Michael Gizzi, Clark Coolidge, Poetry Project, 5/4/05

Michael Gizzi

Gizzi's work is charged with an original pleasure of creation intense enough to shoot through the full spectrum of it's materials even when those materials plunge toward the melancholic and tragic. This work is welcoming, rich, wildly wacked-out impressionistic autobiographical poetic crime-jazz with family history as the plot: beautiful, comic, heartfelt and possessed of the power to frighten square people of all types.

"a ukulele speeding towards the heart"


Clark Coolidge

Shelly Man in warmth and relaxation, Hans Bennick in humor and spectrum of response. Jazz/noir voicings with an intense improvisational sprit. An inexhaustible feeling of positivity. Answering everything -- experience, memory, dream, art, politics, environment -- with artistic productiveness, like saying, no, THIS is the mental space I am choosing, one that can't be contained within a bullying consumerist expansionist apparatus -- wacky, quirky, hilarious, joyful, melancholy, unceasing. Theatricality blurring in and out of the language with micro-characters and settings, like a quantum-theory Tom Waits.

“oops. My mother is a gas tank”

Lines that make the top of your head boil over:

“You can’t put your arm around a manta ray.”

“Imagine a dental pain that helps you express yourself”

“There’s a snake in the hallway and we WILL be friends.”

A musical response to everything at the same time.

Heavily grounded, and heavily playful, responding to a gigantic spectrum of life information. Seamless conversational riffing mixed with zany vocab strings.

Total interdependency of the recombining elements of life information, life energy, and language.