Score moved fast. Born in Berkeley in 1983, Score published six issues in less than three years, one out of Berkeley, four more out of Oakland, and one out of San Francisco, Score 6, an issue featuring J. W. Curry’s work, shepherded into the world by co-editor Bill DiMichele while the other two editors, Crag Hill and Laurie Schneider, were spending the summer of 1985 in Ireland and England.
Score was four or five issues old when Bob Grumman dropped, unexpectedly, into its orbit. Score’s network was flung worldwide; mail art and literary journals such as Karl Kempton’s Kaldron in the U.S., Julien Blaine’s Doc(k)s in France, and a whirlwind of publications coming out of Canada, Italy, and Australia provided an intricate map of the international network. But then, unbeknownst to us, Bob Grumman, thanks to a referral by Kempton, landed fully-formed, it seemed, as a critic, into our cozy world of visual poetry.
After a modest query about submitting to Score, Bob’s prolific letters were voluminous (always multiple pages), usually including painstakingly close readings of visual poems published in Score, Kaldron, Velocity, Photostatic, Lost & Found Times, and other journals and zines. His intense attention to the poetry we cared about was validation like no other we received since our contact with Kaldron following publication of Score 1, and his engagement was contagious. We had read more than enough in his letters to ask Bob to write an essay for Score, on material of his own choosing, whenever he was ready.
Bob Grumman’s initial appearance in Score was issue #7 (see above), his first published critical essay. “Excursion Through Picturing Verbalizations, Verbalizing Pictures” marked him as one to be listened to (no one at the time was reviewing visual poetry the way Bob was, work he continued in Small Press Review and other journals for two decades), to be learned from, and to be argued with (especially around his eccentric neologisms, “vizlature,” “vizlation,” and “illuscriptation”). First and foremost, for all of us in this survey, he showed abundantly that our work mattered.
Bob focused on a variety of visual poems whose letters he contended created images that then metaphor[ed] [his verb] pictures of moons, mornings, fornications, and circuses. The essay begins with a discussion of the first poem from e.e. cummings 1935 book No Thanks. The first line of 12 is “mOOn Over tOwns mOOn” and the last words are “ToWNS/SLoWLY SPRoUTING SPIR/IT.” The typography—the topography—of the poem, the movement of lower and uppercase letters across the length of the lines, Bob argued mimicked “a moon’s response to its night’s recession. At the same time the poem discusses, and its letters metaphor, the dawn’s lighting a town large, alive—spirited.” One of the hallmarks of Bob’s reviews was how he walked readers through the poems he was reading as if they were at his side, valued confidants, his critical prose chatty and welcoming.
Bob was adept at making connections across poems and poets, so it was no surprise to see the discussion move to an extended reading of Ronald Johnson’s iconic concrete moons from Io and the Ox-Eye Daisy, touchstone work for Bob and so many other visual poets. The poem is comprised of ten frames. In this passage, Bob focused on the second frame where above the black letters MOON on the white page a large white O rises in a black field (see below), the figurative moon born out of the denotative “moon.” In his commentary, he animated the static, arguing that the large size O “helps energize the reader vigorously to assimilate the image, to recognize it back to convention, to unhostile it through his awakened imagination to his disconcerted intellect.”
One of Bob’s gift to his readers was seeing and bringing us into the larger world/s engaged by the poems he wrote about. Following a cursory discussion of Guillermo Deisler’s “Visual Poem,” which also contains a moon, Bob warmed up—or wakes up again—with a reading of Aram Saroyan’s concrete poem “wwww.” He traced the poem from its first two lines “wwww/wwww,” similar to the zzzz sound sleepers may utter, through a line of four dots denoting the passage of time, then to “waww,” suggesting a baby’s cry, to “wakw,” then to “wake,” “the barely audible sameness of “wwww” growing through garble into ‘meaning,’ or full consciousness, and activity.” Another line of dots again marks the passing of time, leading to the penultimate word “walw,” then to “walk,” the final word on which the whole poem stands. “[S]o the poem states and acts out a person’s passage,” Bob wrote, “from sleep through waking into deed, with connotations of a sun’s similar passage into day, and of a baby’s into birth—and, in fact, all things which can begin, awaken, be born...”
The next passage discussed one of my typewriter correction strip found poems published in Kaldron 18. These strips were 1” by 2 ½” which I enlarged to fit an 8 ½ by 11 sheet (see below for a detail). He got at the intent of the “78078” right off—“little more than an interesting but simple satire on printed matter so devoid of emotional content that it blurs, irritates against the observer—print as anti-poetry spilling repetitiously out of factories.”
But as was Bob’s wont, he continued to read into the poem, allowing his imagination to flair at the word “crotch,” deciding that the poem was about “an act of fornication between a pair of pants and a pleated skirt.” Once he was fixated on that interpretation, he found the words “fly” and “Phal” and in the blurring of the words a “hint of erotic vibration.” Far-fetched, inaccurate? Neither, I thought; I still chuckle at the sheer playfulness of his reading/s.
Bob broke into the final sentence of the discussion of “78078” to begin a brief discussion of another poem by e.e. cummings and one by Ian Hamilton Finlay: “And the tension [in “78078”] between the text’s many numbers and its sensual-seeming words sings its read back and forth between technical diagram and emotional experiHOLD EVERYTHING! THE CIRCUS IS HERE! !” I can’t think of many other critical writers who would be audacious enough to truncate one discussion so that he would have space for another.
Bob chose these two pieces (see below) as examples of poems that again metaphor their meaning through the actions of their letters, words, and phrases across the page, the cummings’ piece, “mortals)”, mimicking the mortality of trapeze artists, the last letters, “(im” joining up with “mortals)”, which is in the position of a title, the poem circling up and completing itself “through mortal deeds and mortal beauty into, up into, immortality—as its subjects do, and as Art does.” Finlay’s poem is comprised of the letters for the word “acrobats” layed out in diagonal rows, one row of “acrobats” swinging up from the bottom of the page while another swings from the top, both sharing an “s” in the right middle of the page, thus “metaphoring acrobats springing in and out of eachnesses.”
The tour de force of the essay is Bob’s analysis of Karl Kempton’s “The Wait/Weight of Inspiration” published in Score 3. Bob walked through the poem that transforms across 13 pages beginning with what could be a living figure (see below), a being with a body spelling p-o-e-m, leaning back to get leverage, then kicking up an O into the air (or a moon, a symbol of imagination, as in some of the other poems Bob highlighted in this essay).
The O falls and kicks up the letters p-o-e-m into the air, first taking the shapes of a pinwheel, then leaves or open books, until they begin to gather again into the crystalized structure of “poem,” then morphing into “poems,” ultimately forming a mandala (see below). This sequence Bob declared was “a poem become as well as a whole philosophy.” The elements of “poem” are alive, three-dimensional, each element energized, forming, in-forming, until together the poem resonates as poems, as more than.
Throughout this essay and in so many other essays and book reviews, Bob is daring and playful, which you can see on full display in his blurb on the back cover of Of Manywhere-At Once (see below), an autobiography/critical readings of a wide variety of poets and poetries, which he claimed was “the world’s first large-scale discussion of poetry to cover ALL extant varieties of it, including visual poetry, alphaconceptual and ‘language poetry’”. And it was the world’s first, as it only could be. Only Bob Grumman could have written that book, those reviews, those capacious and luminous letters that many of us have missed so much over the years. We cannot measure Bob’s impact on Score through its 19-year run. Suffice it to say it was substantial.
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