As someone interested in mapping the stop-and-start iterations of experimental American poetry, I cannot help but situate the self-interrogations and cultural/political analyses of Jill Magi’s SPEECH in relation to Robert Grenier’s infamous provocation “I HATE SPEECH.”
As someone interested in mapping the stop-and-start iterations of experimental American poetry, I cannot help but situate the self-interrogations and cultural/political analyses of Jill Magi’s SPEECH in relation to Robert Grenier’s infamous provocation “I HATE SPEECH.”[1] Though sometimes cited as a rallying call for Language writing, the declaration’s context (e.g., the Berkeley Free Speech Movement) and afterlife (Grenier would go on to compose, among other things, drawing poems), however much a “breach,” as Ron Silliman called it, with the voice-centered p
The selected poems of Larry Eigner is just out from the series I edit with Hank Lazer at the University of Alabama Press. We are able to offer a 30% discount, so you can get this 350-page book for $17.
Eigner’s poetry is one of the splendors of postwar American culture. There is no more perfect introduction to Eigner’s sublime actualizations of the “sustaining air” of the everyday than this selection.
My foreword to the book is included in Pitch of Poetry. It is also on-line here.
Imprint vol. 23 no. 1 (Fall 2004) Published by The Associates of the Stanford University Libraries republished with permission from the author and Stanford
Convolution has just reissued this great 1979 poster, that should have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and gotten Grenier a MacArthur too. But it didn't work out that way. Robert Grenier’s poster-poem-map, originally printed by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press in 1979. 500 copies. 40”x 49”. Comes rolled in a tube. A steal at $30. It is ready to ship. Don't miss it this time around. Order here.
Left to right: image courtesy of Wesleyan University Press, from 'The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen,' edited by Michael Rothenberg, 2007; image courtesy of Bob Grenier; image courtesy of Hank Lazer.
From the beginning of my writing, I have been concerned with (floored by) the fact of a word, or a letter, as a thing, a physical, elemental, thing — and the act of contemplating such a thing. In the late ’60s, I noticed the poems of Aram Saroyan — one word, say, “crickets” — printed repeatedly in a single column, in Courier type, down the page. My first works were less poems or writing per se about something than memorials to the fact of words, that they appear and seem to signify.
Robert Grenier’s Sentences (1978, complete text) from Whale Cloth Press. In 2003, twenty-five years after its publication of the original edition of 500 boxed 5" x 8" index cards, Whale Cloth Press made available a web-based version of this crucial work. Before viewing the web version, please read the note on the web version of this poem.
Breadcrumbs would violate library rules, so I tore up notebook paper to leave my trail. I was in the Poetry Collection in the library of the University at Buffalo reading CAMBRIDGE M’ASS, a book-length poetry broadside, 49 by 40 ¾ inches, with about 275 poems by Robert Grenier scattered across it.[1]
Calligraphy Typewriters: 'The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner'
The selected poems of Larry Eigner is just out from the series I edit with Hank Lazer at the University of Alabama Press. We are able to offer a 30% discount, so you can get this 350-page book for $17.
Eigner’s poetry is one of the splendors of postwar American culture. There is no more perfect introduction to Eigner’s sublime actualizations of the “sustaining air” of the everyday than this selection.
My foreword to the book is included in Pitch of Poetry. It is also on-line here.