Paper short abstract:

This application of an Olsonian "Projective Verse" poetics--with further reference to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Daphne Marlatt, and certain postmoderns--to Arpine Konyalian Grenier's poem "Waterwheel at the Electric Institute" relates to the theme of "forced forgetting" in Grenier's poetry.

Paper long abstract:

I am proposing the application of a modified Olsonian "Projective Verse" poetics (with further reference to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Daphne Marlatt, and certain postmoderns) to Arpine Konyalian Grenier's poem "Waterwheel at the Electric Institute" as part of a session on "forced forgetting" in Grenier's poetry. This poem constitutes a notable force field, and with Grenier's academic training in science (quantum physics), my approach would afford rich interpretative play in investigating the theme of "forced forgetting" in her writing.

In a review of Grenier's collection The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins, published in Jacket2 (see http://jacket2.org/reviews/registers-breath-origins-and-concession), I situated Grenier in a trajectory extending from Cid Corman, through William Bronk and Clayton Eshleman (with whom Grenier studied at California Institute of Technology in Pasedena). While Origin was not a Beat "little mag," it might be argued—especially in light of her prose poem "Ever Feral and Chrial, the Howl" delivered at the European Beat Studies Conference Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2015—that Grenier is a post-Beat—or so those who have Donald Allen's penchant to categorize might have it. What she shares with the Beats—in particular Allen Ginsberg—is her raising of social consciousness though her own experience of deracination and a forced forgetting (genocide) that formed not only her personal past but also informed the world with which she remains steadily at odds, forever on the margins, yet always compassionate and engaged.