Sentences Toward Birds by Robert Grenier

Sentences Toward Birds
Robert Grenier

SELECTED BY AL FILREIS

Robert Grenier created a long poem titled Sentences. It consists of 500 5”x8” cards, one poem typewritten on each card, stacked in boxes that were handmade. I said “a long poem” but really this monumental artwork is 500 minimalist poems, and they can be read a few at a time, one at a time, all at once, in whatever order. Sentences doesn’t tell you how to have a reading experience.

Three years before Grenier created this great work, he created an earlier version of the project. It’s called “Sentences Toward Birds.” Here he printed 41 cards and put them all in an envelope.

I’m obsessed with this work. I don’t know what “Toward” means. The birds are nearly ubiquitous, appearing here and there in the tiny card-poems, sometimes right there in the printed words, sometimes off-stage (as it were). Are the birds flying toward the observations made in the minimalist expressions? Are the poems gesturing toward the idea of poems as bird-like?

Do the cards add up to 41 ways of looking at birds in their various forms and guises and effects?

One of the bird-card-poems reads this way:

                          sing songs to crop duster

This is the one I can’t get out of my mind. The birds are singing. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are being asked to sing by the poet. Not to us or for us—which would be the traditional lyric gesture. No, the song (the poem) is an ode to something else flying overhead. It’s mundane, agricultural, mechanical, noisy, unnatural, unlyric. Yet it is just as eligible—as a recipient of beautiful tonal inflections—as any word or phase that follows the “to” in the line. This, like many of the cards in “Sentences Toward Birds,” is a meta-poem: a poem about the poem as a song sung to anything.

Grenier, who has already admired the minimalism of the imagist William Carlos Williams, expresses two beliefs here: first, whatever we read, whatever is written as a script for what we read, is a song no more or less lyric than any other reading; and second, songs always inexorably direct themselves toward something and it doesn’t matter what that something is.

Beauty is everywhere. No ideas but in crop dusters.

ABOUT AL FILREIS

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon, Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. His new book is 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (Columbia University Press, 2021). He has taught the massive open online course ModPo.