“It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors. Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ’s commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts.”–Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly
Jenny Grassl’s poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl
Kristina Marie Darling: The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field. In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing. What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?
Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.
There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today’s poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist. What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry?
JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry.
Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.
KMD: Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.
JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the
wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.
In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language.
KMD: What can poets learn from visual artists?
JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.
Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.
KMD: In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves. Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry?
JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman’s life in the shadow of monuments.
Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void.
KMD: What else are you working on? What can readers look forward to?
JG: Thank you for asking. I am deep-in with ideas of magic in everyday life, and how its suppression and absence can create alternate realities. I am writing about the bipolar condition, which although debilitating, can offer a symbolic world for the afflicted to work through for healing. This can be most effective as something approximating “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Yet there is power in rawness.
I consider also the madness of the sane world. This is perhaps more entertaining. I am interested in these double facets of health and disease. I have a poem about John of Patmos, the author of Revelations, who offered his hallucinations for literature and religion, strangely relevant to our symbolic understanding of apocalypse. The behavior of Benjamin Lay, who engaged in guerilla tactics to oppose slavery, was considered deranged. I take a look at his story. For balance, I consider a version of The Bachelor season finale. Magic and madness will merge with oncoming streams.
A Portfolio of Poetry by Jenny Grassl
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Author: Kristina Marie Darling
