Jeffrey Grunthaner Interviewed by Spencer Everett

Jeffrey Grunthaner and I met years ago, in grad school. Few in our cohort knew what to make of his work. He offered writing that felt like a bag of nails thrown into the hidebound gears of the workshop model, writing that disrupted the genre of poetry and the conventional formal paradigms of the Poem. And so it remains. A triumph of jouissance against interpretation, Grunthaner’s writing is easy to love and hard to talk about. These qualities remain true as his practice grows to encompass music, visual arts, and curation, in addition to various writing practices.

I spoke with Grunthaner over Google Chat on the occasion of his new chapbook, Aphid Poems, published by The Creative Writing Department. In this work, Grunthaner’s language is verdant and effusive—he labors in the telling and gives generously. Yet the deeper we get, the harder we fall toward the mystery at the heart of the matter: "The night was / Reference to something / beyond night." At the moment you begin to think the language mystifies, however, you’ll find these portents brought down to earth, made goofy and embodied, free to enjoy and to be enjoyed: "Gooey grassroots opened into a narwhal belly of ludicrous delight."

It might be just such ludicrous delight that saves poetry from the nightmare of history, from philosophical impasse, and more precisely saves poetry from Poetry itself. At a time when many poets seem desperate to justify their practice through rational and often sentimental appeals to morality, Grunthaner’s work makes no such claims directly. Instead he offers a sense of presentness that is vital and vitalizing. Yet something ghostly still looms, a harbinger of time.

Here, we sat down to discuss writing beyond genre, the book as artifact, music as poetry, and of course beauty and transcendence, among other things.

—Spencer Everett