The Visual Poetry of Robert Grenier will be the first full-length critical monograph on the visual poetry of Robert Grenier. Born in Minneapolis in 1941 and educated at Harvard and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Grenier has been creating visual poetry since the early 1970s. Since then, he has created nearly 20,000 drawing poems, which constitute a kind of visual epic of the everyday. Although the work is premised on exploring the most basic elements of linguistic representation and visual perception, it can be difficult for readers and viewers to access. The book’s aim is to offer critical guidance and historical background, while still respecting the visual and textual ambiguity that animates the work.
Paul Stephens is a scholar of contemporary literature and visual art. His first book, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minnesota, 2015), explores how avant-garde writers and artists responded to new communications and data storage technologies. His more recent work has been focused on minimal and conceptual art and writing from the 1960s to the present. He teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative and edits the annual journal Convolution.