These Feelings of Futurelessness: Peter Gizzi’s Now It’s Dark

Abstract

This essay examines Peter Gizzi’s book Now It’s Dark under various optics. To begin, the focus is on the book’s intricate construction as an extended, dialogic work, rather than simply a collection of poems. Attention is paid to the complex structural links and divergences between the book’s various sections, and how Gizzi deploys them to displace and complicate traditional elements of the lyric, not least lyric temporality. The analysis of temporality which follows also allows Gizzi’s work to be placed in the context of important modernist and proto-modernist interlocutors, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Special attention is devoted to how Gizzi’s work can be seen to intervene in and deepen the unlikely dialogue between the latter two, by way of an investigation of Natalia Cecire’s concept of ‘contact’ and Gizzi’s own trope of auto-ethnography. To conclude, the essay examines how Gizzi’s poetic working through of mourning, elegy and the problem of pastness links to our present historical moment more generally.