Twenty five years ago, Whale Cloth Press published what at the time was the most radically innovative poetry project I’d ever seen, Robert Grenier’s Sentences. Rereading it today, Sentences still qualifies as the furthest anyone has pushed poetry & form in the investigation of the world:

JOE







JOE

The above is just one of 500 cards, 5 inches high, 8 inches wide, text typed (in “landscape” format) in Courier from an IBM Selectric typewriter, housed in a dark blue cloth covered folding box. You could shuffle the cards & there was a rumor that no two boxes had the works in the same order. This was, Whale Cloth & Grenier seemed to be insisting, a book.

It was as if nobody had ever taken the time before Grenier to just simply look at the language. When his work first began to telescope down from the mid-level lyrics that he was composing as this one-time Robert Lowell protégé left Iowa City for a teaching job at Berkeley – a job obtained in good part on the recommendation of James Tate & Richard Tillinghast – it occurred in a climate in which the most radical book anyone had ever seen or even imagined was Robert Creeley’s Pieces (Scribners, 1969). At the time, I recall poetry students around San Francisco State being utterly stunned by the Creeley book – “how dare he call that poetry?” But within less than two years, Grenier was starting to write works in Berkeley that made Creeley look as mainstream New England as Robert Frost.

I first met Grenier when I transferred to UC Berkeley for the Spring term in 1970. I had dropped out of San Francisco State after the debilitating student strike that then-governor Reagan had consciously used as a model testing ground for ways of defeating student activism. Every single teacher of any true value I had had at State either was fired or quit. One professor I knew was so freaked out by the presence of cops on horseback on campus that he was carrying a pistol at all times. The new university president, S. I. Hayakawa, was a linguistics professor whose class I’d sat in on a few times until it became apparent that he hadn’t read a book in perhaps 15 years. It was obvious he was little more than a puppet for the governor, who originally hoped to use SF State to help get his secretary of education Max Rafferty elected to the U.S. Senate over incumbent Democrat Alan Cranston (Charles Olson’s one-time boss). The only thing that the student strikers did intelligently that entire fall had been to wait until late on Election Day itself to go out on strike, thwarting Reagan’s original plan. But from that point on, it was a debacle as the state showed that it was willing to use whatever force was necessary to break the strike.

Because I didn’t have enough units to transfer as a junior to Berkeley right away, I detoured briefly to Merritt College, which in those days was still in the flatlands of North Oakland, the “bad” neighborhood in which my grandfather had grown up. I took as many of the my breadth courses as I could get out of the way, working as a TA for an anthropology class (the one time I ever held such a role in college), then moved to Berkeley in January 1970 where several people I knew, including David Bromige, David Melnick & my wife at the time, Rochelle Nameroff, were already students. I arrived just as students were preparing to submit manuscripts for a series of undergraduate writing contests. I dutifully gathered my work into a couple of different clusters and asked around what people thought about sending different groups to the different contests. Although the judges for each contest were announced at the outset, I was so new that I didn’t know any of the faculty to speak of, with the lone exception of Robin Magowan.

One of my clusters was a group of short, Williams-esque poems, the core it would later turn out of my first book Crow. Both Melnick & Nameroff suggested that I should I submit that group to the Joan Yee Lang Award contest, whose judge was Robert Grenier, somebody I’d never heard of before. “He likes short poems,” Melnick insisted. This turned out to be excellent advice, as I won the award before ever having met the judge. One day later that Spring, however, Grenier introduced himself to me at Serendipity Books, in those days a great poetry bookshop on Shattuck in North Berkeley. “I thought you were Arthur Sze,” he told me.

I didn’t really get to know Grenier well until the following fall when I attempted to do a special study course on Louis Zukofsky only to discover that almost nobody at Berkeley had ever even heard of the Brooklyn Objectivist. James E.B. Breslin, whom I’d asked first, sort of knew the work but was clearly intimidated by it & wasn’t sure he could help me. He not only recommended Grenier, but – as it happened – gave me some excellent advice about getting the class approved by my advisor, arguing for Zukofsky’s relevance in terms of his association with Williams, whom professors in the department had heard of before. Grenier agreed & the Williams ploy worked. It was only a matter of weeks before I became a full-fledged member of the Cult of Grenier.

In 1970, it was evident to any of the young writers around Grenier that he was rethinking poetry from the ground up. If Creeley’s Pieces offered poetry as it might descend from Louis Zukofsky’s short poems by way of Ted Berrigan, Grenier was adding Stein into the mix as well as the Williams of Spring & All, which Harvey Brown had just published, suddenly demonstrating the good doctor not only to be the epitome of a speech-based poetics that everyone had recognized for the previous 20 years, but also the most consciously radical critic of poetry of the first half of the 20^th century – which came as a total surprise of many. On top of this, Grenier wasn’t merely mixing influences in a new way – although he was doing that also – he was gradually insisting that anything, anything, looked at closely enough could become poetry. His works from that period – which make up the first two pages of In the American Tree, were working themselves down toward a new level of minimalism not seen before in American poetry:

a long walk

a long

walk a long

walk a long

walk along

To poets raised on the writings of Duncan, Spicer, Olson, Creeley & Zukofsky – which is exactly where I was coming from – the sheer gait of this poem, with its deliberately limping prosody, was like an explosion in the face of everything I’d ever known. This was not speech.