Wandering Lines: Robert Grenier’s Drawing Poems

Robert Grenier is a contemporary poet whose latest hand-drawn work challenges the margins of poetry and tests the boundaries of recognizable language altogether. Yet, as idiosyncratic as Grenier’s drawing poems may seem, I argue that they are in fact the logical extension of an important development in modern poetry toward the spatial reorientation of the page, such as one sees also in Larry Eigner. Through the disruption of the poetic line as the fundamental instrument of order and control, Grenier’s drawing poems subvert the gridding of conventional language and undermine the poetic text itself as a site of privileged knowledge and authority, opening up the possibility that there is something productive in non-knowledge, in interruption, or even in error as an epistemology in itself.