I’ve been struggling with Robert Grenier’s Sentences since a while ago. It’s taken so long largely because I’ve been involved in oddling other tasks & hoo-has.
Sentences is odd, fragmentary. Here is a poem:
ocean is
groceries
The import of that poem could vary greatly, depending on context—this is one of the things which, while probably appreciated, I think has been under-recognised by post-avant poets. I listened to an interview, a few weeks ago, that Charles Bernstein conducted with Robert back in October. (Robert burps.)
There’s always a little bit of a lie involved in converting speech to text, & that’s part of what Robert (’I HATE SPEECH.’) is sometimes addressing. His interview is particularly difficult to translate. Fairly early on in addressing Sentences, Charles & Robert look at a poem entitled ‘BIRD’:
I wonder if I do
The poem is in some way a birdsong (Robert does not know what kind of bird); the poet tries to sing it, but can’t, & finally breaks down into whistling.
When I was young, I had a sometimes stormy relationship with my mom, & would on occasion further irritate her when being chastised by whistling the intonation of her scolding back to her. (This was unwise.)
So:
ocean is
groceries
Whistle it. I found out, today, that Sentences was at some point Sentences Towards Birds. A lot of the action of the poems is simply in stress patterns… Some of them in reiterations, but some of them simply representative of phrases in speech—so representative, that a few feel like lyrics to post-modern folk songs.
There’s more, here, tho, than a pair o’ dactyls. Bob knows that there’s more to English than his “uninformed” ear can pick up in birdsong. The vowels are also roughly parallel, tho perhaps part of the point is that the ‘ea’ of ‘ocean’ isn’t quite the ‘e’ of ‘groceries’, & the ‘i’ is definitely not the ‘ie’. That sort of sound patterning is what’s going on in a lot of Sentences.
the horse wrestles
the hoss wrestlers
The movement of that /r/ clearly makes a difference semantically, but ti also changes the phonetic contours of the sentence tremendously.
But not all that passes is simple sound.
standing over backward
Three trochees, yes, but the phrase ‘bending over backward’ would equally have been three trochees. Clearly, this is meant to evoke that phrase. What’s going on?
Post a Comment