Poet Lets Letters Flow Freely
The Daily Pennsylvanian
November 3, 2000
Robert Grenier advised all those who came to hear him speak yesterday not to worry about getting it wrong.
Grenier, an experimental poet, practices what he preaches as he regularly tests the limits of language with his sound and vision-based poetry.
Grenier read several poems and presented a variety of slides to around 30 members of the Penn and Temple communities at the Kelly Writers House last night.
One series of slides contained images of a small notebook with handwritten words on each page. The series celebrated a pond in Belize and speculates that life may have begun in this pond.
"I've never seen anything like it," College sophomore Cher Mayn Chan said. "I knew he did experimental stuff, but this was something really different."
Grenier said that much of the text in the slides arose from an interest in the shapes of letters and the thought that any letter can evolve from another letter.
He described his work as a "process of self-discovery of the shapes that were there all along."
Some of the slides were pictures of sheets of paper covered with overlapping words in different colors.
When asked about his writing process, Grenier said he interacts with the letters on the page and does not always plan each sheet of paper before he begins.
"When, in the writing of things, you begin to look at them as a reader, as if they were yours but not yours, that's a sign of things starting to light up," he explained.
Though he read and explained the slides at the presentation, he emphasized that the slides are not meant to be read aloud and that he hopes that he succeeded in leaving them open to interpretation.
One woman thought one of the hand-written words said "unite" when Grenier had intended it to signify "urine."
As a language poet, Grenier sought to disturb common sequences of words in his 1978 collection Sentences. The work consists of a box of 500 poems on 5 x 8 index cards, which can be read in any order.
English Professor Bob Perelman, a well-known poet himself, introduced Grenier as one of the "most significant figures in recent American poetry."
Perelman described Grenier's work as both literary, sophisticated and comic.
Grenier, in turn, said he likes to fuse "criticism with creative writing."
In addition to slides of his poetry, he showed pictures of a hillside in California where he used to go to write.
"The world is really too much," he said. "To try to equal it in mere human language is just... stupid."
Grenier's books include Dusk Road Games from 1967, 1978's Oakland and Phantom Anthems from 1986.