A luminous new work for the 21st century

This first critical book of essays on the poetry of Peter Gizzi shows how his work extends the traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism while also reclaiming the living presence of the “lyric” in its capacity to sing of the human predicament. Gizzi is author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including most recently Threshold Songs and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016. Lauded contributors, including Ben Lerner, Michael Snediker, Marjorie Perloff, and Charles Altieri, explore Gizzi’s poetry for its embodiment of an American tradition—extending the poetics of Whitman, Dickinson, and Stevens, amongst others—while also exhibiting a twenty-first-century sensibility, perpetuating a new grammar and syntax to capture our place in the world today. Each essayist, in turn, works through close-readings of some of the most important poems of our times, enriching our understanding of a poetry of the mind which never loses track of what it means to feel.

Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries offers a collection of nineteen essays that deftly erodes the simplistic distinction between modernism and postmodernism, showing that many attributes of postmodernist verse form not a break with, but rather a continuation of, modernist poetry.

Loved for his decidedly American voice, for his painterly rendering of modern urban settings, and for his ability to re-imagine a living language shaped by the philosophy of “no ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) left an indelible mark on modern poetry. As each successive generation of poets discovers the “new” that lives within his work, his durability and expansiveness make him an influential poet for the twenty-first century as well. The one hundred and two poems by one hundred and two poets collected in Visiting Dr. Williams demonstrate the range of his influence in ways that permanently echo and amplify the transcendent music of his language. Contributors include: Robert Creeley, David Wojahn, Maxine Kumin, James Laughlin, A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Heid Erdrich, Frank O’Hara, Lyn Lifshin, Denise Levertov, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and a host of others.

A new lyricism for the twenty-first century Runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award (2015) Since his celebrated first book of poetry, Peter Gizzi has been hailed as one of the most significant and distinctive voices writing today. Gathered from over five collections, and representing close to twenty-five years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi's poetry enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. In Defense of Nothing is an immensely valuable introduction to the work of this extraordinary and singular poet. Check for the online reader's companion at http://petergizzi.site.weleyan.edu.

As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry). Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to-aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically-when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens?

Poetry. STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK THAT DOES NOT MOVE attempts that rare "theory of everything," the implications of which are, it goes on...wave upon wave of stuff, categories, speakers, news. Employing quotation, catalogue, a roving, sometimes aerial point of view, and an ingenious use of the colon, STILL is at once a formal argument of containment, and the trajectory of twilight-modernity jacked on too much "product."