Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute: Peter Gizzi (2013)

The O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and in association with the Emily Dickinson Museum, on December 9, 2013 in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre. Poet Peter Gizzi presented the 2013 Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute reading. Gizzie spoke about Dickinson's poetic legacy, and read from his own works.

Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi’s latest work hovers between grief and joy, the abstract and the concrete, all the while exploring the hardships and pleasures in life. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs and The Outernationale. Gizzi has been poetry editor for The Nation and has many honors and awards including the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets as well as fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Brown University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Reviews and excerpts

“Gizzi’s poems reach persistently for what comes to seem like the ghost of the beauty of the world.” — Rae Armantrout, Poetry Foundation

“Gizzi is heir to Emily Dickinson’s occult friendliness, her easy rapport across the “threshold” of the grave. . .”— Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

From The Growing Edge

There is a spike

in the air

a distant thrum

you call singing.

From Threshold Songs © 2011 by Peter Gizzi, published by Wesleyan University Press. Used with permission.