Choratopes and ghosts: Peter Gizzi's lyrical echolocation

I will adopt Maureen M. McLane's term 'choratope' (a riff on Bakhtin's chronotope) to explore how Gizzi's work 'sounds out' poetry as a work of reverberating, listening intensity. Drawing on physical expressions of sound across the new and selected poems of Sky Burial (2020), I suggest choratope is a useful analytic for conceptualising an ethic of the tentative that characterises Gizzi's lyrical articulation. This is felt especially in the sense of a world whose patterns, expressions and song are contingent measures of momentary positionality and intensified experience. What McLane describes as choratope's 'resonance' allows us to think through the abstractions and material encounters of Gizzi's imagery, apostrophe and vocalisation — often indicated as a ghostly flicker, duplicating refrain or gestural placement. I will show how in Gizzi's work such resonance — 'poetry as sonar project' (McLane) often finds its effect in relation to a notion of the commonplace, where the instance of a given 'I' is an iterative and inclusive intensity of perception (rather than a singular, reducible being) — the 'chorus'. I conclude by reflecting on the possibilities of this choratopic poetics towards an ec(h)o-poethical project of elegy and more-than-human noticing.