Cole Swensen on Rupture, Disjunction and Peter Gizzi

Cole Swensen, in her collection of  essays on poetics, Noise that Stays Noise, includes a piece discussing the workings of Peter Gizzi’s collection Some Values of Landscape and Weather.  Though I have not read the Gizzi, or really any Gizzi, certain observations Swensen makes use vocabulary and explanations possibly pertinent to understanding her own poetics, specifically the paragraphs on page 47 that discuss fragments, juxtaposition, rupture, anddisjunction. 

Two of the Gizzi poems Swenson alludes to are posted on different poetry sites and they are posted below.  I was expecting something much more radical, if I do say. Was Swensen really looking to find in Gizzi’s work the poetic moves she makes in her work, and over-read his work in terms of inventiveness? The Gizzi poem, Etudes, Evidence, or a Working Definition of the Sun Gear, was only discoverable piecemeal; a trip to the library is definitely in order, because the lines that are available to the on-line searcher seem interesting in their typographical allusions.  

Etudes, Evidence... begins: 

In a picture of thought the f-stop opens 
as when sky larks departing….. 

Continues at some point: 

the shaped light is making the curve of an s 
loop of e, the crown of a as boats 
in spilled ink sway…. 

 Anyway, here, the available Gizzi poems from this collection….

Chateau If

If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional if of ar-

rows the condition of if

if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so

         if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist that pic-

tures the fluted stem if lavender

if in this field

if I were to say hummingbird it might behave as an adjective

here

if not if the heart’s a flutter if nerves map a city if a city on fire

if I say myself am I saying myself (if in this instant) as if the ob-

ject of your gaze if in a sentence about love you might write if one

day if you would, so

if to say myself if in this instance if to speak as another—

if only to render if in time and accept if to live now as if dis-

embodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f

if a creature if what you say if only to embroider—a city that

overtakes the city I write.

It Was Raining In Delft

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.

I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.

Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones

and the sun now in a curbside pool.

I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I’ve been walking

for 7 hrs on yr name day.

Dead, I am calling you now.

There are colonnades. Yellow wrappers in the square.

Just what you’d suspect: a market with flowers and matrons,

handbags.

Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.

I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem,

a we-see poem, a they-love poem.

The green. All the different windows.

There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each

translucent electric blade.

And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things.

Things that have been already said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade.