On Wednesday November 20th, the final Poetry at Bennington reading of the fall term was held and was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College. National Book Award finalist Peter Gizzi, author of Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan, 2023), and the prolific poet and art critic John Yau, author most recently of Tell It Slant (Omnidawn, 2023) and Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (Black Sparrow, 2023) read from their latest collections in Tishman Lecture Hall.
Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), Now It’s Dark (2020), and Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award, all from Wesleyan. In 2020, Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems in the UK. In 2024, Penguin UK published an expanded edition of Fierce Elegy. His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018, Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. Editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and with the late Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). From 2007 to 2012, Gizzi was the poetry editor for The Nation. Since 2003, he has been a contributing editor to the literary journal Conjunctions. He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
John Yau has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. His most recent books of poetry include Tell It Slant (Omnidawn, 2023), Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon, 2012). Born in Lynn, Massachusetts to Chinese emigrants, he is the founding editor of the small press Black Square Editions and Professor of Critical Studies at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. His work has been honored with the Jackson Poetry Prize; fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and the Rabkin Prize for excellence in visual arts journalism. His books of art criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, as well as monographs on Wifredo Lam, Thomas Nozkowski, Joe Brainard, Catherine Murphy, A. R. Penck, Richard Artschwager, Pat Steir, Liu Xiaodong, and Kim Tschang-yeul.
An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by the Director of Poetry at Bennington, Professor Michael Dumanis. “[It’s] a record of being or seeing and thinking about language,” said Dumanis in his introduction to Peter Gizzi’s reading. “I’m glad to be here,” said Gizzi, before reading from his collection, Fierce Elegy—a terrific and fearless collection of poetry. Yau read next, from his latest collection, Tell it Slant, that blended the evocative with the current. It included pantoums, poetry written during the pandemic, and poems inspired by threads that he discovered on the internet. “It’s all real,” he said, at the end of his reading. Gizzi and Yau have known each other for thirty-seven years as Yau was a central contributor to Gizzi’s literary magazine o-blek from the very beginning.
Additionally, students were invited to attend three additional events featuring Yau and Gizzi: first, a master class by Yau on the same day at 3pm in CAPA Symposium, “Writing Under Constraints,” second, a master class by Gizzi, “This World Is Not Conclusion: A Talk on Emily Dickinson” and also, Q&A on Thursday, November 21st at 12:30pm in EAC-1, “Peter Gizzi and John Yau in Conversation with Michael Dumanis.”
The reading was followed by a book signing. The copies of Yau and Gizzi’s latest books were sold in Tishman.
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