Bob Grumman, WOW

 

Michael Basinski




Thinking of Bob Grumman. Wow. Those were the days. I seem to recall it started with letters To Port Charlotte, Florida – home of Bob and his Runaway Spoon Press (RASP), which I Recall he said he started as a children’s book press. His innate playfulness and innocence were always wonderfully obvious. His “children’s book” A Strayngebook is marvelous, and I would read it to my daughter often with great delight. A Strayngebook set, I think set the parameters for all that came after. Then there were the conferences and meetings of poets, Columbus, Boston, etc. Bob was there. But he never had any money so he had to come on the cheap, which is to say, riding the hound: The greyhound bus. It is 1,450 miles from Port Charlotte to Boston and from Port Charlotte to Chicago: 1,263 miles. Those my friends are long, long bus rides, a lot of odd stops in out of the way places with an always changing bizarre cast of fellow travelers. Did he, like Kerouac, make ten baloney sandwiches for the trip? But he made these trips, repeatedly. Now, I think of Bob riding the bus, hour after hour, one day melting into another. Bob G. outside some 24-hour rest stop restaurant in some small Maryland, Pennsylvania Twilight Zone air thick with moths and insects buzzing around fierce bus depot light dreaming of poetry. It was his labor he engaged for poetry. So, Bob Grumman was a rebel with his feet firmly in other stream poetry. He was a true bohemian. He told me part of his livelihood was from his job as a pool skimmer. Bob lived poetry. I believe his supreme achievement as a poet and artist was his ability to create and to embrace new forms. New forms, from the size of RASP books to his own unique math poetry, to the space he created via RASP for aberrant types of poetic writing. He fostered creativity looking to forge nonrestrictive writing. He smashed into the rigid state of poetry and he did this as a pacifist. I miss him. Bob, I am just now waiting for the bus.




John M. Bennett




Bob Grumman was a friend, and an important presence in my life for as long as I knew him. What fascinated me about him was his enthusiasm in seriously considering all forms of experimental/avant garde literature, and making very serious efforts to understand it and to think about it. This included text poetry, visual poetry, audio and sound poetry, and many other forms and formats. He was relentless in his thinking and writing, a true enthusiast with no axes to grind. He was not a "critic" or theorist who tried to apply a prerset ideology or theory to a work. This made his efforts at understanding others' work especially useful and stimulating; it was especially useful for the kinds of writing he was interested in, to which no existing intellectual or scholarly apparatus would apply. His books about other poets were groundbreaking, especially in that he was among the very first to write extensively about all the new writing that was being born in the 1980's and 1990's. His own work as a poet was fascinating as well, for example his Mathemaku and related forms. His generosity was also manifested in all the books of others' writing he published through his Runaway Spoon Press, which included several volumes of my own, during a time when it was extremely difficult to publish anything truly innovative. I'll be forever grateful to Bob; for he was one of the first to seriously try to understand my at times very strange approaches to writing, and for his true friendship. He was a real mensch.




Geof Huth






https://dbqp.blogspot.com/?q=Grumman




Jake Berry




Where and how we met is lost to me. Probably through Mike Miskowski, Jack Foley or I could have seen something he wrote in a mag or a review in Factsheet Five. 

At any rate, what Richard Kostelantez has written affirms much of my own experience of Bob. He was taking care of his mom. He had acquired a photocopier. This placed him a step ahead of the rest of us who were saving our coins and hitting Kinkos late at night for special deals. Bob turned that copier into something that resembled his character - open, diverse, self-made, and independent. Runaway Spoon was something only Bob could have invented.

I can’t recall if it was a phone call or a letter that initiated me into his love of argument. Probably both. It wasn’t email. This was before all that. Amid our exchanging of histories and affections for various arts and artists he latched on to the fact that I had spiritual inclinations. They weren’t toward any particular religion, and certainly not any sort of fundamentalism, but Bob seized it as an invitation. At first I was reluctant, trying to avoid a confrontation, but for him it was sport. He sought argument but not agitation. He was direct and thorough but gentle and good humored. He was an atheist, materialist and very capable of producing coherent, logical arguments in favor of his position. Eventually, we agreed to disagree, but keep the topic open for further debate. There were several topics about which we had long running debates. I don’t think either one of us ever won one of them. Perhaps we kept them going because that was one of the fundamental elements of our friendship.

Bob was probably the easiest publisher I’ve ever had. You sent him the manuscript. He turned it into a book and sent you a copy. If you liked it he sent more copies and copies out the usual channels. He once told me one of my books was beginning to show a small profit and asked if I wanted beer money or more copies of the book. I took the copies.

If someone wrote a bad review of his work, or anything he published, they could expect a response from Bob complete with extensive argument. It was a game he played to win.

He labored over his own work - especially the sonnet about which he wrote a book including every revision. It was the mathemaku that seemed to delight him. For most of us engaged in what was then called experimental or even avant-garde (does anyone use these terms anymore?), we loved the moments of discovery, not knowing where a poem might lead. Bob didn’t work that way. He knew every twist and turn. He knew every point on the map before he charted the course. If you discovered something in his work that was not included in his account of it he would happily grant you the right to do so, but you would do so knowing that your interpretation was your own invention, not what he intended.

This sounds like Bob was combative. He was anything but. He was warm, generous and conciliatory. It was simply the case that he made sure he knew what he was talking about before he started talking or writing.

Several years went by after we made the transition to electronic communication and publishing when we were out of touch. There was no reason for this. He was busy writing reviews, blogposts and more mathemaku. I was busy with music and poetry. In that interim I published a broadsheet then an electronic mag called The Experrioddicist after his term ‘experioddical.’ He didn’t entirely agree with the liberty I had taken with the word he coined, but he supported it through commentary and reviews. We found one another on Facebook before it became the impediment it generally is now. Neither of us cared for the software, but it was another format for presenting new work to the world. I started a page there under the Experioddicist rubric and asked him to post something. He once again questioned my extension of the terminology but supported the work that appeared there.

We planned further collaborations - publishing as well as poems or whatever we could invent. I knew he’d been through some health issues, but he had recovered. Then one day an email arrived that said Bob was gone the day after a checkup had given him a clean bill of health. One of many things we agreed on was that the medical establishment was frequently wrong. I wish it had been right this time because I miss Bob’s presence. We need his work, his voice, his insistence that we keep all portals open. I’m looking forward to one day buying a copy of the complete mathemaku and working my way through each one, knowing that I am probably getting them wrong.




Márton Koppány




Bob was special. One of the best creatures, most innocent souls and sharpest thinkers I've ever known or known about. His unique mathemaku will grow in time. And for me he was a very close friend and an invitation into visual poetry for two decades. I'll always miss him.

This is how I got in touch with Bob in 1996. I was living in Milwaukee with my wife who was an MA student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Based on info picked up at Woodland Pattern, I started sending out my old black and white sequences (written in the eighties) to different magazines and presses, Runaway Spoon Press among them. Bob kindly reacted, and he brought out a small book of mine soon, which became my first book ever. Had the "another submitter" not sent Bob back the letter meant to me, we wouldn't have gotten in touch - or would have gotten in touch much later. Chance had a role, as usual. Bob calls himself "maximally incompetent", which is of course the opposite of the deeper truth, but he liked to belittle himself and to make jokes about himself, and that is something I always loved about him and found very relieving. He was maximally competent, but never played the power games.

This is the cover page of Bob's book in Hungarian, edited and translated by me, and published in 2000 by Kalligram (a small press in Bratislava). It contains his essay on MNMLST poetry plus a good selection of his early mathemaku. Bob was also included in the three special issues of Kalligram Magazine, brought out in the 1990s and early 2000s when I had the opportunity to work for that small press and realize a few projects with them.

SPR May-June 2015

Richard Kostelanetz

(BG d. 2 April 2015) 

He lived modestly next to a creek in Port Charlotte, FL, in a small house he inherited upon the death of his mother with whose care he was entrusted by his family. Between the house and the street was a car that didn’t move, because it served as Bob’s external storage. Inside the house was a literary workshop with manuscripts and publications scattered about. Tall and wiry in build, Bob bicycled everywhere, even to the classes on “shop” that he substitute-taught at the local public schools.

Growing up in Norwalk, Connecticut, where his family had a certain prominence (as one bridge over the Merritt Parkway is marked “Grumman Road”), he decided not to go to college, instead enlisting for four years in the US Air Force. He never spoke about that experience with me. I gather that, not unlike other aspiring writers my age, he moved to Los Angeles and tried to get into filmmaking without success. Eventually, he took a degree at Cal State-Northridge, where the poet Daniel Halpern and sculptor Betty Beaumont had gone a decade before, though both were younger than him.

One Norwalk anecdote I remember has him shooting baskets by himself when three black guys pull up to join him. One of them was Calvin Murphy, who went onto a distinguished college and professional career. As they agreed to play two-on-two, Calvin got the white guy. Bob’s memory is that Calvin’s first pass was so strong it nearly knocked Bob over.

As a writer, Bob likewise played big league ball, albeit mostly in small provincial playgrounds. However, because both his critical prose and innovative poetry were strong, common understandings of the new poetries in our time will acknowledge him. Nobody else, in my considered judgment, read innovative poetry as closely or imaginatively. For this last reason alone, his essays will be irreplaceable forever. Fortunately, his well-chosen literary executor Geof Huth is gathering his invaluable blog posts into a single source.

In his personal letters, Bob was forever apologizing for what he could not do—for how hard it was for him to get done his work as a poet, as a critic, and as a micro-publisher. I couldn’t understand why not, as he didn’t suffer from a visible lack of energy or culture. A few years ago, I tried to enlist him as a co-author or at least a collaborator of identifying “Small Press Classics,” which I thought him capable of doing off the top of his head; and though I kept his name in the manuscript, nothing ever came. Perhaps I should have given him a deadline, which I don’t do, even with interns working on a project, because I regard such as strictly for children who will never become adult.

None of my colleagues worked so hard to stay unrecognized. Refusing to promote himself or even his friends whose success might in turn benefit him—the latter a strategy at which some other contemporary poets are impressively skilled—I think. he expected to be posthumously honored for his integrity. Not so, except by me here.




———————




(2 February 1941-2 April 2015)

With his regular contributions to the periodical Small-Press Review and his book Manywhere-at-Once (1990), Grumman became a major critic of avant-garde American poetry. His strengths were, first, relating new developments to the high modernist tradition and, then, penetrating close readings of texts that would strike most readers as initially impenetrable. For instance, looking at George Swede's “graveyarduskilldeer,” Grumman notices, “Here three words are spelled together not only to produce the richly resonant ‘double-haiku,’ graveyard/dusk/killdeer//graveyard/us/killdeer, but strikingly to suggest the enclosure (like letters by a word) of two or more people (a couple–or, perhaps a// of us) by an evening–or some greater darkening.”

Very keen on distinctions, Grumman coined useful discriminatory categories where previous commentators saw only chaos: “infra-verbal” and “alphaconceptual” are two examples. He has also published many books of poetry, some of them featuring poems that mix words and numbers, which, with typical readiness to classify, he calls “alphanumeric.” Not only did his micropress Runaway Spoon rank among the most active publishers of the best experimental writing but his press's catalogue demonstrated how witty the conventions of a publisher’s book list can be.

Joel Lipman

PARTS OF PEACE




1.

Peace is an odd and easy thing,

on the big list at the top

and on my little list topmost too.




Everybody wants peace except those

who mislead us. We fear them and vote

them toys of power.




My favorite pieces are chocolate double-devil’s food, a piece of Cindy’s rhubarb pie,

those early pieces we never talk of but lie about, dream of and blush, and, oh!

I like a piece of the action, but better a peace every body walks away from whole.




Peace treaties I love only because I so hate war and

the bootdirt that dies for every nothing and

so I hate peace treaties while loving peace.




And speaking of the single heart

I give you the hot red peace of my garden’s rose blood bud.

I found peace in wisteria, peace walking the creek

softly calling my dog’s name.




I give you piece of mind, if only for the poet’s instant

of word, three of them lasting about 1 & 3/10ths seconds

– peace of mind –




then on tics cable, playlist

dings, rings, reminders, siri’s

and so forth.




2.

(This is a short section of the poem

where the poet joins the Peace Corps for two years

behind yesterday’s truce line.)




3.




Peace is a political poem with a word,

for example, ______________________________




put “Gaza” there, “Guantanamo” “Nixon”

perhaps “Putin” ”Ladin” “Supreme Court” “abortion.”

So many killers.




But it’s not politics this poem wants, it’s peace.

Bicycle wheelspokes want peace, kayak paddles do,

my purple heart scrapbook, blue, mauve and faded.

That sentimental puppy eyes creep out get well soon card wants icky sad peace




and I won’t spend life in a theme park,

no to Clint Eastwood’s image for mayor,

celebrity crap sucks –

I get along with my neighbors, the batshits among us,

don’t accept capital punishment or public death theatre,

bombings, hate, rape, snuff, execution, slaughter and the like.

And there’re few people I’ll ever trust with my peace, I mean given

all those skyscraping corps and power grids, toll roads, sky specs,

shipping containers, blinking conspiracists, survivalists, even

stars, bars, pizza and nazis – gad!




Daily newspapers scare my hair off and are seldom trustworthy.

Would you elect Sinclair Broadcasting or USA Today King of Peace?




4.

So, were I a seer with other than tumbled vision, I’d say

watch out, citizen,

beat feet.




When bigshots start talking up peace

someone’s about to go to war.