Robert Grenier (born August 4, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is a contemporary American poet associated with the Language School. He was founding co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of the influential magazine This (1971–1974). This was a watershed moment in the history of recent American poetry, providing one of the first gatherings in print of various writers, artists, and poets now identified (or loosely referred to) as the Language poets.
He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4 published by Stanford University Press in 2010,[1] and was the editor of Robert Creeley's Selected Poems, published in 1976. Grenier's early work, influenced by Creeley, is noted for its minimalism. Grenier's recent work, however, is as much visual as verbal, involving multicolor "drawn" poems in special (and not always reproducible) formats.
His works include Sentences, Series, Oakland, A Day At The Beach, Phantom Anthems and OWL/ON/BOU/GH.
In an essay from the first issue of This, Grenier declared: "I HATE SPEECH". Ron Silliman, commenting on Robert Grenier's gesture some years afterward, wrote:
Thus capitalized, these words in an essay entitled "On Speech," the second of five short critical pieces by Robert Grenier in the first issue of This, the magazine he cofounded with Barrett Watten in winter, 1971, announced a breach - and a new moment in American writing.[2]
Grenier's recent "books" have been variously described as folios of haiku-like inscriptions or transcriptions. Examples of his current holograph poems can be seen on-line through the Grenier Author Page at the Electronic Poetry Center (see section below: "External links"). Curtis Faville (who co-edited The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner with Grenier) states that Grenier "has gone on to produce a new hybrid form--neither "poetry" nor graphic art—which treats words (letters) as a form of literal visual design, in which "legibility" hovers at the edge of apprehension".[3] He received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists award (2013).[4]
^"Introduction: Language, Realism, Poetry" from In The American Tree edited by Ron Silliman, (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1986; reprint ed. with a new afterword, 2002).
Ron Silliman on Grenier's minimalism American poet Ron Silliman discusses both Robert Grenier and American poet Aram Saroyan in the context of their minimalism (On Silliman's Blog, May 21, 2007). Scroll down to the comments section for an interesting history of Grenier's various writing periods and publications provided by American poet Curtis Faville
Larry Eigner Author Page at Stanford University Press The publisher of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4 offers extensive resources on Eigner's life to include reviews, descriptions, and a pdf file of Grenier's "Introduction"
