| | R A N G E | |: Archive

December 2011

22 posts

“…I have often characterized my voice as, simply, an ongoing narration of my bewilderment as a citizen in the world. I find bewilderment to be a productive place from which to compose. It’s a word I like as it has both ‘be’ and ‘wild’ in it, and I also hear wilderness. Let’s be honest, life is strange and gets stranger; it’s strange to be here. So for me selfhood is also a biological phenomenon, enacted by the body I have to work with; it’s my instrument. In one of my poems in this book I say ‘the biology that composes I is shared with I.’ Sometimes I think that my language has a kind of sonic blur, trying to transmit the impersonal frequency of pure neuro-hormonal energy. This might sound crazy, but in the act of locating a ground in this otherwise dark process, I came to an understanding that was, for me, revelatory: that the sensory data recorded in my poetry is, at the same time, a fiction of consciousness and the physical reality of my nervous system. Sometimes I think that I’m only an ethnographer of my nervous system; it’s certainly peopled. So what do I mean when I say that I want to be clear and to suggest something larger? One of the jobs for me as a poet is to listen to the exterior world in relation to some otherwise illegible interiority. I want to connect these two and give the resulting relationship a sound.” —Peter Gizzi

Nov 30, 2011