Harold
dying
sleeps
sleep
*
Susan
daughter
of Harold
teaches
Robert
Grenier was good enough the other day to give me a tour of his current
hand-crafted poetry, of which the two above pieces stuck with me so deeply that
I woke the next morning as though dreaming their words. But words, as anyone
who has read Grenier's "scrawl"
works in recent years will realize, represent just a fraction of what is
going on in these poems.
Each of the
two above pieces (typed here entirely from memory a day later) is hand-drawn
over two pages in a hardback sketchbook the size of a trade paperback, each
word printed out in Grenier's curiously inscrutable block letters in a
different color. The first three lines of each piece are heavily overlapped,
with the last one somewhat freer. One doesn't so much read these poems as one
does fathom them — it takes a few
minutes literally to recognize what exactly is being said.
This is
not, I think, accidental. It puts the reader into the position of getting to
each word slowly & as if a discovery, a process that more or less mimics
Grenier's own act of writing. Typing them, as I do here, does these works no
justice whatsoever. Although, doing so, I come to realize that what enables me
to remember them is the power – the emotional power – of the long “e” toward
which each piece flows.
The
sketchbook & these hand-drawn works represent a one-of-a-kind technology
that I associate with the visual arts, not with publishing, and Grenier did
have a show recently at the Marianne Boesky Gallery
in
Grenier's
attention to the world around him — there were pieces in this sequence about
the wind, on the beach & above the eucalyptus trees in Bolinas, that I wish
now I'd remembered more adequately — is very close to my own writing process
& Grenier unquestionably has been one of the largest influences on my
poetry. His is perhaps the most private writing in the world, yet if there is anyone
anywhere who is writing more intelligently or intensely, I've not seen the
work.
