Robert Grenier. 30 from sentences...[1976?]

The John Hays library reading room is a model of what a library ought to look like. For example, ceilings should never be lower than fifty feet, the architecture must carry the posture of a legislative assembly hall. Light streams through ivy climbing windows more than twice my height, covered with translucent offwhite curtains to shield the paper from direct radiation. Three employees work in silence, one sorting manila filefolders, moving so slowly as to seem motionless, the second wearing a breathing mask, looking through boxes of old sheetmusic, the third a student behind the desk watching me on a security monitor as I stand directly behind him and sign in. Giant tables made of mighty felled trees, varnish thinned by years. Above the exquisitely carved doorframe, bedecked with fruit and the head of Elizabethan angels, a gold-painted clock flanked by eagles tells the time in roman numerals: 10:10. 9 October 2003. Leatherbound ribbed volumes in wooden cabinets are fronted by wire mesh. White busts and a security camera monitor my intrusion into this timeless space. They make you wait for your poetry. It would be great to throw a frisbee in here, this place is stadium-sized, the wasted space bespeaks tremendous respect for print.

My book is delivered: Robert Grenier's "30 from sentences...[1976?]" according to the typewritten words on the cover of an envelope, part of a microcanon of multisequential print literature. This is part of the book Sentences, poetry written on unbound notecards in a box.

Let's read.

But first let's shuffle. (The book is presented so carefully in this environment that one is tempted to handle it carefully, with white gloves and tweezers, and clerical reflexes impell one to keep the pages collated as they were when you found it—it would be funny if everybody who read this copy ended up reading it in the same order, defeating the purpose of the book's unusual unbound presentation, the very feature that may have doomed it to lie unanthologized in this tomb.) 15 cards, each printed front and back with a small number of words, four inches by six, with one title card offering no publication information.

Silliman is the Groucho to Grenier's Karl. Disconnected phrases, some spoken, some written, an asyntactical stanza. A phrase in all caps set above a phrase in all lower case appears to be a small titled poem. Many of these make no impression on me, either banal or bewildering. A variety of strategies at play. Neologisms? Phonetics. Fragments. What images accumulate seem to be northern North America, Winnipeg, Minnesota, Iowa, dogs, small towns. One rhyme stands out like a rhinestone in a jar of buttons. Enjamb. Ment.

One has to read what is not there in order for this to be a substantial experience. What is not there? What is inbetween, in the potentially vast number of inbetweens? What is the effect of multiple reading orders? What is the difference? While there are a variety of types of stanzas, and types of types, a few techniques recur conspicuously. These recurrences form movements, and if the recurrences cluster than the whole book is given a shape. Buttons in a jar, if the red ones end up all on top the jar is different than if the red ones are spread throughout. Except that there is nothing here so unsubtle as the color red. That these pages seem to be from different poems is significant. If they were put in the same poem they would appear haphazard, inconsistencies foregrounded, a drawer containing no matching socks. The fact of disconnected pages gives this discontinuity a legitimacy—the discontinuity is not allowed to become the subject of attention, it is an irrefutable fact buried in the materiality of the object. Like the unknown, hypertextuality is followed to its extreme corners. A small library of nonsense that eludes simple composition. How I would like to be in the author's head as he writes this, jotting down part of something the grocer said, replacing the first letters of words, hearing a dog bark outside, striking the capital letter at the beginning of the line, perhaps rolling over to the nighttable and jotting down something stuck to the residue of dream, something he never could have thought of.