Robert Grenier
Tony Trehy posted a message entitled “Robert Grenier at the Text Festival” to the British Poetics List, but what showed up in the digest version of the Brit-Po email was pure hexadecimal gaga. That seemed like an ironic comment all its own, given Bob’s commitment to the material signifier and his general distaste for computers. So I wrote to Tony to say Hey Wha? And, when he responded, I thought to post it here.
hi
Robert was great; we got on very well and he seemed to really enjoy this part of England. I wonder why it turned to code, it hasn’t happened before. This is what I wrote:
Earlier last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Grenier off the plane from San Francisco at Manchester Airport. Although having exchanged photos so we would recognise each other I thought to be on the safe side I would print out one of his recent drawn poems and stand with it opposite the arrival gate like people do with notices such as “TAXI – MR SMITH”. And something quite unexpected happened: virtually everyone who came through the gate paused to read the poem (without realising that it was a poem of course). I began to feel like I was doing a performance. One daft old American Fascist walked up to me, tapped me on the chest through the poem and said “I’m not Osama Bin Laden” - presumably mistaking Bob’s use of line with Arabic. But otherwise people seemed genuinely to be caught be the unexpected textual intervention. Another passing reader actually left the building and then returned to ask what it said. The start of a week of fathoming the meaning of Grenier drawn poems.
Bob (and his partner Sue) got off the plane last and we went for a breakfast of smoked salmon scrambled eggs. Probably you’re more interested in the ‘reading’ than my diary of the week, so I’ll truncate that to say that overall we recorded about 6 hours of interviews and conversations (which will be transcribed and put out into the world): Bob is a great talker and brilliant company. He was particularly pleased with the hanging of the nine-poems series we bought for the Festival which was alongside the exhibition “Different Alphabets”; in which he was most moved by Ed Ruscha’s “Time is Up”.
His remarkable ‘reading’ was more of a sharing of the experience of writing and reading. Bob sits in the audience and projects selections from a set of 64 poems spanning a year in his life in Bolinas, California. Imagining a reading where the first two ‘illegible’ poems took about 20 minutes working through, your heart might sink but the intensity of the works and Bob’s presentation style is absolutely gripping in a paradoxically understated way. His persona is self-effacing, warm, engaging and carries the gentle authority of the intensity of his investigation of his natural surroundings. The progress through the reading for both Bob and the audience is the process of grasping the thing itself, the actual experience he had at the moment of writing, not a representation but an approximation of Nature. The audience are actively part of the reading, invited to contribute and question throughout and developing ‘literacy’ in reading for themselves. Chiming with the theoretical position of the Text Festival, while rooted in the Poetry Context and often surprisingly lyrical, Bob sees his recent work as moving into the interstices between poetry and visual art. The reader can step over the fine line to simplistic ‘solving the puzzle’ and miss the thrill of the deeper experience of, for instance, AFTER/NOON/SUN/SHINE or the absolute approximation of birdsong in words.
The hot news is that Bob has been collaborating with a translator in Paris to create a French-English book edition of SENTENCES in which the mechanics of the original have been revisited and on occasion renewed through the lens of translation.
The gig was one of the key moments of the Text Festival and for those who couldn’t make it, I am happy to announce that I am starting to plan the next one, and finding the first very conducive, Bob will be returning with a very special exhibition and reading.
