After Berkeley, Robert Grenier taught at Tufts University, then moved on to Franconia College, an experimental school tucked in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The move, as well as Grenier’s departure from the masthead of This, put him further outside of the scene, as such. At the same time, however, Grenier’s writing was developing rapidly. Gradually world filtered west of new poems that were being written not on pages, as such, but on cards. At one point there was a show of such cards, either at or near Franconia.

Grenier was hardly the only poet to be showing cards in a gallery setting during that period – Yoko Ono & Jim Rosenberg both had occasions to attach words to heavyweight paper to wall (& in Ono’s case ceiling) – but Grenier’s focus on language had expanded so dramatically during this period that poems like “WINTRY” & “a long walk” seem positively literary, in the old-fashioned sense of that word, by comparison.

This published a sampling of 30 cards in its fourth issue in the Spring of ’73. But it wasn’t until Michael Waltuch’s Whale Cloth Press published “the box,” Sentences, five full years later, that the scale & scope of Grenier’s work really came into view. It’s a project that I would suspect has had a profound impact on every reader who ever gave it serious attention.

I’ve written in the past about both Grenier (in Verdure 3&4) & Sentences per se (a review in the American Book Review in 1979) in the past & don’t feel the need to rehearse those arguments here, other than to underscore the degree to which Grenier saw things that nobody prior to him had envisioned as literature. In some ways, it is the very plainest of these poems that are the most truly radical:

twelve to twelve to one

A text like the one above is not only “about” found language, but presents a dance of symmetry at the level of syntax & asymmetry at the level of letters that will never settle into a balanced, stable whole. Like an optical illusion – such as a Necker cube – the poem will never resolve. There is more going on in these five words than in many books by normative “mainstream” poets.

Even the publication in a box-of-cards format was designed to unsettle any presumptions the reader might, literally, bring to the table. Michael Davidson used to tell a story about assigning Sentences to students at UC San Diego who would dutifully head up to the rare book archive, set it down on a table on begin reading through, only to have Davidson show up, come over to their table & begin shuffling the cards as the students struggled with their impulse to become hysterical.

Now the cut-up, regardless of whether you trace it back to Brion Gyson, Bob Cobbing or just Allen Ginsberg straightening up the papers on Bill Burroughs’ floor in Tangiers, likewise predates Sentences by some time. Grenier’s genius lies in specifically asking the reader to take on the consequent role of ordering the units. As such, each card thus must float free.

yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee
yah gee

is not building towards

TWELVE VOWELS


breakfast


the sky flurries

any more than it is toward

lakeshore spondee

or vice versa. By removing “before” & “after” from the book of poetry – or at least by rendering it visibly arbitrary – Grenier has in fact created “new sentences” in a way that had not been previously possible, let alone contemplated. Indeed, I’ve often felt as though I was given much more than my own share of credit for my talk, ”The New Sentence,” when something like Sentences demonstrates the degree to which I was merely stating the obvious, somewhat clumsily at that.

I’ve written with regard to the Objectivists that I’ve often thought that the poetry of the 1950s, from Ginsberg to Olson to the Ashbery of Tennis Court Oath, seemed much more revolutionary precisely because there had been a break in the historical record & that the moderating connection between the generation of Pound & Williams & these post-war poets was (temporarily) lost.* In something of a reverse dynamic, I sometimes think that language poetry has been integrated all too comfortably into the spectrum of post-New American poetries in part because its most revolutionary works, specifically Sentences, haven’t been more widely distributed. You cannot find it anywhere in Abebooks.com, nor even Grenier’s 1979 oversized (40” by 48”) poster – or, to be accurate, book in the form of a poster – from Tuumba Press, CAMBRIDGE M’ASS. Functionally, an entire generation of poets have come along who have only had occasion to see these works either second hand – in a library or someone else’s home – or excerpted in formats that cancel out at least some of the elements of the work, as in the 28 pieces contained in In the American Tree, the book freezing the order in spite of all otherwise good intentions**. 

All of this hopefully is soon to change. What’s occasioned my thinking on Grenier this week has been a chance to beta test a still unannounced site that, when complete, will make Sentences available in a fully equivalent electronic version, a wonderful solution. At one level this approach seems “obvious,” albeit ironic insofar as Grenier – like Clark Coolidge – has been one of the last poets to resist the onset of computing.*** There are still some bugs to work through but, overall, I can already tell that the site is going to be wonderful – and accurate to the impulse of the work itself. For example, each time a reader proceeds through the deck, the cards will appear in a new & different order. When the site is fully up & running, I’ll be certain to make a note of it here. If you haven’t yet read Sentences, the opportunity will soon be at hand.

* Thus Oppen has been misread on occasion as being a far more conservative poet of the 1960s than ever was the case. In fact, he was a radical poet of the 1930s who was being viewed from a very different historical context. The more interesting (if unanswerable) question is whether Olson or Ginsberg could have been who they were in a world in which Objectivism had not been erased.

** This explains the otherwise awkward title, “A Sequence / 28 Separate Poems from Sentences,” used in the anthology.

*** The irony is compounded as even Grenier’s most recent “scrawl” texts have been most widely distributed via the web.