If “a long walk” was not speech, Robert Grenier’s “WINTRY” certainly was:

 

German

Magnus massive

Dagny Dagny calling

call me call me

 

lazy prairie icy

streams, nicely

nicely nicely nicely Norwegians

 

vell I, well I

vell I, vell I

snowy vell I

vell I don’t know

 

oh vell I, oh well, I

well I don’t know

oh, vell, I don’t know

 

Ah yah

ah, yah

ja

a sod hut

 

One can almost hear Frances McDormand in the 1996 film Fargo speaking these last three stanzas while chewing a hoagie, battling morning sickness & extracting a leg from a wood chipper. Like the Coen Brothers film, which I’ve sometimes thought of as being little more than an extension of this poem by Minnesota native Grenier, “WINTRY” is obsessed with the dialect of the American far north. After its opening stanza suggesting a shortwave radio operator’s attempt to connect to the Other & a second stanza that contextualizes what follows, the final three stanzas focus on the smallest imaginable distinctions of enunciation & pause. If Paul Blackburn had perhaps best articulated a process for the transcription of speech as such, he nonetheless still focused on that speech’s spectrum of reference. For Grenier here, the articulation is the reference.

 

In 1970, Grenier was quite clear in stating the revolutionary nature of his intentions toward literature. While his “I HATE SPEECH” comment from the first issue of This*, the journal that Grenier initially edited with Barrett Watten, has become iconic in its role initiating langpo, Grenier’s comment there was more typical of what he was telling anybody who would listen in those days. In the same first issue of that publication, Grenier declares, again all in caps (& adding boldface in the place of italics), that “’PROJECTIVE VERSE’ IS PIECES ON,” very neatly erasing twenty-plus years of labor on the part of Olson, Duncan, Blackburn et al. “WINTRY” first appeared in that same issue of This & is reprinted on the first page of In the American Tree.

 

While Grenier was not the only person doing interesting new work in 1970 that was clearly already outside of – or beyond, if you prefer – the New American framework – Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge & Jackson Mac Low are all cases in point – he was the one person actively arguing for the position’s revolutionary potential. This is why, in retrospect, it has always been easy to identify the “origin” of language poetry. Grenier let everyone know early on that to investigate new alternatives required a break with a past, even as his “recuperation” of Pieces into a version of Projectivism demonstrated that this new model in his head was in fact insistently loyal at least to the abstract principles, as Grenier saw them, of one particular version of the New American perspective.

 

It would be hard to overestimate the impact Grenier’s poetry & perspective had on the writers around him. In the thirty years since it was first written, I doubt that there has been a week in which I did not find myself reciting “WINTRY,” all or in part. If there is an “Ur-poem” somewhere deep in my imagination, a mantra for what poetry might be, that poem is it.

 

 

* Green Apple Books in San Francisco is advertising a “complete run” of This, vol. 1 through 11 through Abebooks for $150. That’s a good price & the collection is said to include the samples of Grenier’s cards – “30 from Sentences” – slipped into This 4. But This published 12 issues, so this set is one item short.