Significant contributions by Bob Grumman (February 2, 1941 – April 2, 2015) to American alternative poetry include insightful critical articles and reviews on minimal, visual, and mathematical poetics; publishing alternative poetry books and anthologies of various sizes with his Runaway Spoon Press; and his role as a participant and cheerleader for mathematical poetry. He also composed visual and alternative poems passing the time test. The following informal survey, a gathering of poets, writers, publisher, and friends, covers these aspects and more of Bob and his works. Additions may be forthcoming...
Bob Grumman first came to my attention with an unsolicited submission late 1984 or early 1985. Hunting through the haystacks of Len Fulton’s The International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses for magazines publishing visual poetry, he found Kaldron. The approximate date is gathered from memory and page 135 in his autobiographical rumination on his multifaceted poetry interests, OF MANYWHERE-AT-ONCE. Over the span of Kaldron as an international visual poetry and language art journal I accepted 1 or 2 percent of unsolicited submissions. I sought works and selected from international exhibitions I curated. His submission was returned with a polite rejection letter that started a long, fruitful and at times contentious friendship. Bob loved to argue. Suggesting he send the works to Score in the rejection letter began his long working relationship with its editors who published his poems and critical articles. At the same time he had reached out to other publishers which set in motion other long time friendships and publishing relations. Through the years he attended events using mass transit visiting poet friends and meeting others thereby continuously adding to his impressive network of friends in alternative poetics and publishers over the years.
I never met Bob face to face, but we had long phone conversations. Our correspondence expanded when the internet opened its digital vacuum pipes for email. It would be five years after his first submission before I published two of his visual poems, both in the last issue, 21/22, page 23, 1990. These were also exhibited in Visualog 3, (of my international exhibition series) and its sister exhibition, Visualog 4, in Brooklyn, co-curated and added to by Bill Keith. Both visual poems at that moment in my opinion were his strongest and remain among my favorites alongside some of his widely praised mathemuku poems.
He began Runaway Spoon Press in 1987 financed by an inheritance that enabled the purchase of a xerox machine. Eventually 150 books and anthologies were published, including 7 of my collections. The books and chapbooks come in a variety of sizes. He also published broadsides. His major anthology is the “visio-textual art” anthology, Writing to Be Seen, 2001, co-edited with Crag Hill. Financial restraints ended plans for more volumes in the hopes of creating a major collection of alternative poetry. He published many of the important poets of North American and a few Europeans creating alternative literature, most of whom are and remain unassociated with academia’s academy.
Grumman was a columnist for Factsheet Five, 1987 to 1992; contributing editor for Poetic Briefs, 1992 to 1997; columnist for Lost and Found Times, 1994 to 2005; and his longest gig, a contributing editor for Small Press Review, 1993 to 2015. Three readily available samples of his criticism: MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing (https://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm); Blends & Bridges, Bob Grumman, My Favorite 10 (http://www.bigbridge.org/bgtenfavorites.htm). Lastly there are his mathematical poetry articles, M@h*(pOet)?ica Mathekphrastic Poetry on Scientific American blog I’ve collected and made available. (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13niG2j-0JcoYDxLuqJWhvaNBm38T10p1). In the folder also is a collection of his visual poems, Xerloage 30: A Selection of Visual Poems. It can also be downloaded here http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage30/by/bob_grumman which also contains an in depth review of the collection by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Through this site one can also purchase a printed bound copy.
A reader quickly encounters Bob’s neologisms in his critical and other writings. I did not go deep into the neologistic discussions Bob maintained with others, pro or con. I will leave it up to others and his legacy whether or not they endure. A couple of close friends and I shared concerns. Those of us objecting to many of his neologisms thought or felt they distracted from his insightful parsing attempts to categorize sets and subsets of alternative, multimedia expression. Long had I been uncomfortable with the term avant-garde. I preferred alternative poetry; he went for otherstream which has gained some traction. In phone conversations and correspondence my primary complaint, his hyphenated polysyllabic complexity, was raised as a dyslexic and one desirous of simplification. Visio-textual art is one of his neologisms we debated. I settled later on my own umbrella term to cover all visual art expressions using text, visual text art. Many terms constantly moved in spelling. Others were tossed and replaced in his never ending journey to nail down the purposefully ever illusive shape shifting alternative forms and sets constantly invented and then turned inside out by countless adventurist alternative poets. I and many others admired his detailed critical scrutiny of alternative poetics and his desire to open a wider discussion through his categories. In this regard he had long combative exchanges with various academics who he felt ignored alternative poetry and its nuances. I do not know of anyone else attempting such a detailed analysis. The task he assigned himself is and remains difficult and unfulfilled by anyone. The attention to detail and extensive networking earned him a working relationship with Richard Kostelanetz on A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, 3rd Edition.
When working on my A History of Visual Text Art, I discussed with Bob new findings on Henri-Martin Barzun and others; he was hesitantly interested being influenced as most others by the orthodox misinformed Apollinaire and Marinetti narratives. He was helpful on some details regarding Cummings of whom he had intensely studied and discussed as a major influence on American alternative poetics. Bob gave me the impression he was essentially North American centric in criticism and publishing given most of his publishing is works by North Americans. I do not fault this especially now after encounters with Latin American and European academics who assume without any deep knowledge that America as empire is incapable of producing consequential alternative literature. These encounters also provided an insight into a certain academic mind set that the only literature of consequence is that which is dense enough to make a career off of for the production of reams of publishable commentary. Thus, minimal poetry and its influencer, haiku, are suspect, deemed shallow, and of little consequence. As an academically and self trained historian often I had disagreements with Bob’s caviler attitudes and assumptions on actual facts outside his intense focus. He accepted, it seemed, shallower narratives when it came to pre WW1 visual art text history and older, the roots of haiku, another of his deep interests. But, we all have our blind spots.
Our understanding of haiku and its tradition differed. This made for a few ruckus conversations. Bob admitted his lack of historical interest, almost dismissively; the focus for him was its influence on modernism’s and other poetics isms onward into the present. This does not alter or diminish his basic thesis that haiku’s force field compressed the North American short poem into splinters creating multiple alternative minimalist expressions. I wonder what the American master of the American short poem, Emily Dickinson, would have gifted us had she known of haiku. My readings of Japanese monk haiku are many but in translation. Basho removed haiku from renga, which was its opening stanza, making it a poem itself expressing a kensho moment or higher, a satori span. In such spaces of consciousness or higher awareness language does not and cannot exist for in the no there there, there is no duality. One is united with the all or the none not a none. Once returned from that moment the haiku expresses the trigger. A trigger example is Basho lifted into a moment by the renowned frog’s splash much like in a ch’an poem moment the trigger a monastery bell ring. My understanding is that the original intent of haiku by Basho and others soon after became an expression kin to a ch’an poem of such moments to a master as proof of such a moment. Eventually haiku moved into the wider poetic field of Japan and later exported as an expression of an “aha!” moment, an insight beyond normal day observations, but not a kensho moment.
This far reaching impact of haiku on the American contemporary short poem, the full spectrum in lexical, concrete and visual poetries, beginning with modernism is another of Bob’s deep studies, critically and compositionally. Once absorbed, haiku’s variety of evolutionary streams created a force compressing the American short poem into still more concise forms, lexical and visual. His book, From Haiku To Lyriku: A Participant’s Impressions of a Portion of Post-2000 NorthAmerican Kernular Poetry, 2007, attempts, unlike any other I know, an overview of the evolution from haiku into the constellation of new forms in North America. These he groups as kernular poems and other divisions in an attempt to categorize and trace from compressed lexical to alternative types. The innumerable examples collectively present an anthology of short lexical, concrete and visual poems embedded in detailed analytical commentaries sourced from his wealth of knowledge gained through countless hours of critical writings for the various publications to which he contributed.
Mathemaku, another of Bob’s neologisms, is perhaps his best known. It is the title of his mathematical poetry, his hybrid of mathematical and haiku poetry. Like other alternative poetries, mathematical poetry is a type with many approaches from strict to loose definitions. Some practitioners desire actual mathematics occur within the presented work. Others, such as myself, are for a more open expression that also allows for conceptualization and suggestive nuance fussing two or more visual text art types forming a field. Others contend any poetry with numbers or mathematical symbols belongs to this type. In his own words, Bob gives us his view http://www.oocities.org/soho/cafe/1492/expla1.html. Others in this survey discuss Bob’s mathemaku in detail.
Additional information:
Tom Beckett's e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e v-a l-u-e-s interview site, but just in case he doesn't - https://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/2006/01/interview-with-bob-grumman-by-geof.html. & Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino did an interview also, at e.ratio - http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/grumman1.html.
https://library.osu.edu/collections/spec.rare.0090
Books catalogued separately: https://library.ohio-state.edu/search~S6?/aGrumman%2C+Bob./agrumman+bob/-3%2C-1%2C0%2CB/exact&FF=agrumman+bob&1%2C25%2C
https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/bob-grumman/
For samples of mathematical visual text art works see “Mathematical Painted Art, Visual Poems & Anticipators,” p 198 of A History of Visual Text Art.(https://www.karlkempton.net/p/blog-page_97.html)
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