A POETRY
Peter Ganick
from A POETRY
can
you keep a secret?
the
sequence of this secret is nothing but its own stating.
there
is nothing behind or before it.
literature
is not of its concern.
a
grain of sand is mindstyle enough
for
its intention to thrive.
can
you keep a secret?
so,
again, we wander streets, beaches—
anywhere
there are tides from which
we
can be harangued no lecture other than
that
is offered & inscribed here.
can
you keep a secret? we asked.
somewhere
in an art magazine an artist wrote the first person singular pronoun and
meant
everybody.
so—why
not use everybody’s pronoun—we.
Encomiums for A POETRY:
The monotonous experience of trudging thru everyday reading-scapes'
disposable closures necessitates Ganick's POETRY of pure & precise chance
(-taking) openwork. His detours reauthenticate via strides reshaping &
strophes rebooting reading/living experience along paths of least resistance.
Even as mountains are moved & walls walked thru, Ganick's manifold
situations pathway supersonic turtles unleashing living/breathing
panoramas' pointed loitering toward magnetic north as true north's
derivations. Baudelaire's "botanist of the sidewalk", Ganick,
breaking mama's backs & busting chops as any causeway-rooting ganglia
plumber "on a routine walkabout" must, surgically roves his precision
& polyphonic wondering, rollicking & astute, fine & dandy. Get
his drift.
John
Crouse
Peter Ganick's always sharp modalities have taken on a new register
here. Space filters "things" with the emotions of light, discovery
and ambiguity, as if "meaning" itself had become a music of silence.
At one point Ganick declares "space emerges victorious"! Here we
are reading a "poem" ("untitled poems for a wednesday
evening") or the multiple variants of space between the lines or
stanzas of the poem, as if we were going from sleep into eternity.
Ganick's spare music engenders many ends without beginnings. Sun Ra reminds us
"space is the place". And it is music we are hearing and waiting to
hear in the midst of the intricate pauses, a jazz of distances and
non-substantiation. A world where surfaces don't matter is a labyrinth of unheard
music, a space of intervals and reverse mirrors. Is there a way to exit from
the poem? Ganick suggest in the last line that "noon's steward invents
ears."
ivan arguelles
In A Poetry,
Peter Ganick grapples with the universal questions of life from
a perspective more personal than many of his other literary meditations.
Opening with reflections on his father's passing and their final discussions
about the nature of existence, Ganick’s inquiry examines life, philosophy and
language through a free form exploration grounded in personal reflection but
fueled with an alchemist's exalted vision of life’s cyclical transformation
from lead to gold and back, revealed with as deft a grasp of its illusive
nature as one can gain.
Vernon Frazer
Peter Ganick has published over 200 books of poetry.
He was publisher of Potes & Poets Press, an important avant garde poetry
press, from 1980-2000. Now he runs white sky books and supervises the blog ex-ex-lit.blogspot.com, a forum for
experimental-experiental literature. He is active in the visual art field,
having recently had a book of art criticism, 'thoughts on abstraction in art',
accepted at the Barnes & Noble NOOK Bookstore. For a day job, he has been a
piano instructor in the West Hartford CT area for 39 years. He lives in West
Hartford with his wife, the artist, Carol Ganick.