« Peter Gizzi’s Hypothetical Lyricism: Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) and The Outernationale (2007) »
Résumé
In Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) and The Outernationale (2007), Peter Gizzi finds news ways to renegotiate the lyric tradition: ignoring the neo-confessional conception of the self as well as the radical yet illusory refusal of subjectivity, Peter Gizzi proposes a new poetical critique of the lyric “I.” If he does not refuse to say “I,” the poet does not consider however that his poetic “self” goes without saying. On the contrary, the “I” in his poetry is the object of a methodical doubt, suspended as it is between presence and absence, interiority and exteriority. The lyric subject is not conceived as a self-enclosed entity: rather, its variable morphology is constituted by the moving and tense relationship between the subject of the enunciation of the poem and the many figures the self cuts in the text. In his work Peter Gizzi elaborates a hypothetical “I,” the poetical condition to a new lyric song, a “Chanson en si” (Tristan Corbière) coming from the battlements of “Château If.”