"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
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.
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
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.
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.
