Phantom Anthems and What I Believe

DESCRIPTION: Bound to particulars that go thump in the type. If details just seem like leftovers today, then Robert Grenier’s work could nourish an eager family. It’s not that Grenier highlights the everydayness that spares us in our attention to the bigger picture, rather he shows us that picture is punctured with just the sort of slights, slangs, and twists which often skewer the usualness of daily events. Everydayness should never be confused with obviousness or our closest habits; everyday I pronounced his name "Gren-yay " until my pronunciation was corrected by someone who knows him (everydayness consistently gets it wrong). The pronunciation of bigger punctures is what I tend to notice in Grenier’s work.

There are some details that go beyond mere detailing, keeping attention from passing by. "OH sooner than I thought." Did we "OH" before thinking? Oh well. What is written off today is not detail but articulation. By articulation I mean that rhetorical vigilance towards accents and links: part and parcel of particulars. Hold on, sorry, I need to correct myself. I don’t want to lapse into petty semantic distinctions. What I really mean is that Grenier invests in the black sheep of pronunciation, too subtle or egregious for mere speech: the overarticulation. No longer writing "on" or "off," instead writing "and as." Overarticulation dashes writing while extending it, out-detailing the details (outwitting the ob(li)viousness of transparent speech). Overarticulation is that dash, that awkward addition, that writing-puncturing, writing-particularizing, writing-dashing. "SONG / o-u-/u-u-ni-/form-ity-o-/u-u-u-ni-/formity-o-/i-unit-de-/formity-u-/unit deformity."

pleasurable, since details are only in the exaggerations. Each overarticulation a micropolemic. "NUT/day dawns doesn’t if you rhythm fiend."

Yet overarticulation does not guarantee a richness of meaning, for at its worst it tends to be confused with hollering and aggravation. When maximized for the better, overarticulation highlights the acoustics. Overarticulation milks the language, accenting both the good and bad of disjointed lyricism. Writing-milking operates among the tension between opacity and richness, muddy and melody, density of obscurity and density of meaning, curdled, and potently fresh imaginations. A vital Ronell might call it "dialactate."

Articulations aren’t solely linguistic categories; etymologics locates "articulation" within medical discourse as physiological points of juncture, or, simply put, joints. "UNBENDING LEGS, agh, I’m getting/awfully/old/&/stands." Overarticulation, hyper-extending the joints, amplifying the punctures, dislocates language out of its socket, initiating a kind of semantic-arthritic: "a l w a y s h a p p e i e r." Grenier’s "scrawl" poems emphasize the function of the fingers and knuckles while writing, occasionally shifting from the right to the left hand: a maximization of hand-writing. It’s about time poets found themselves thinking in common with the doctors (from shamanists to William Carlos Williams). Rhetoric is anatomy.

Robert Grenier’s ‘scrawl’ is comparable to Stan Brakhage’s films which Brakhage described as poems.

Grenier’s ‘book’ is drawing, which has no other translation (‘reading’) than its pictorial being (‘shape’). Using Stan Brakhage as a foil, in the film Reflections on Black the film-maker has scratched with a sharp instrument over a blind man’s eyes so that a set of brilliant white stars shimmers on the film stock itself. Attacking the surface of the film and reflecting on the conditions of film-making is consciousness.

Grenier’s poems are drawings which are ‘drawn’ as if from the other side of the paper. As if he writes with his left hand.

(He actually did write some of the pages that way.) His text is scratchings on an original space existing only in that; and as if it were on the other side of the paper at the same time. Another sense of space is created.

In the book’s first section, the composition of the 8-1/2 x 11 pages is an act of politics. You’ve got to get everything onto the page, and it can only be 18 pages. (This section was originally published as an ABACUS issue, the format of which is 18 pages on 8-1/2 x 11).

The final episode is introduced by scratches of stars bursting on black leader, as if we too were seeing through the blind man’s eyes.

The reader of these poems has to decipher (as really seeing) them. Pages are sometimes divided by a line (center line of notebook), that have a reflecting upside-down ‘image’ on the bottom; that are the graphic rendition of poems which echo and in some way also ‘empty out’ the ‘other’ image. Or are just the next poem in the notebook.

They just exist in that space, which is also ‘non-translatable’ (in the sense of an act of politics) as not graphic or ‘fine art’ in its material or technique. In a sense, it can’t be translated (its opaque) because its xerox: both individuated and continually different and mass produced. It is as if the correspondences and reflections are produced from the text being a mass technique.

Grenier’s experimentation with xerox as graphic art is form which enables drama and ‘characters’ to be seen in a new way. Brakhage’s infants being born, or scenes of children playing with themselves are such an abstract form or ‘scrawl’.

Grenier’s text is a form of love poem comprised of three parts. In the first part, "What I Believe", the poet addresses Kathleen Frumkin; in the second part "Transpiration Transpiring", he makes "a little magic book" to endeavor to imagine "what else is in the world", and is cast on transformation itself, "only hope" in which this literal shape is the form of the world (such as in the drawing of the moon as a skull with the writing scrawled in that space "I’ll try to draw the Moon last night it was like this").

The finding of the world is the writing of shapes , moving to the (horizon) recognition that there are "no end to shapes" or translations in the word/world.

The third section, "Minnesota", constitutes a movement of integration in sound and shape, rising to a love poem to a loon (moon) and the loon’s love song to the moon. The latter occur on split double-reflecting pages in a simplicity of beauty arrived at only by the prior process of the (going there) decipherment of the handwriting.

These poems are an attempt to have the ‘word’ (‘world’) read as ‘world’ (‘word’) as a form of "societal function" or love. It is created by an author being made imaginary to, thus in a sense created by, a reader who translates.

CROW

started as arr

from the trees in the woods

rather dimly

attended to as bark

more familiarly

identified as the neighbor’s dog

by their house over there

where the kids walk probably

flew overhead as ark

UPSTAIRS OUTSIDE IN HEAVEN

roistrous unfurling of be-nighted

jet engine passage overhead

sound noise burning stars exhaust

UPSTAIRS OUTSIDE IN HEAVEN

roistrous unfurling of be-nighted

jet engine passage overhead

sound noise burning stars collapse

UPSTAIRS OUTSIDE IN HEAVEN

roistrous unfurling of be-nighted

jet engine passage overhead

sound noise burning stars aghast

MOON INTO

waning parcels

of heaven clouds move

dawn has the sky color

earth makes the sun land

DAWN AT MOURNING DOVE MOUND

for Kathleen Frumkin

doesn’t it just gust rigid

"of course it does" might by breeze of

greyer greener moon of light pink purple

principal able to articulate that some day

unknown seen not simply visualized eyed

greys & lavenders and browns & mauves

GO INTO THE COUNTING HOUSE / GOVERNMENT

& exchanges amongst themselves, banking

furniture, glass business & the fed world-wide counting

out some shillings ‘equal’ computer image shellfish bravado

oil-bearing shale at night, varmits underwater, cold, no problem

dispute over territory grievance against concept

of property, ownership, idee that sausage

words, lawyers, a National Bank can vividly summon

that a Corporation or Company could be formed

built of my blood & puritan dedication to work-product

with money that easily by people smitten

hardened to their task with vast popular support

for many years now in office, overbearing

apparently from a ‘stupid naturally’ & arrogant vagrant

brainwashed placeless raceless workhorse populace

that votes, that has been so ‘denatured’ as to

believe attend it lives in the land of the free

because it can spend its hard-earned

25c often twice a day on newspapers concrete

as if free speech with limits had anything to do with control

of the country by a soulless relentless Blue Demon capital

that creates conditions only insofar as Miles Standish

nobody can see through Al Davis

irregardless of whether AGH soothsayers

anybody knows full well what’s happening Shakespeare regalia

evil yellow metal "Yellow-Hair" vs. Black Hills

buffalo plains various fixed & warring tribes

count crop Israel & everybody fixed bad air

itself & profitable altercation, world-license

decimating & warring tribes foregrounding

perpetually threatening nuclear war

new neutron bombs Oregon comity

kill all the people, spare their homes

factories, stores, banks, streets, hydrants

for the ‘surviving’ Princes of the World

I MUST HAVE BEEN

a skeleton of a poem I knew

appeared to me ‘again’, I am

the only one to whom it mattered to

NEW MOON

the moon

will be clearly in the heavens for a discerning look

WINTER NIGHT HEARTLAND INTERIOR

for John & Eliza in Ann Arbor (March 17/18 84)

still winter burnt magpie

cold moon rising after Hamlet Henry James

chill breeze blowing red mad sets

stumps from the north across water glister

East Chicago space settled mon metal bedframe

land to the yellow south

skyscraper los day

puppets everything horizontal

on the sky line levelled spit

except charred crypts and molds

everything stands man alert

goes about his business loudly

as though skyscrapers vomit

nothing had happened had submissive

men nothing ever would except lip

everything kept on happening

business just as if it had been daily happening

skyrocketing in fact example anything skyrocketing

depletion into which desolate hickory missile

looking bacon southern Indiana lampposts Evanston groves

ROCKS UPON INCOMING TIDE

those that can read character

from aspect might as well be rocks

FOR ALICE

squall that’s operationability scouring leaves sundering

death so they can grow apart instead of being one big lead leaf

morning & aided in this by the wind & raining sky that’s blowing

from the West wildwood children in wool red in life no matter

leave them behind as everything grows & skyblue walnuts sour everything

by bowling ball you try to knock them all over by dying, right?

AMONGST OURSELVES

pages flapping

more winter beauties

feels like fall

silver side of light off the waves

from the horizon abeyance

still permitted to think of a page

set to & allowed to progress through from the left to the right

across the page is tops these times

& to keep it up horizontally

toward a total limit our by

now well publicized measures in Central America

your perhaps marching against Afghanistan or Arabia

like a small field of spears

perhaps across horizon Africa &/or into space to war

awful feeling of inevitability of horrible destructive contacts

presage already everyday in the workplace hate

o Boom it’s a big high tide at the no moon