I promised a while ago I would post about Robert Grenier (specifically, a link to his scrawls, also referred to as his "illuminated poems" or "holographs"), and here I am fulfilling that promise.
Silly as they look at first, I was initially skeptical about the scrawl poems (though having loved for a while Sentences, probably his masterpiece, a series of Saroyan-esque micropoems written on index cards, a digital version of which appears here), though I think one begins to understand in a new and immediate way, if only intuitively, the difficulties of written language seen at its near-ultimate extension.
Silliman sez:
What seems to interest Grenier most [in the scrawl poems] is the making explicit of the “coming to recognition” process of reading. He is really fascinated at the idea of identifying the instant a word “pops” into consciousness & poem after poem functions to locate precisely this moment.
Which feels right to me, although I have maybe a half-sense that there's a fair amount more to it that I can't put my finger on, whether about language as a kind of AI that's become more intelligent or pregnant with possibility than its inventors, or about written language's ability to replace the world, or at least spoken language (after all, Grenier is famous for "I HATE SPEECH", which, me too), or both –– or something.
About the above holograph, Grenier writes:
Whether drawing poem texts like 'the one about crickets' (no. 39) accomplish (or help accomplish) whatever it is they are otherwise 'saying'—so that seeing/reading "crickets" a reader may hear 'crickets themselves' (& even be able to literally go ('by ear') "across/the/road"?)—remains an animating question.
I'd love to hear what you guys think. A correspondence interview between Grenier and Charles Bernstein is here.
--Ryan
After much deep thought and in light of the interview, here is my critique: they are too easy to read.
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