The Brooklyn Rail

Poet, art critic, curator, and musician Jeffrey Grunthaner’s first full-length poetry collection Paracelsus’ Trouble With Sundays is a book like no other I have ever known, one that truly must be seen to be believed. This new limited edition of one hundred published in Japan late last year by visual artist Kenji Siratori’s iconoclast Posthuman Magazine imprint showcases not only Grunthaner’s uncompromisingly dynamic, multi-media collage approach to this writing, but also the vivid, often unsettling or even nightmarish full-page color illustrations contributed by Siratori as a direct response to the text. It is a collaboratively produced art book for fans of weird children’s tales or avant-gardism, a novelistic puzzle with pieces missing, a playful, mesmerizing, and darkly humorous visual/textual poetic landscape to get lost in. It is as much in dialogue with the historical literary works of authors like Charles Baudelaire or Lyn Hejinian as it is with the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, algorithmic computer image-generating technology, internet memes and 1990s music/TV fanzines.

Jeff currently lives in Berlin, Germany with his wife and young son. He moved there in 2019 after having lived in New York City for many years. I met him at a poetry reading in Bushwick, Brooklyn… it was one that I had helped organize at Molasses Bookstore in 2013, and he was in the audience heckling. We have been good friends ever since. Others who also know him from poetry readings and art events during the 2010s may recall some of the work he presented live under the banner of “Trouble With Sundays,” which sometimes took the form of highly abstract sound poetry vocal performances, DIY chapbook publications, cut-up slideshows or short experimental films. Three pages from an earlier version of this manuscript also appeared in the February 2019 poetry section of the Rail.

I spoke with Jeff at length on a video-call this past December, during which we also took the time via screenshare to peruse together through a PDF of the book, taking a closer look at some of its uncanny (at least to me) contents.

Ben Tripp (Rail): You did write most of this? I ask because the book is a massive collage of different styles of text and imagery. It runs the gamut from handwriting to typed-out passages in all kinds of varying sizes, fonts, and designs. Are you responsible for some of the mixed-media, image-based artwork in it as well—other than the illustrations by Kenji Siratori, I mean—or was some of it almost like stuff you found on the ground, or wrote/produced with friends collaboratively?

Jeffrey Grunthaner: There’s very little appropriation in the book, honestly. But I’m into stuff like that. I can think of maybe two places where it’s very incidental and something just happened to be in front of me, so I thought I would add it in, with a kind of attitude of collage or layering. Mostly I found weird ways to parallel already existing texts, that wasn’t an appropriation and also not rewriting… more like a way of creating a hallucinated version of an already existing text.

Rail: On the one hand, I see a novel when I read Paracelsus’s Trouble With Sundays, but it’s a poetry collection, an art book, or maybe even a “performable book.” It could be interpreted as a score for a live performance. You presented a short film in 2014 you called “Trouble With Sundays” at a group poetry reading in Williamsburg. I was there and appreciated how it broke up the monotony of a typical reading. Fellow poets, familiar faces, were cast as these preposterous characters reciting a pretty laughable script, but it was engaging and unexpected. Then afterwards you did get up and recite directly from what I assume was an early iteration of the book.

Grunthaner: I remember that. The idea of Trouble With Sundays as a book, or really a project, I should say, had been kicking around for four or five years. Often it would get shelved, other times I had opportunities to do a reading or something. A multimedia text is what I always wanted to do, and I didn’t see it happening around me. There’s fundamentally three levels of text in the book. There’s the kind of printable typewriter text, there’s glitch digital…

Rail: There’s early computer/word processor font, like the early Macintoshs. My family used to have one, boxy, black & white screen…

Grunthaner: Yes. Even the green & black screen computers, which I grew up with in the 1980s.

Rail: Right. Those were mildly radioactive, right? I know them as well. My parents still have an old Kaypro computer.

Grunthaner: Yeah. And then the third layer is handwriting. A document of the personality.

Rail: And it’s frightening at times, like a ransom note, but that may be cliché… where every single letter is cut out.

Grunthaner: Well, I didn’t do that exactly, because it’s definitely all my handwriting.

Rail: You didn’t cut out individual letters. But it’s a lot of collage, the book could be described as a bit chaotic, but the words are almost always whole, albeit sometimes illegible.

Grunthaner: Readability or the lack thereof, like dissolution, or things dissolving, is a reoccurring motif here both visually and thematically.

Rail: It becomes gestural on my favorite pages, which sometimes look like they could be the cover of another book or catalogue of work. This one says “CLOSE COVER * STRIKE GENTLY AMERICA Après avoir écrit” at the summit of a baby-blue background with a handwritten note fragment, which is also crossed with a piece of a currency, and a volley of colorful, sharp-looking strips. An insect-like figure almost begins to emerge and walk off the page.

Grunthaner: This is material I had in front of me at my desk. I assembled it together. “Après avoir écrit,” after having written. However, I don’t want to make it sound totally random. It’s more like if you’re practicing a certain kind of mindfulness, with whatever is in front of you at hand, you can’t help but formulate a certain statement.

Rail: You’re composing, taking things away as you go, following your instinct and deciding. It’s not random. You’re curating, you’re organizing.

Grunthaner: There is method to what may look like madness. Some people see it as totally random and chaotic. I see it as formalist, the way everything is structured. It’s basically a suite of prose poems. The way they’re shaped, they emulate a page of text from a novel or short-fiction, but ultimately they’re more like daft, hallucinating, surreal prose poems.

Rail: I think every reader approaches it and as you experience it, you learn about whatever is your own bias, taste or textual preference… it’s like a litmus test, a dynamic reading experience, truly unlike most other books. There’s bound to be some page that rubs you the wrong way, or is frightening. I don’t like memes, for example, but Paracelsus’s Trouble With Sundays makes excellent use of the meme font and design in places as well.

Grunthaner: Thank you. The meme font as it was like five years ago or so.

Rail: And that speaks to the crazy hyperactive planned obsolescence thing of the internet, twenty-four-hour pseudo-culture or whatever. So you have what is, in my opinion, rather tasteless meme font and design, but the words that appear are not the same words that you typically see as a meme. Then there’s the verso-recto spread doubling, two of your pages on the one side, with Kenji Siratori’s illustrations on the other: one part is an elegant, bourgeois novelistic excerpt—but it has been also digitally glitched out—it’s next to the meme. These contrasting elements balance each other out.

Grunthaner: I put this manuscript together about five years ago. The idea had been kicking around for five years prior to that, but the actual assembling of the writings I had done over that time took eight or nine months.

Rail: So all of these novelistic pages with the silly bombastic characters, you wrote?

Grunthaner: I wrote everything. As I said earlier, none of it is actually appropriated. Maybe lines or fragments here and there, like “Après avoir écrit,” obviously I didn’t write that.

Rail: Like if you used a Xeroxed airline ticket or something, you didn’t write what’s on the ticket.

Grunthaner: Yeah, and whenever I did appropriate language in parts, it was me trying to use language like an airline ticket, if you will.

Rail: So you wrote the memes, you chose what to put into the generator to get that font.

Grunthaner: And I found the images for the memes on eBay.

Rail: The meme font on that one page appears atop a photograph that looks like it could be from the 1930s. This woman’s hairstyle, and the clothes, the amateur vibe of it, a somewhat blurry black & white snapshot, the furniture, it all looks very old.

Grunthaner: One underlying theme of Paracelsus’s Trouble With Sundays is a house. Maybe not the house I grew up in exactly, but something that resembles the domestic experience I had as a child, which was very chaotic. And the household accouterments, the fabric, the font, the eighties Mac computer… I wanted to preserve somehow.

Rail: It’s plausible that these arcane snapshots spliced in throughout the book are from your family album, but they’re not actually.

Grunthaner: Just as I found a way to generate something to write that mimics a text without appropriating it, I wanted to build something that emotionally reflected early childhood experiences without necessarily being autobiographical, or like “autofiction.” A lot of the work mimics a domestic environment like the one I grew up in, but none of this is properly confessional. Maybe in the last poem the “I” is similar to me, but generally there’s nothing auto- or confessional, except for the handwriting, which is like that but in a different way.

Rail: There are many palimpsests, writing on top of writing. How did you go about making these pages? Did you have software or a photocopier or collage by hand much?

Grunthaner: I mostly used a word processor. I found ways within Microsoft Word to layer text in a way that looked glitched-out.

Rail: I’m impressed that you could get those visual effects using just Word. There must be an aleatory/chance element about it. You don’t exactly know the parameters of the glitch or what’s going to happen.

Grunthaner: Ten years ago when I came up with the idea, I was doing this glitching on social media. It was a thing happening on there a lot that was trending, in a way.

Rail: I remember some of your posts. Some reminded me of Lettrism: short, sometimes incomplete phrases multiplied/smeared on top of themselves and distorted in various ways.

Grunthaner: Lettrism and Situationism I was and remain aware of. I was definitely into that stuff when I was developing all this.

Rail: The snapshots in the book are full of drama. The expressions on the people’s faces. They could be stills from some old mainstream feature film.

Grunthaner: They might be. Who knows.

Rail: When some of these pages, without Siratori’s illustrations, appeared in the Rail in 2019, there ominously appeared the words “Heather Locklear” handwritten at the top.

Grunthaner: Again, I wanted to allude to a kind of growing up and childhood, early adolescence. I associate Heather Locklear with Melrose Place which I used to watch with my sister in the 1990s. I wanted an almost nineties fanzine nostalgia in certain ways.

Rail: There are pages with all capital letters where it’s as though someone is yelling, and other photographs that look like they could be from some odd science catalogue or occultist archive.

Grunthaner: What I tried to do with a lot of the imagery is decontextualize it to a point where you can’t really tell what its origin is. Although it’s visible, it’s almost concealed at the same time. I think that ties in with the illegibility of some of the text, or the incoherence of some of the phrasing.

The absurdist syntax is how I wanted to depict the hallucination of a book. The stuff that was already in the Rail, the methodology there, was to go for something atmospheric, even scary.

Rail: Like a photograph of a room where something horrible happened, à la one of those true-crime reenactment television shows.

Grunthaner: A lot of how I think of my childhood home is at times scary. I hate to say it, but I have scary memories of youth and the people around me. It was not good. This is reflected by that Mickey Mouse shape. Anyway, all that personal history is redacted in these poems.

Rail: I see also there’s video subtitles as another layer of text.

Grunthaner: There’s different uses of technology, but predominantly it’s computer zine, typewriter, glitch text, and then handwriting. In Hegelian terms, that’s like the abstract, negative, concrete. The concrete is handwriting. Hegel’s something I was reading and still read. The abstract is the partial; the partial is old media, the typewriter… old media is partial, and it has its negative in new media: the computer. The concrete would be handwriting, which also emulates what is from the typewriter and the computer.

Rail: I was going to say earlier too, the hallucinations thing, and the prose poem thing, that’s very French, like Symbolism.

Grunthaner: I also took a page by Philip K. Dick and rewrote it so that the words kind of resembled the words originally used but it was different, a parallel, a ghost. It doesn’t actually communicate any of his themes. It wasn’t about memory or paranoia. It’s conscientiously a misreading. It’s a mimic on a purely verbal, graphic level… the graphic nature of the text. Also, a lot of the ideas from the Language Poetry writers that I was learning about in grad school at Brooklyn College, the subtle glitching or alteration, and the idea of writing that looks like prose, quacks like prose, but actually isn’t prose. It does something different. It doesn’t have the transparency that prose should.

Rail: You want some of the formal qualities of prose, but you want it destabilized through a poetic process and context.

Grunthaner: Sure. Also, getting back to the whole chaotic nature of my book and how it doesn’t look much like any other book out there, I can actually think of two books…

Rail: There was Purloined by the artist Joseph Kosuth from 2000, where he stitched together hundreds of individual pages from hundreds of different novels into one novel.

Grunthaner: You showed me that a while ago. That would have been a way easier way of doing it. Mine is guided conceptually and methodologically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily conceptual writing, especially because I actually wrote almost all of it. The two writers I’m thinking of are Erica Baum, who has a book like this, doing something similar, not that I’m directly inspired or influenced by it… and then there’s Harmony Holiday, who had a similar book out with Fence.

Rail: Let’s talk about these illustrations. Were they made algorithmically, or with artificial intelligence prompting to some degree?

Grunthaner: Kenji used Midjourney or some-such program. It may be one he developed entirely himself for all I know. He took lines from my text and plugged them in and got this monster imagery. It would build this creepy nightmare realm. It turns the book into something new, even to me. To look at and observe and see how it relates to other things. As much as I like the original manuscript as it appeared in excerpts in the Rail, Kenji’s work puts it on a different level. I can observe it more and not see through it.

Rail: Your illustrator/publisher was doing something a bit more bespoke than usual with the algorithmic technology, crafting it in a certain way, rather than just letting the computer do its thing. What do you make of all this hubbub and talk about the potential existential threat that AI poses when it comes to culture, art, the economy?

Grunthaner: I don’t care. There are way worse existential threats.

Rail: AI is thought to be capable of taking away jobs from people, the labor and alienation aspect of it… if it makes it more difficult for people to survive/earn money from their skills; if those skills are suddenly dwarfed by those of the computer… and what of an art world that could become overcrowded with so much art that can be so rapidly produced?

Grunthaner: I tend to think along the lines of Ted Kaczynski, or better yet Jacques Ellul: technology just de facto makes it harder for humans to live. The more tech you have, the worse off you are. I recommend his book The Technological Society.

Rail: Getting back to the design of your book, it’s two of your pages on the left each time, and then with the illustrations on the recto, or right side.

Grunthaner: Yes. That gives it a sense of being a compilation or anthology of a book that doesn’t quite cohere enough to exist, a book from a dream, or a book that is a hallucination.

Rail: Your book does have characters who pop up here and there, like “Darius.” It’s a poetry book with characters.

Grunthaner: There are about thirty different characters. I had a spreadsheet where I narrowed down each character and made sure there weren’t too many. It’s a book you could potentially piece together in sequence, but there’s paging missing.

Rail: I love the parts that seem like excerpts from some nineteenth century decadent novel or something, the bourgeois novel thing. The sitting-room drama: “Brendan stepped forward. He was a student of the Professor’s in dark rooms where the wizened old man lay, propped up by endless pillows.”

Grunthaner: I think it’s really funny.

Rail: What about Paracelsus?

Grunthaner: That’s my illustrator Kenji Siratori’s contribution. Paracelsus was an alchemist, also interested in things like the Kabbalah, during the Renaissance.

Rail: The illustrations create a different sense of space, compared to the manic interiority of the collages and the mixed text, they instead open up an expansive landscape, with often a clear horizon line, and rather sunset/sunrise-y color tones. And the figures are totally misshapen.

Grunthaner: Like Yves Tanguy or Salvador Dalí, in a way.

Rail: Or also Bruegel… and Hieronymus Bosch.

Grunthaner: Programs like Maya create stuff that can look like those artists’ work. It lends itself to landscapes, Dalí-esque. I also like Bosch, but prefer him during his ergot phase, when he was eating that green bread.

Rail: Even the littlest design elements throughout the book become somehow more expressive, like “The Marble” with the blue italics and the underlining. It evokes some kind of glossy Condé Nast magazine or pulp-y paperback fiction.

Grunthaner: I like A Nest of Ninnies by John Ashbery and James Schuyler, their collaborative novel. It’s so hokey. They each wrote a chapter one after the other taking turns. I dug that energy, romping through classical structures of Europe. Prose poetry, Arthur Rimbaud. The French prose poem was very much in line with this, and the Language Poetry writers from the eighties. I also love Marcel Proust. I started noticing how the words would be cut off at the margin and continue at the next line arbitrarily. The word “mystery” might be spelled “mys-” on the one line and then the rest “-tery” on the next line. It’s just a typographical convenience, but one day I saw it and thought that’s a great line break. When there’s just not enough space with the margin. I emulated that and felt it was a more interesting way of producing line breaks. I still do that in a lot of my poetry. I’m into dissonance. The “Marble” poems in this book were all written during my first months living in Berlin. But you know, I’ve read this work aloud in front of New York audiences, and having a poem called “The Marble” and then having it unfold the way it does… New York poets were just like, uh, wait, what the hell is this!?

Rail: I remember being there for at least a couple of live readings you did of this work. Hearing it, it didn’t sound like prose, despite the presence of characters and dialogue.

Grunthaner: None of it actually is prose, but it looks like prose. There’s always line breaks and I’m very conscious of making them. I wanted it to look like a paginated block of prose with the margins of that sort of page. Basically my form was a visual structure more than like a sonnet or a villanelle or other poetic forms people adopt.

Rail: You’re approaching it as a poet, adopting prose as a container, while remaining conscious of the line breaks.

Grunthaner: But it’s not a poet’s novel, it’s poems. I have read a lot of these poems aloud in performance, but you need to see and read it for yourself, given how visual they are, to get at what they’re doing.

Rail: I agree that the impression one gets of this work hearing it at a poetry reading, is very different from the impression when you read it, especially now as it is flanked by the new illustrations.

Grunthaner: It was at times frustrating, how it came off at live readings.

Rail: I was at one of those readings where you did a sound poetry performance thing, sounding it out, abstractly.

Grunthaner: Yeah. Like a Keston Sutherland thing. Trying to come up with the sounds.

Rail: I remember having no idea what was going on, but I was into it. I had no reference point. One moment you were reciting poetry that was words, then it was just sounds, syllables.

Grunthaner: I don’t do a lot of that anymore, or at least at the moment, since I finished Trouble With Sundays. The writing of the book effectively was completed five years ago. Since then I’ve been doing a lot of art writing, which is of course in prose, and I put together my chapbook Aphid Poems in April of 2022, which is completely separate. Aphid Poems is closer to how I work now. Trouble With Sundays is how I would write poems back then, the before times. The fact of the earlier work coming later is just the nature of time: it’s not linear. Everything has a beginning, middle and end, but it almost never happens in that order.

Rail: There is one page that sticks out in your book like a sore thumb, but not in a bad way. It’s like a whole other picture plane of text and image, it’s just a color field completely jammed with italics, all-caps words in lines that run the entire length of the pages, like it’s zoomed in onto a larger text.

Grunthaner: This is way more of an in-your-face, almost noise poem. It’s the loudest page in the book, and it’s actually an excerpt from a whole longer poem that I’d written. But I thought it would work better as a truncated quote, better than the whole poem. I’m happy with that, because a lot of the book is fragments striving for wholeness without maybe realizing it. At best, the book is a whole composed of fragments. This is an instance of fragmentation, almost like a page ripped out of a notebook. It’s funny to look at this and read it again now because it’s from a while ago. It shows my life as it was years ago. I always tried to incorporate experiences from my day-to-day. “Odyshape,” for example, was a record by the band The Raincoats that I loved at the time. It’s a snapshot.

Rail: It’s a diary of what kinds of media you were engaging with at a certain time of your life, what you were reading.

Grunthaner: Yes. And the handwriting is a good indicator of personality.

Rail: It’s also like a fingerprint. You’ve said before there aren’t many presses that would take on this kind of material, whether they might be poetry presses or otherwise. So what kind of writing is it exactly, if it can even be summed up? What kind of poetry is it, if you had to categorize it? Visual Poetry? Art book? Or even Concrete, maybe Conceptual Poetry?

Grunthaner: I didn’t send it to too many presses. I’ve always been pretty careful about who I send things to. With Trouble With Sundays I had to make sure that any publisher I was sending it to was already publishing weird, avant-garde, maybe even “outsider” stuff. I wish more presses would embrace work like this. I would say Poetry and Art Book. I don’t see any of it as Concrete Poetry. And it’s guided by a concept, but it’s not Conceptual Poetry either.