Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Beckett's Question: Are there images and scenarios you think about obsessively?

Beckett's Question: What’s your position on appropriative strategies of writing?

Found this essay lurking on my hard-drive, written sometime in the 1990s...

Robert Grenier’s Series As Bridge

            Two years after moving to San Francisco in 1980, my writing models changed from Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and Gary Snyder to Aram Saroyan, Edwin Morgan, Seiichi Niikuni, Claus Bremer, Ian Hamilton Finlay and many of the other concrete poets in Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. My focus shifted from poem as vehicle of self-expression to poem as pivot of language potential. Driven less by personal/political agitations, the need to voice my outrage, I dug into the material of language itself, sought out strategies to liberate the visual representations of language — the alphabet, words, letters, parts of letters, the spaces between them — from their confining semantic contexts. 

            How did I make this jump from Beat to concrete poetry, a poetry I had knocked my head up against for years without an answer? (How in the hell could “lighght” be a poem, Mr. Saroyan?) I didn’t leap blindly: a number of writers served as bridges: Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Larry Eigner, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, among others. Robert Grenier, in his book Series, particularly in the section titled “FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME,” provided one of the most direct routes into an understanding of concrete poetry.

            Grenier’s work led me to word level, the seemingly inscrutable substances of individual words, a mind-boggling place for a reader and writer oriented toward ”larger” discourses such as poems, stories, novels, and essays. I rarely studied words for their own sakes, interested in them as parts dependent on the whole. Words were right when they enhanced the larger picture. But Grenier showed me what can be done with words themselves by themselves. They were not so minuscule anymore, no longer simple cogs in a complex machine. They had their own formidable powers, their own energies. They could stand out on their own.    

            Words unshackled from oppressive contexts, a poem such as

 

                                    JOY

 

                                    maple

                                    apple

 

frees readers to bring their infinitely varied experiences with “maple” and “apple” into play, or to create new experiences in the reading. If Grenier would have written the poem as ”JOY//red maple//apple blossom,” or something similar in which the meanings of words were more inextricably bound to other words, possible paths of meaning would be truncated. Autumn and spring, two distinct seasons suggested by the adjectives, would have to figure into the equation. Without those constraining modifiers, readers shape their ”maple” and “apple” into the trees, syrups, fruits or whatever else they want to construct and experience. The title, of course, channels meaning by delineating an overarching emotion for the poem — joy — but as a subjective state, tied into “mapleness” or ”appleness,” numerous readings can still be generated.

            Because Grenier chooses to deploy so few words in many of the poems in Series, he’s taking more risks with each word choice. The fewer words, the more significance each choice carries. A poem such as

 

                                    BLINKING LIGHTS

 

                                    wooden spoons

 

opens itself to myriad readings (or mis-readings, for that matter), not something many writers would want to happen to their work. Grenier has the nerve to let words and readers do as much of the work on their own as they can.   

            With fewer verbal constraints, many of the poems bubble with a spontaneity rare in poetry. For example:

 

                                    PAINTINGS

 

                                    lamb stew

 

The combinations of words seem incongruous yet natural, impossible yet unpremeditated. Aware of ”painters” who use non-paint materials on canvas (blood, bodily wastes, nail polish, food) — lamb stew could very easily describe a set of paintings, I can’t help but belly-laugh at the poem. 

            I was initially perplexed by the poems consisting only of titles, words comprised of all capitalized letters: DEVOTION, FINN POWER, SNOW TIRES, LIES, CLAPBOARDS, THROUGH THE SPACE BETWEEN. I couldn’t think of any context in which these words would stand comfortably by themselves (except FINN POWER, they’d all make weird graffiti or bumper stickers), but in the context of a book of poetry, they were especially disconcerting. I decided then that they were poems intended to throw the context of poetry itself into question. How are these poems? How is anything a poem? You can’t take anything for granted.  

             The more I thought, the more I was intrigued by this section of Series. These poems were stripped down; words stood exposed; the poet’s voice muted, the strategy shifted weight from authorial personality to the character of words themselves. Grenier accomplished a lot of different things in Series, but one that influenced my writing was his ability to let individual words stick up for themselves.

            Once I grew accustomed to looking at language microscopically, I only had to take a short step to understand concrete poetry. When I again leafed through the Williams’ anthology, the poems were not so esoteric. I sought out books by those poets and found Aram Saroyan’s delightful Pages. I was struck by similarities between Grenier and Saroyan. (I wondered if Grenier knew Saroyan’s work, or if Saroyan knew Grenier’s work.) Grenier could have written any one of the following poems:

 

                                    Not a

                                    cricket

 

                                    ticks a

                                    clock

 

                                    *

 

                                    something moving in the garden a cat

 

                                    *

 

                                    incomprehensible birds

 

                                    *

 

                                    night

                                    so daylight

 

                                    *

 

             However Saroyan came to make decisions similar to Grenier’s, or at least arrive at similar results, he clearly was also a master of poems with few words, as were many other concrete poets. Concrete poetry, or visual poetry as it is known by its contemporary practitioners, is particularly trenchant in its investigations into the bodies of words, continuing to manifest what the words have always known.

            Grenier bridged my writing and reading from Beat poetry to visual poetry. I wonder now where his scrawl writings, perhaps the most intriguing visual poetry now being produced, will take writers and readers in the future. I’ll be learning from them, wherever they go.

 

 

 

Beckett's Question: Are you a fan of outright theft of another’s words?

Beckett's Question: Or do you feel obligated to transform what you have taken into something which is yours?

Beckett's Question: Is, as Charles Bernstein once riffed, intellectual property theft too?

Beckett's Question: Am I wrong to think of my texts as desiring machines which you really ought to plug into?

Issue 11 of textsound is now live

featuring work from KC Trommer; Andy June 
& gtrabbit; Karl Petrunak; Free Rein; Mendi + Keith Obadike; Dale Sherrard; 
Moholy Nagy Sextet; Alexander Baker; Laura Emilianoff, Dan Godston, & 
Christopher Bruce; Amanda Le Claire; Ken Cormier; Joe Milazzo; Steve 
Buchanan and Tom Comitta. 
 
From the editors note: 
 
"But the duh duh duh duh duh good okay so i put the paper Yeah, that. That 
Yeah, mm mm, and then Simon. Really really late anyway. Maybe. This is The 
Hood. Later, will hook wanted to explain, let you know Hollywood. Anyway, 
bye bye. But anyway HI Well, anyway HI But anyway, okay See you later bye 
bye See you later bye bye, okay anyway. I hope. Bye, bye bye. Okay bye. Okay 
bye. They, but anyway. But anyway, bye. Later. Okay bye. But anyway. Okay, 
bye bye. Thanks Bye, leaving. Hey, with him and his family okay. But anyway, 
My, my, Me. But anyway, bye. But. But anyway. But anyway. Hello. What 
happened My. I don't have. Anyway HI bye. My name is bye bye." 
 
http://www.textsound.org 
 
textsound is an online audio publication. .mp3 files should be sent to 
editors (at) textsound.org. 

 

Sprung Formal, the Kansas City Art Institute’s literary arts journal, is now accepting submissions for its 2011 issue

Past contributors include: Jennifer L. Knox, K. Silem Mohammad, Alli Warren, 

Sandra Simonds, Michael Magee, Tao Lin, Rod Smith, Nada Gordon, Brandon Downing, 

Mike Hauser, Brandon Brown, Sawako Nakayasu, Sarah Mangold, and others.

We are open to poetry, costume parties, 

fiction, victorian remedies, micro essays, late night swears & slurs, 

gucci bandanas, drawings, so sexy, dirty overall(s), recipes, sasquatch, 

videos, red velvet cupcakes, drive-by arguments, plea bargains, sounds, 

mixtures, the fried, encoding, thank yous, sweaters, tuna melts, e-mails, 

circularity, locks, lucks, lox, memes, yearbooks, chapsticks & chopstick, 

wrapping & rapping, gatherings, pay phones, tissues, hunderd dolla bills, 

paychecks, pogs, bogs, legos, puddles, pudding, scribbles, portraits, graphite, 

oil, stains, bad news, misunderstandings, leftovers, gas bags, next times, 

good times, dance steps, talk shows, indoor low level drum beats, steaks, 

post cards, missed encounters, close encounters, agony, traditions.

Our submission period is: February 9th-March 
10th, 2011

Email and snail mail submissions are accepted (Please note no 
submission will be returned)

Email submissions can be directed 
to:sprungformalkcai@gmail.com

Please put last name/title(s) of work in subject 
line

Snail Mail submissions can be directed to:

Sprung Formal Offices of M.Kirkwood

4308 Holmes Rd

Kansas City, Missouri 

64110

 

Beckett's Question: Is language a parasite and humanity its host?