Robert Grenier (poet)


Robert Grenier is a contemporary American poet associated with the Language School. He was founding co-editor of the influential magazine This. 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 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, 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 formats.

Life and work

Robert Grenier is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Iowa Program in Creative Writing. He has taught literature and creative writing at UC Berkeley, Tufts, Franconia College, New College of California and Mills College.
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:
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. Curtis Faville states that Grenier "has gone on to produce a new hybrid form--neither "poetry" nor graphic art—which treats words as a form of literal visual design, in which "legibility" hovers at the edge of apprehension". He received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists award.

Selected publications

Books of poems