses and the solo flight you are taking back into the old language.
It's the same but different,
different now.
The mouth knows the bit,
the taste of it.
A NOTE
It's strange here, all this time in me and time around me. I was trying to climb out from under 5AM thinking outside the truck and its engine are real.
Today the slinky is 70 years old. Next year my body will be 57: it was human, it was American, it was a piece of big data, it was employed, it loved and mourned the documents behind a people.
In my time I loved people.
RIME
It was a language to eat the sky a language to say goodbye
standing with others standing in the dust.
The old language continues its dialogues
in ordinary dust.
When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy
Right now there are teenage microwaves screaming through your body while you are having text with me.
This is the moment I'll need you to sing
with me.
I am making my way in some dark room looking for other structures to love.
From the left something speaking
I can't identify.
The floor goes unfixed and moving and this doesn't happen only at night but during the day when I don't want
to think on it.
That I saw a blood-orange ball caught
out my window.
That I'm listening to light and it said time.
I'm listening to time, it says, ha.
You need to be howling at bloody torn space.
Need to be spooked out of your hidey-hole
and its glowing mess.
But I love this ball I'm riding on.
The strange hunk of metal and rock whizzing
around my loves and my loving.
The fact I spin and it spins and everything
is spinning close up.
From far away it's so cool.
I guess they call this physics or they call it laws.
If they're so well-made, why do we suffer?
I thought the day was opening but now I see it's already gone.
Outside the cruel dove has a broken window.
The day isn't friendly.
Who are you to me?
A way to understand the floor?
The floor that holds me up and leaves me
standing.
I don't know where to go.
Me, Tuesday at 5PM.
What does it mean to be in a room,
any room.
The wind banging against the clapboard.
I know enough to see the cracked pane isn't going to be fixed anytime soon.
Who has time for such things in the song?
Breaking. Blooming.
The wobble of light on wood-grain late
in the day.
In the loneliness of orange.
In the loveliness of orange.
Release the Darkness to New Lichen
But I found a way to say no to the wood in my house
it kept creaking wouldn't stop talking
I found a way to say no
I need to be standing in the warmth of the wood that the sun made
I need to find myself dissolving
otherwise it is all otherwise I'm lost, did I say that
I saw the frill of light today walking on the path
could you hear the stirring in the wood, pine needles and the branches
was it wind or a creature am I here or is it over
this was the first day the nothing day in the nothing year
it gave me courage
it gave hints of blue,
clouds, electrical and dancing
it gave me rays I've never seen
shooting down touching things
this was the first day
A Social History of Mercury
In oneself the ghost of self
The walls where I live
Floorboards in spotted light
To see oneself clearly
The mirror world
Its cruel repetition
This is not a melancholy state
Simply primeval
Words live here
Take root
Their vocative flourish
"the winter sun says fight"
The winter sun says fight.
The arctic blasts say fight.
This polar world is flat even if my head says round. Like this meant something to me, like nothing.
I was more ing these days to every surface. So what's in this morning that will solace?
Once I saw the city of God reflected in a freak shadow
the sun cast. I thought life complete,
tight, happiness.
Now sun says cigarette,
and I abide. I remember its noisy ray clanging my room on my knees looking for crumbs.
I remember days and nights and days and nights, days, nights,
high and dirty.
Now fog says coffee,
that'll bring you back.
To where? Where do I actually live so far outside my head deep inside the chemical wash of my genes.
I am fighting for love but I need a new god.
Left here, this one no longer fits. I, sick of the reptile in me,
the dis in time,
its twigged agony.
I've been here before.
This World Is Not Conclusion
When I look out your window I see another window I see a wedding in my brain, a stylus and a groove a voice waving there
When I look out your window I see another window these trees are not real they grow out of air they fell like dust they fell
So singing is seeing and vision is music I saw diadems and crowns, daisies and bees, ribbons, robins,
and disks of snow sprung effects in pencil-light
When I look out your window I see another window I see a fire and a girl, crimson hair and hazel eyes a public in the sky
When the world comes back it will be recorded sound that cooing shrub will be known as dickinson the syllabic, fricative, percussive, and phatic will tear open
Out your window I see another window I see a funeral in the air I see alabaster space I read circumference there
Night Work
The eyes take their relief in dark in this night room seeing things.
The waking dark old-like a monk's pagoda in some far bell country never seen.
To have never seen it in me ringing the night room the gone steps creaking ens.
To remain like this what the world wants.
The motor fumbles in the distance anything becomes rhythm in the distant wave.
You can ride it if you can hear it the whine of night the ongoing ribbon.
Song
I want color to braid,
to bleed, want song to fly to flex to think in lines. To work the pulp, to open up this cardinal feeling in green.
The hardest part is the songbirds and their fugue state,
fug state, fuck it.
The world is neon in the gloaming quiet.
I am willing to walk away, willing to be on fire, to blaze to Blake, to sink into the moon's aphorism and its garden of figures.
The moon above my life. It's rough and real tonight,
cold fusion reflecting sun.
There is a quaver,
a gibbous light to this equation.
Puzzling rays full of dinghies, pixies,
kobolds, and gems,
heroes, songsters,
and your face.
The strangeness becomes you,
darling night.
Google Earth
Taking in the earth from wide space; to see its incommensurate blue; I am also thinking of your face, its dark wilds always, its burning incandescent blur; it wasn't the sky exactly, it's more like the sky an arrow takes; I once texted all I really see is your face; the world is broken down tonight, when you're far I don't like the sea, don't like these clouds either, the tree's canopy, don't like these touch screens majestic with distance.
Rainy Days and Mondays
Over the all this and under the all that
between this yes and that yes
hauntedness
between the girl and arrows
the long ago and far away
between galaxy and litter
talking to myself for now
a song
Instagrammar
These lost stars tomorrow will they be there when we wake in our sorrow, is it us so lost in the moment,
is it today we look to flower
If it were because the time we saw and loved, if it was because we are and should be this, the way it was then, we find it glowing this our future and bravado
We say how could this be when did this happen that we'll find ourselves somewhere else in some future laughing, why is it incompatible I mean what does it matter, whether the ship were in the trees or the ground was in the water The stars doubled in the river the stars once floating in past futures we ran to, if it all seems dizzy and mayhem if it all seems promised and ordained
Our future is in the air
Antico Adagio
Bring down the lights. Bring out the stars. Let the record sing; the vibraphone; the violin; the gong. We call this charm a festooned gazebo in twilight. We call night and her creatures to the summer screen; every beat a wheel every wheel aglow. The soft tight musical light a freshet. And happy who can hear the wood, the ferns bobbing, the stars splashing down. I wanted this glad tight happy light inside the gloaming. I wanted glow. The piping anthem of a voyage listing in lamplight, oboe light; hear it and fly. Hear it fly like friendship like modernism beginning like a steamer pulling out to sea in an old reel dreaming. Married to a song; to a pebble of song.
Pretty Sweety
Here there are small animals foraging and content
Perhaps this is what's called perhaps love is a small animal foraging
content entirely with its mouth there with the ant and the sun and fur
This is a strange view sunlight and furlight and a mouth
busy with nature a mouth busy with its bloom
a mouth blooming loveliness
A Ghosting Floral
To be dispatched by downcast eyes
To have forgot a singularity in green
It's not what you think when I look
The vista suits me
Loam fanning out into music falling
Shadows wheel
Wings drafting above doing it finding it
The day suits me
The air inside me inside you, things
Do not move let the wind speed
A Garden in the Air
You wonder summer's terabyte,
here on the terra forming,
floating and atomizing,
giving over to shadow,
then a muffler rumbling,
distant engine, a little cozy,
acoustic shadowing,
or when the bells die out slowly, like light across the neighborhood's plumbago skies,
a blanket feeling in the face of narrative,
a map on somebody's face suddenly changing from the time it takes to the time it takes,
and you keep thinking,
overhead the ancestral chirring, this twilight's creaturely bluing feels downright numerical,
like polka dots on the ceiling, still you're thinking how this chirring and its attendant evening,
erratic nothings, a material weaving, warping, excess jetting, ancestral airs,
what you are speaking,
leaves, whirring, living,
listing, in summer green,
how can the tonic sustain its frequency, moment of tuning, but you do all the talking,
you do all the talking and forget the world,
in this room, the walls,
what you are speaking,
these fires at the edge.
Sentences in a Synapse Field
For I wanted sound / to dig into sound
For snow and blood / for wine and mirrors / for electrons / and electricity
For debris / for damaged art / our collective fortune / future
For as long as there have been soldiers / there have been poets / for as long as poets there has been a bridge
For I wanted to hold a room in silence For debris flooding back into a wave
For as long as particles / a charge / for it should be incredulity / to be alive
For these things that can be told / until mystery becomes elegy
For it was March going into April / for the day was / speaking the day
For what you thought / for what you buried / for who you are /
How to Read
FOR ROSMARIE WALDROP
A world of light and a world of openism
A syntax of heat and dynamism
A human world mewling in the dark
A giganto space of silence, time
A mind on fire in the heat of the quest
Rhythm percussion assonance
Energetic silent magic
A textual nimbus, air born
Civil Twilight
Life is big these days and it's hard to take
its measure.
It's a complicated phrase this planet we're on.
But what if it were all water
on stones, plash.
Pine bows creaking like ropes
on a clipper ship in some shitty weather of yore.
This ball in space emitting cries
into space.
If I saw you and the I said,
my poetry is changing,
I would say my life is changing.
I see it there clearly as power lines
above a rail-yard playing wind.
The notes are where I take shape and then arrive into the present
world-station, hello.
It didn't matter that the whorl didn't happen as it did.
That the speckled horizon couldn't be otherwise.
This is what I'm saying now,
so I'm going deeper and it burns,
a better whisky,
the sky turning monarch into night.
But earlier the light was witchy,
instamatic and shining, 6 degrees over
the horizon every day.
The sun in this world on its way from my porch in the west.
There is song in the grass against the whine of the jet.
It all evaporates and decays,
not into silence but into life.
What if it were all music?
What if the day were a countertenor informing us, besting bureaucracy,
offering sustenance against my case of the punks.
Take the ride, it won't take you all the way.
The sun in the street or am I just lucky.
The day was like that.
And the established fact of the sun.
A Winding Sheet for Summer
1.
I wanted out of the past so I ate the air,
it took me further into air.
It cut me, an iridescent chord
of geometric light.
I breathed deep, it lit me up, it was good.
All these years, lightning, rain, the sky,
its little daisies.
Memento mori and lux.
2.
And you can't blame me.
This daisy-feeling.
I was a poet with a death-style of my own
waking.
I occupy the rest of it.
A blue-green leaving feeling.
To no longer belong to a body sometimes
open to air.
In rain, in early morning rain.
3.
Today was the day of the amphitheater in mind.
The day of a dreaming speech where the light is dope
and that's all you can say.
When a feeling degrades and evolves into thought like
2AM dilated, revealed a star.
It will say this long agony is great being awake.
It is being lovely now.
4.
All the stars are here that belonged to whatever
was speaking.
I built my life out of what was left of me.
Sky and its procedures.
A romanticism of clouds, trees, pale crenellations,
and poetry.
A musical joybang.
Touching everything.
5.
When the words come back their fictions remain.
Thunderheads and rain, lexical waters raking gutters,
carving a world.
The stylus will live in the flash.
A daring light from pewter to whatever.
Now discrete observations produce undramatic sound,
like I am a bubble,
make me the sea. O, make me the sea.
6.
For a long time the names of things and things unnamed.
For a long time hawks and their chicks, fox and their cubs,
mice and their mice.
For a long time bunnies and boojum, and a name
for every bird in me.
I am native to feathers — their netherside.
7.
The sun was a goldish wave taped to a book.
A wavy diagram in a fusty book.
Foxed old wave.
A soft electro-fuzz enters the head.
A soft fuzzy opiate lightness.
What could be the message in this
pointillist masquerade.
What use memory.
8.
I came from a different world.
I will die in it.
Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it.
I love seeing it with them.
Love watching it die in me.
It wasn't behind or beside me.
Finding it wasn't it.
Being it was everything.
That was the thing I thought as I fell.
9.
I am that thing in morning, whatever motors in the skull,
something is claimed.
Sudden rain keeps it real.
Rooftops from the window look stunned.
Cleansed.
Looking out over the day, the pale performing day.
I always consult the air before composing air.
10.
And what have you been given, the blue nothing asks,
who are you under clanging brass?
Who are you, Saturday; sing to me.
See the crows thread summerismus.
Afternoon shade mirrors an issuelessness.
A perfection of beetle slowly treading summer's blade.
The leaves broadcast color.
I was born in summer, my conqueror,
breaking into wisteria.
11.
The sun was a golden rag nailed to a ladder.
And here the marigolds grow down to the banks.
The mayflies drowse above water.
How then the dazzling surface and its dictions
under piled clouds,
and clouds sitting there by place and sound.
One thing. This thing and sound glitters.
Indicative transitive particular battles the void.
All afternoon a green-gold silent light
on the spotted grass, sprung.
12.
I know it's summer even if I can't decipher the call.
I believe in the birds haunting me. I held on.
I'm full of bluster but also full of vision.
I'm not ready to put the book down.
To stop singing bright spots thrilling the quicksilver
over my torrent.
I make sounds, forget to die. I call it living,
this inhuman conch in the ear.
A pewter sensation and wind.
13.
The sun remains a yellow sail tacked to the sky.
I am climbing air here. I am here
in the open.
The kestrel swerves.
Its silent kerning.
A stunning calibration of nothing.
I'm left to see.
Excerpted from "Archeophonics"
by .
Copyright © 2016 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
HYPO VIGILANT
FIELD RECORDINGS
RELEASE THE DARKNESS TO NEW LICHEN THE WINTER SUN SAYS FIGHT
THIS WORLD IS NOT CONCLUSION
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF MERCURY
NIGHT WORK
WHEN ORBITAL PROXIMITY FEELS CREEPY SONG
INSTAGRAMMER
HOW TO READ
CIVIL TWILIGHT
GOOGLE EARTH
RAINY DAYS AND MONDAYS
A GHOSTING FLORAL
ANTICO ADAGIO
PRETTY SWEETY
A GARDEN IN THE AIR
A WINDING SHEET FOR SUMMER
BEWITCHED
Acknowledgements
What People are Saying About This
“Peter Gizzi’s disturbing lyricism is like no other.”
“Gizzi treads eggshell air, eggshell earth, traipse never not shadowed by collapse, as if to sound some depth, some corrected tilt or some righted something gone under, the poems an evaporative track left in its wake.”
"Gizzi treads eggshell air, eggshell earth, traipse never not shadowed by collapse, as if to sound some depth, some corrected tilt or some righted something gone under, the poems an evaporative track left in its wake."—Nathaniel Mackey, author of Nod House
"I like that Peter frequently over bets, this poet gets in trouble and needs the world to get him out of it. It's like this: I saw the frill of light today/walking on the path. It's speechy, meaning (for me) that his writing actually grows ornamental, and then suddenly it turns slight like trash in the street and it's ravishingly strong. Gizzi's strength is a world of big ideas buttressed by fragility and the incidental. And he's often complaining. I'd call it girly. Even post gender. It's strong and it's pretty work.""—Eileen Myles
"Gizzi treads eggshell air, eggshell earth, traipse never not shadowed by collapse, as if to sound some depth, some corrected tilt or some righted something gone under, the poems an evaporative track left in its wake."—Nathaniel Mackey, author of Nod House
"Peter Gizzi's disturbing lyricism is like no other."—Adrienne Rich
“I like that Peter frequently over bets, this poet gets in trouble and needs the world to get him out of it. It’s like this: I saw the frill of light today/walking on the path. It’s speechy, meaning (for me) that his writing actually grows ornamental, and then suddenly it turns slight like trash in the street and it’s ravishingly strong. Gizzi’s strength is a world of big ideas buttressed by fragility and the incidental. And he’s often complaining. I’d call it girly. Even post gender. It’s strong and it’s pretty work.”