On Andreas' retirement...

                                         "Don't lament or don't lament only: construct"

     (Charles Bernstein)

Andreas Gripp has recently announced retirement from writing and speaking, citing as causes age and a general uneasiness with the state of affairs in Canadian poetry. Fortunately, the great People's Poet has talked this way before (and who wouldn't faced as he he's been with continual rejection from the Can. Lit and academic crowds). I'd like to think, however, a poet's sensitive heart will get reprieve from the pain and hurt long enough to pen the next poem. It's what Andreas does best: record in exquisitely approachable verses the unjust slights always directed at the artist true to his craft.

I will reprint an article I wrote a few years back on his collection of verses entitled Anathema. It's my tribute (if indeed Andreas has finally stopped writing) to a friend of almost ten years and brother in verse. The poet speaks so eloquently of the disprized and underappreciated in his poems because he has always been one.
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Even when poems aren't named after people ,and perceptions not too narrowly confined to place and circumstance (though these are the attributes I admire most in Gripp's poetry), the effect of reading "Anathema" can be to find some rather surprising twists to stock literary themes of nature, death  (considered in this blog post) and the act of writing itself (the subject of the next). Gripp is a poet who can disclose all those curious windings of the imagination at work because they've been layered expertly into his work. I've identified so far two types of writing in "Anathema": poems like "A Week in the Life of Morgan", "Hildegaard's Tomb", with its attention to the individual, and the more stylized work considered below, distinguished primarily by artistic daring and design.

     And about the wind, the branches will bend

     from its affection

     Though the sun and the rain

     take the credit or the blame,

     it's the wind that roars

     like a neglected middle child

     receiving little thunder

     for its contribution to our lives

     (for it's the water, dear,

     that nourishes;

     the rays of our star

     that causes things to grow).

     And scribes of old and new

     romance the heavens,

     the seas that tickle feet

     upon the beach,

     whispering now and then

     of the wind's surging power

     to make the surf

     that pummels sand

     and draws our shores,

     strength reserved

     for the usual suspects,

     ignorant of the fact

     that the wind has had its fill

     of flapping flags,

     hoisting balloons,

     raising bubbles blown by children,

     keeping kites

     from knotting in trees;

     wishing to be something more,

     paradoxically less -

     gentler, yes,

     than even the breeze

     that guides our sails

     and bounces hair,

     nudging tiny

     seeds

     when farmers

     miss their mark;

     saving a moth

     by lifting it

     out of an awaiting spider's

     reach;

     taking sides, perhaps, heroically,

     but never tearing

     wing or web

     in the effort.

The poem presents wind as a misprized force ("a neglected middle child/receiving little thunder") that is reduced to softer, more poetically treatable qualities. How is this done? Dropping in importance from roar to a gently nudging influence on sands, seeds and webs isn't something wind does by accident; the change in character is a product of the power of expression itself to release a symbol's latent powers (something Gripp also manages to do remarkably well in "The Language of Sparrows").

Both tenor and tempo change just when the presentation of wind as a noisome presence "that pummels the sand/and draws our shores", and brief commentary by ignorant scribes end. The wind, by "wishing to be something more", actually becomes something less in the sense that letting go of cumbersome strength is the way to unleash its truer protective, nurturing side. Biblical or Taoist in inspiration, with its strength on display or "gentler,yes,/than even the breeze/that guides our sail", the wind symbolism used here is among the most effective I've seen in his writings.

Not afraid to use this type of thematic play (and ask for real attention from the reader), Gripp, of course, alienates himself even more from a CanLit verse culture that demands easier, more consumable popular writings. Without trying to make him into something he's not, it's still easy to detect in his work a tension between commercialism and a need for genuine artistic expression: between what  avant-garde theorists like Peter Bürger refer to as the  "ideological reproduction of society"  (what Gripp and I call CanLit) and more self-satisfying expression. A hip hop-inspired 'raving poet' style , lying on the extreme side of poetic popularity, seems to be an offshoot of this growing trend to merge art with immediate commercial success. For Andreas Gripp it's lyrical expression, balanced phrasing and the infusion of an engaging authorial presence that matter and these, paradoxically enough,  are what alienate him from the norm.

To be appreciated, whether in analysis or in the act of reading, the poems have to be clearly 'intuited' as unique expressions of a single living voice engaged with a variety of significant life-experiences. One of Gripp's recent poems, "Chatting with Death over Chai",another work of skillful technique, gives the poem the same sort of textual uniqueness 'wind' enjoys in the above discussion, a stable identifiable design that even among some wildly erratic turns won't ever threaten to break apart. It's what it is and will always appear to be: interestingly arranged typographical and literary composition never leading to anything too abstract or too wildly experimentalist. It's poetry that never fails to make an impression. And the impression here is that of a poem that tries to make dialogue with Death look eerily (but not too ridiculously) plausible. Given the poem's length I will consider sections of it.

     Chatting with Death over Chai

     I met Death

     for tea today,

     surprised by its

     invitation,

     sent

     nonchalantly

     like a post

     from a Facebook friend.

     It asked

     how I was doing,

     why I hadn't

     cared to call,

     or write,

     or even think

     of its existence

     in the days and weeks

     gone past.

     I said

     I'd been

     too busy,

     that Life

     snatched all my time

     (being the

     possessive sort

     that it is),

     telling me to hurry,

     to walk a little faster,

     put my heart

     out on the line.

In a macabre "My Dinner with Andre" setting Death is personified but also trivialized, the interlocutor treated casually and conversation with 'it' reduced to monotonous bits of  "Facebook" talk. Content is dry and  a little ragged; even a potentially momentous (allegorical) drawing up of Life-Death battle lines is comically passed over, as if the thought of treating 'Death' as anything but an amusing topic of conversation over chai is out of the question. This setting and style of talk, potentially comical if we forget what the discussion is about, frame the entire text.

     I confessed to Death

     that it nagged me,

     Life that is,

     like a spouse

     that cracks a whip,

     grinds me to the stone,

     imploring me to reach

     for unseen heights,

     failing to configure

     that from there

     I tend to fall,

     bruise and break

     on the ground,

     that it seems

     to disappear

     in the aftermath

     of plunging,

     returning to rasp

     sweet nothings

     in the time

     I start to heal.

The effect on reader of this absurdist staging is to cause some disorientation since what is perhaps the one topic that deserves to be treated definitively is made the object of endless description. Meanings seem to  have the flightiest regard for the language of conversation itself; the discussion format of the poem (in which Death itself is visibly 'absent') serves up speech as a series of mute half-expressions, a dialogue reduced to a virtual monologue, and generally bored expressionless exchanges instead of real engaging talk. Instead of meaningful literary energeia there is confusion bred of this intentional mocking of dialogue convention by the very participants who try to keep it going. The linguistic center that cannot hold can't but help turn communication into a free-fall that reduces everything to "sweet nothings".

     Life

     was once its friend,

     I hear from this jaded

     soul,

     extra cream and sugar

     in its ever-steaming cup,

     stinging

     from a throbbing hurt

     I didn't know

     it had,

     treated oh so frosty -

     like a neighbour

     that we see

     but never wave

     or smile at,

     one

     we've heard

     bad things about,

     lamenting

     its ostracism,

     our blatant hatred

     of its name,

     our avoidance

     at every cost,

     our refusal

     to look it in the eye,

     to hear its side

     of the story,

     it's claim it isn't

     so bad,

     it's been

     misunderstood,

     that's it's here to shield

     and shroud us

     from the wounds

     that Life

     inflicts,

Borrowing terminology from Charles Bernstein we might say Death's revealed not as ominipresent but as "omniverbal": not symbolic but "heterosymbolic" (My Way: Speeches and Poems). And that ghostly parti-coloured ("scarlet-lettered", Gripp says later) entity that Death's become, present everywhere but nowhere, is subject of an almost endless list of epithets the poet is eager to give, one following the next down the entire page (the typographical arrangement noted above). A portrait of Death that's as quirky as this, one moment the erstwhile friend of Life who's turned "jaded/soul", the next some self-pitying sot who says he's been misunderstood, may seem senseless, and poetically counter intuitive, until we remember that that's what strong unconventional poetry has always been about.

      that breath

     is the ultimate villain,

     a hero of sham and spell,

     Life's night of sleep

     a lie,

     our pillows but a tease,

     that only it,

     our scarlet-lettered

     Death,

     cold-shouldered to the bone,

     gives rest

     that won't be ruptured,

     time without a tick,

     that its bond with Life

     was severed

     by assumptions

     that weren't true,

     that Death

     was the cause of sorrow,

     we should flee it

     whenever we can...

And the list of second-hand reports about what Death is purported to have said or thought, continue on, seeming almost to spiral out of control. Dizzying in scope but essentially unfinished, poem strikes us as lapsing into verbal frenzy that is the result, ultimately, of collapsed subject matter and a misguided urge (every poet falls prey to sometimes) to have the last 'canonical' word: but, of course, it's what Gripp had in mind anyways.