Poetry as A Free Derivative – Comments on the Poetics of Peter Gizzi Cover Image
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Wiersz jako pochodnia niepodległa - uwagi o poetyce Petera Gizziego
Poetry as A Free Derivative – Comments on the Poetics of Peter Gizzi

Author(s): Kacper Bartczak
Subject(s): Poetry
Published by: Stowarzyszenie Czasu Kultury
Keywords: Peter Gizzi; materialist poetics

Summary/Abstract: The text introduces the reader to the basic connections and poetic relationships that are at the source of the genealogy of the poetry of the modern American poet Peter Gizzi. The discussion focuses on the main themes and formal innovations by means of which Gizzi synthesizes several branches and periods within the tradition of American poetry. Gizzi is shown here as a poet who continued the project of a materialist poetics, initiated by Williams and developed later by the Objectivist poets, of whom the leftist poet Goerge Oppen was particularly important for Gizzi. At the same time, however, identifying objectivist-material traits is only the beginning of the synthesis that Gizzi carried our between two transcendent poetics: those of Whitman and Dickinson. Gizzi’s poems are a song, the “singing” of which is a reaction to encounters with the very fabric of the world, awakened from obscurity by orphic poetic activity. This action is initiated, as with Whitman, by the human element, which, however, is under the influence of an excessively lively world, and undergoes, as with Dickinson, a shifting of its transgressive edge. Rather than a subject, the entity we experience traces of it: psycho-somatic states that are an echo of strands heard in the poem. As it clashes with language, the world radiates, touches, and blurs human subjectivity, but does not completely erase it. The poem itself is an independent meeting between the human element and its otherness. The discussion includes an introduction to the poems of poet that appear in this issue, translated by text’s author.

  • Issue Year: XXIX/2013
  • Issue No: 02
  • Page Range: 142-145
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish