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The Outernationale
Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection fuses documentary truth with imaginative force. The Outernationale locates us "just off the grid," in an emotional and spiritual frontier, where reverie, outrage, history, and vision merge. Thinking and feeling become one in the urgent music of Gizzi's poems. Saturated with luminous detail, these original poems possess, even in their sorrowing moments, a dizzying freedom. This is both a poetry of conscience and the embodiment of a genuinely poetic consciousness. Objects, images, and their histories are caught here in their half-life, their profoundly human after-life. Gizzi has written a brilliant follow-up to Some Values of Landscape and Weather, a book hailed by Robert Creeley as "a breakthrough book in every for reader, for writer, and for the art."
- GenresPoetry
132 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
Peter Gizzi
56 books57 followersEducated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, poet Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007), and Artificial Heart (1998).
Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”
(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)
Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”
(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 28, 2007
I remember reading this book when I was in a bad period and not giving it a stellar rating. It was more a problem with reception (me) than the collection, I can see now. I've since reread this book more than once and I have to say I'm stunned it didn't get nominated for the Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Critics Circle Award. Because it really is of that caliber. I think I used to "have a problem" (funny to me now--I laugh at myself quite a bit when I look at my weird quiddities of taste, my seasonal mood disturbances) with the way Gizzi's poetics grew out of Ashbery's.
But while certain contemporary poets have sprung "fully formed" like Minerva from Ashbery's forehead, and many of them have annoyingly remained "Children of Ashbery" (they could fill a virtual Village of the Damned) Gizzi is not one of these.
Gizzi's poetry probably nurtured itself as much--if not more--on Oppen's and Spicer's poetics as it did on Ashbery's urbane, shopping cart-discursive, and increasingly pallid poetics. This isn't another Ashberian vampirism act. Thank God.
There are actually two title poems, but the latter title poem is the poem to see right away--the book's tour de force. (The first poem with that title didn't wow me.) This book is filled with many unforgettable images. Who knew that "after the war, (Matthew) Brady's glass negatives were sold wholesale to farmers to build greenhouses." Well, Gizzi did--and he got a great poem out of it. Gizzi turns science into poetry as well, in lines that seem also to be a phenomenological capture of evolution's devastatingly brilliant sloth, lines that seem like poetry writing its own autobiography: "the 100,000 years it takes a photon / to reach the surface of the sun // eight minutes to hit our eyes."
Is Emily Dickinson the "specter" Gizzi encounters in Amherst, who whispers en passant: "these sounds we live within speaking to you now / sir, i was a soldier in these woods." And there the reader would be remiss not to realize the woods are the poets' shared home turf but also the holy forest of language itself.
Gizzi's poem's are filled with a humaneness. Read the poem with the somewhat self-mocking title, "That's Life." What a beautiful paean to the virtues of friendship that is. And what a memorable love poem he's written in "Lines Depicting Simple Happiness."
In the past, Gizzi's excess has been a tendency towards the fey and even--very rarely--the twee. But this thick collection has few cloying poems. It's the rare poem like "Phantascope (1895)" where one can see traces of that earlier tendency towards an outre lyricism which kept trying to swim backwards in time and yielded the poet some arty knockoffs of early French surrealist loves.
Gizzi is an original when it comes to catachresis, that beautiful deformation of language which was Hart Crane's true metier. Dozens of lines stayed with this reviewer after my last read-through of this book. Who else could write lines like "The throaty blue / in a doorway after a party."
Thematically, this collection is obsessed with cinematography and visual modes of representation in general. Hence, optics and epistemology are recurrent obsessions in the poems. There's a poem which seemingly transcribes the one minute film David Lynch made with the actual camera used by the Lumiere Brothers (those first pioneers in film) and poems meditating on the evolution of Van Gogh's style from early work to death. These are both strong poems.
Another recurrent theme is poetry's failings. This gives the writer a number of very strong poems. "Protest Song" is a poem along these lines. It's the perfect equivalent in poetry of "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." It tells us in its ten short lines everything poetry is often presumed to be, but is not: "This won't help when children are dying / no answer on the way to dust" and "This is not a bandage or hospital tent / not relief or the rest after // Not a wreath, lilac or laurel sprig / not a garden of earthly delights.
This is a book by a poet fully empowered, and the poems adhere with strong covalent bonds in the way that only a true collection will. The poet Martial has an epigram where he talks about how any poetaster can cobble together a sheaf of poems, but then reminds us "It is hard to make a book." The smart-ass Roman was talking about the sort of things Gizzi accomplishes with The Outernationale.
But while certain contemporary poets have sprung "fully formed" like Minerva from Ashbery's forehead, and many of them have annoyingly remained "Children of Ashbery" (they could fill a virtual Village of the Damned) Gizzi is not one of these.
Gizzi's poetry probably nurtured itself as much--if not more--on Oppen's and Spicer's poetics as it did on Ashbery's urbane, shopping cart-discursive, and increasingly pallid poetics. This isn't another Ashberian vampirism act. Thank God.
There are actually two title poems, but the latter title poem is the poem to see right away--the book's tour de force. (The first poem with that title didn't wow me.) This book is filled with many unforgettable images. Who knew that "after the war, (Matthew) Brady's glass negatives were sold wholesale to farmers to build greenhouses." Well, Gizzi did--and he got a great poem out of it. Gizzi turns science into poetry as well, in lines that seem also to be a phenomenological capture of evolution's devastatingly brilliant sloth, lines that seem like poetry writing its own autobiography: "the 100,000 years it takes a photon / to reach the surface of the sun // eight minutes to hit our eyes."
Is Emily Dickinson the "specter" Gizzi encounters in Amherst, who whispers en passant: "these sounds we live within speaking to you now / sir, i was a soldier in these woods." And there the reader would be remiss not to realize the woods are the poets' shared home turf but also the holy forest of language itself.
Gizzi's poem's are filled with a humaneness. Read the poem with the somewhat self-mocking title, "That's Life." What a beautiful paean to the virtues of friendship that is. And what a memorable love poem he's written in "Lines Depicting Simple Happiness."
In the past, Gizzi's excess has been a tendency towards the fey and even--very rarely--the twee. But this thick collection has few cloying poems. It's the rare poem like "Phantascope (1895)" where one can see traces of that earlier tendency towards an outre lyricism which kept trying to swim backwards in time and yielded the poet some arty knockoffs of early French surrealist loves.
Gizzi is an original when it comes to catachresis, that beautiful deformation of language which was Hart Crane's true metier. Dozens of lines stayed with this reviewer after my last read-through of this book. Who else could write lines like "The throaty blue / in a doorway after a party."
Thematically, this collection is obsessed with cinematography and visual modes of representation in general. Hence, optics and epistemology are recurrent obsessions in the poems. There's a poem which seemingly transcribes the one minute film David Lynch made with the actual camera used by the Lumiere Brothers (those first pioneers in film) and poems meditating on the evolution of Van Gogh's style from early work to death. These are both strong poems.
Another recurrent theme is poetry's failings. This gives the writer a number of very strong poems. "Protest Song" is a poem along these lines. It's the perfect equivalent in poetry of "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." It tells us in its ten short lines everything poetry is often presumed to be, but is not: "This won't help when children are dying / no answer on the way to dust" and "This is not a bandage or hospital tent / not relief or the rest after // Not a wreath, lilac or laurel sprig / not a garden of earthly delights.
This is a book by a poet fully empowered, and the poems adhere with strong covalent bonds in the way that only a true collection will. The poet Martial has an epigram where he talks about how any poetaster can cobble together a sheaf of poems, but then reminds us "It is hard to make a book." The smart-ass Roman was talking about the sort of things Gizzi accomplishes with The Outernationale.
February 16, 2008
As I understand the peculiar title of Gizzi’s book, the "outernationale" indicates a region of American ambiguity, not the political and spiritual universalism, of the “Internationale,” but rather a space or condition that is outside the national spirit but still partaking of it. In Gizzi’s work, one senses this ambiguity through his frequent discontinuities: sentences break off; empty space surrounds trembling phrases; assertions about to be made collapse in upon themselves. Some readers may find this linguistic groundlessness disconcerting, even bothersome, but I would argue that it is a necessary condition, out of which and against which come Gizzi’s most moving and humane poems. One solution to this ambiguity which Gizzi proffers throughout The Outernationale is a sort of American zen mindfulness, an awareness of the object-world (George Oppen, most dialectical of objectivists, provides Gizzi with the epigraph to his book) that renews one’s sense of openness to the immediate moment. Another is his offbeat humor, even when the going gets rough. In Gizzi's book, the American sublime is only a quick phrase away, producing what he calls in “A Paper Wind” “this buoyed reverie” which in its “singularity” produces “an uncommon obligation”:
Call it a nation, or a language.
Call it ourselves standing
in the dark in the wind
with a friend, it was night
and the book was closing,
the city was almost asleep,
We gestured toward home,
we were home.
In this homecoming, language, nation, the city, the book, the inspiring wind—all of the most basic elements of Gizzi’s poetry—are joined together.
Call it a nation, or a language.
Call it ourselves standing
in the dark in the wind
with a friend, it was night
and the book was closing,
the city was almost asleep,
We gestured toward home,
we were home.
In this homecoming, language, nation, the city, the book, the inspiring wind—all of the most basic elements of Gizzi’s poetry—are joined together.
February 9, 2013
Whatever weed Gizzi smoked in 2006/07, please let me know. Such a badass.
July 4, 2013
Peter Gizzi isn't one of the poets dissed by a recent Harper's Magazine article that complained about the dearth of good poetry in America. In fact, Gizzi's one of the best we have. His poems are simple and to the point while embracing the numinous abstraction the quotidian life we live seems to employ simply to keep us awake.
August 30, 2007
Wow, wow, wow.
June 11, 2008
I checked this book out of the library and some of the poems were absolutely amazing. I'll buy a copy of this book because there are many poems in this collection I want to read again and again.
July 6, 2008
I'm loving this! I've read it but I keep going back to reread and enjoy. It's good stuff.
August 31, 2008
Breathtaking.
January 27, 2022
If today and today I am calling aloud
If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt
bits pf sun, the din
if tires whine on wet pavement
everything humming
If we find we are still in motion
and have arrived in Zeno's thought, like
if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up
we might know we were loved, are loved
if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain
If our wishes are met with dart
and thyme, thistle, oil,
heirloom, and basil
or the end result is worry, chaos
and if "I should know better"
If our loves are anointed with missiles
Apache fire, Tomahawks
did we follow the tables the pilgrims suggested
If we ask that every song touch its origin
just once and the years engulfed
If problems of identity confound sages,
derelict philosophers, administrators
who can say I am found
if this time you, all of it, this time now
If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and
if rain falls sidelong in the platz
doorways, onto mansard roofs
If encumberations of the fall
and if falling, cities rocked
with gas fires at dawn
Can you rescind the ghost's double nakedness
hungry and waning
if children, soldiers, children
taken down in schools
if burning fuel
Who can't say they have seen this
and can we sing this
if in the auroras' reflecting the sea,
gauze touching the breast
Too bad for you, beautiful singer
unadorned by laurel
child of thunder and scapegoat alike
If the crowd in the mind becoming
crowded in streets and villages, and trains
run next to the freeay
If exit is merely a sign,
* * *
i.
Real things inside me he said.
You've gotten it all wrong.
I see you and hear you
and that is the beginning of a poem.
Not a circle but a ray
not a definition but a journey
flowering in scenes.
This composition is still all the time
coming into view.
The depth we might say.
I am seeing through you
like transistor songs
from a postcard beach town,
two lovers caught in cinemascope.
A movement inside movement
unlike the stars and flag.
* * *
ii.
I was going to tell you how it is
and then leaves out the window
ask me to respond.
Not just colour and shine
but a total relinquishing
of the headlines.
If today is ash then
we have come from a great fire
and then heat is beginning
to consume the present.
To say rhythm is dangerous
is to miss the day entirely
to push the body on
is ungainly order
and the fate of fire
is to consume fuel from any source.
* * *
iii.
Should we discuss the news?
The meteorological epiphenomena
days in day out. It's unforecastable,
not going to stop.
Here we are, caught
by a luminous blue fuzz
touching everything out our windows.
It's not what you thought.
The smell of earth and hot sun.
Reassuring to lilacs too.
Loneliness is structural after all,
you have to really come with us
across the page, and if we are
indeed, alone together,
mighty are the numbers
drifting out there.
* * *
iv.
That's it the, everything opening,
memory fuzzing, dandelion projection -
a falling upward at last. If you can
move like those motes
casting random shadow casting
liberty, the low progress in air.
To Carthage I came, to shado
the lovely outside pouring in air.
The lowing flickering branch
making a picture to show you.
I searched, traveled in stacks
all day and no I've found you.
Empty light formating a dais
on the page. A valuable blank.
This craving for notes, momentum,
that I came to love the struggle,
inner engine spitting years,
splintered, what are years?
* * *
When time becomes
we become
when day becomes
we begin to break
Take it, all of it,
in consecutive units
What of the plough
the mental field
the bedrock pediment
in time and in
the ancient street
so feeling of Lincoln
I'm nobody
for a change
I take the form
of everyone waiting
No day no bird
taking off
The wood pigeon is no bird
a sound pouring
into itself
We call this
broken and boarded
It is not a dream
not gated
Inside the groundlessness
comes to rest
a largesse of ought
Melville has bled
into the local runoff
So much
so much more translation
in the yard
as if insisting
against falling
I want my house
to burn
and build from
nowhere
just there
Let us be
appendages to evolution
mysteries
in the face of violence
even with the shades
If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt
bits pf sun, the din
if tires whine on wet pavement
everything humming
If we find we are still in motion
and have arrived in Zeno's thought, like
if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up
we might know we were loved, are loved
if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain
If our wishes are met with dart
and thyme, thistle, oil,
heirloom, and basil
or the end result is worry, chaos
and if "I should know better"
If our loves are anointed with missiles
Apache fire, Tomahawks
did we follow the tables the pilgrims suggested
If we ask that every song touch its origin
just once and the years engulfed
If problems of identity confound sages,
derelict philosophers, administrators
who can say I am found
if this time you, all of it, this time now
If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and
if rain falls sidelong in the platz
doorways, onto mansard roofs
If encumberations of the fall
and if falling, cities rocked
with gas fires at dawn
Can you rescind the ghost's double nakedness
hungry and waning
if children, soldiers, children
taken down in schools
if burning fuel
Who can't say they have seen this
and can we sing this
if in the auroras' reflecting the sea,
gauze touching the breast
Too bad for you, beautiful singer
unadorned by laurel
child of thunder and scapegoat alike
If the crowd in the mind becoming
crowded in streets and villages, and trains
run next to the freeay
If exit is merely a sign,
- A Panic that Can Still Come Upon Me, pg. 1-3
* * *
i.
Real things inside me he said.
You've gotten it all wrong.
I see you and hear you
and that is the beginning of a poem.
Not a circle but a ray
not a definition but a journey
flowering in scenes.
This composition is still all the time
coming into view.
The depth we might say.
I am seeing through you
like transistor songs
from a postcard beach town,
two lovers caught in cinemascope.
A movement inside movement
unlike the stars and flag.
* * *
ii.
I was going to tell you how it is
and then leaves out the window
ask me to respond.
Not just colour and shine
but a total relinquishing
of the headlines.
If today is ash then
we have come from a great fire
and then heat is beginning
to consume the present.
To say rhythm is dangerous
is to miss the day entirely
to push the body on
is ungainly order
and the fate of fire
is to consume fuel from any source.
* * *
iii.
Should we discuss the news?
The meteorological epiphenomena
days in day out. It's unforecastable,
not going to stop.
Here we are, caught
by a luminous blue fuzz
touching everything out our windows.
It's not what you thought.
The smell of earth and hot sun.
Reassuring to lilacs too.
Loneliness is structural after all,
you have to really come with us
across the page, and if we are
indeed, alone together,
mighty are the numbers
drifting out there.
* * *
iv.
That's it the, everything opening,
memory fuzzing, dandelion projection -
a falling upward at last. If you can
move like those motes
casting random shadow casting
liberty, the low progress in air.
To Carthage I came, to shado
the lovely outside pouring in air.
The lowing flickering branch
making a picture to show you.
I searched, traveled in stacks
all day and no I've found you.
Empty light formating a dais
on the page. A valuable blank.
This craving for notes, momentum,
that I came to love the struggle,
inner engine spitting years,
splintered, what are years?
- Homer's Anger, pg. 63-67
* * *
When time becomes
we become
when day becomes
we begin to break
Take it, all of it,
in consecutive units
What of the plough
the mental field
the bedrock pediment
in time and in
the ancient street
so feeling of Lincoln
I'm nobody
for a change
I take the form
of everyone waiting
No day no bird
taking off
The wood pigeon is no bird
a sound pouring
into itself
We call this
broken and boarded
It is not a dream
not gated
Inside the groundlessness
comes to rest
a largesse of ought
Melville has bled
into the local runoff
So much
so much more translation
in the yard
as if insisting
against falling
I want my house
to burn
and build from
nowhere
just there
Let us be
appendages to evolution
mysteries
in the face of violence
even with the shades
- From Here Laughter Sounds Like Crying, pg. 105-
March 13, 2023
honestly a high 4.5 but i'll round up to 5 because i'm obsessed with gizzi's work! out of the three i've read, it's my least favorite, but that's not saying much because i've loved all three of his books i've read so far. i may or may not have two more on the way from thriftbooks. anyways, poetry fans, get on this. he's got a new book coming out this year too!
June 21, 2008
I liked his last book better. Still some really good poems in it though.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews