Review: In an Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky by John Greiner
Daniel Barbiero
March 2020
In an Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky, a new collection of poems by John Greiner, gives a view into things, people and places from a poetic sensibility steeped in memory, sensation and a colloquial surreality at home in the contemporary city. Like the 19th century flâneur or the early Surrealists haunting the flea markets and seedy arcades of Paris, Greiner seems to take inspiration in the quick-cut, fragmented stimuli of city life, which serve as a background against which his reflections, recollections and free-form recitations take place. If a displaced sense of place is the default way of being in the urban atopia of the alien and anonymous, Greiner somehow finds his place there—in its apartments, restaurants and delicatessens, subway cars, amusement parks, and wind- and rain-swept streets.
“There” frequently is New York, which Greiner inhabits both physically and in the imagination. Consider the ending of “Sunday F Train Running all the way to Stillwell Avenue:”
the local train is chasing me all the way
down to Coney Island and there’s going
to be a big and bloody crash when it crosses
paths with the Cyclone but I will be fine
sitting out this Sunday with you and your
pig pen skull on the beach after the wells
at Ruby’s wash our better manners away
Here as in the other poems in the collection, Greiner’s voice is largely the spoken voice, driven ahead by the momentum of its own rhythms as it spins monologues of inspired invention incorporating and mixing elements of the inner and outer worlds in both their empirical and fantasized forms. Greiner draws from life but transfigures it through an accumulation of slightly off-center associations, which he lays out in a stream of consciousness porpoising just above and below the threshold of the nonconscious. A poem like “Mystery of the Street” is one long run-on rumination binding words together with a rhythmic logic as well as with the mutual attractions of rhyming vowels and consonants; “A View of Paris with Furtive Pedestrians” is an articulated structure of freely associated images of sights, tastes, touch and memory. Although these and the other poems in In an Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky work their effects through attention to language, they also call up vivid visual images for, as Greiner observes in “Cinema,” “words/gradually/express/pictorial values.”
Rhyme of a different sort—the metaphorical rhyming of two places inextricably associated with each other—is the engine behind “It is Raining and Violent in Paris:”
It is raining and violent in Paris this spring the French Open is a fiasco undermined by complaints the Seine has flooded this room reminds me of the bar at the Meurice though it looks nothing like it I have always preferred the Meurice to the Ritz and the Crillon but on this sunny spring day in New York City my preference for the Meurice over the Ritz and the Crillon is of no importance for it is violent and raining in Paris where the French Open is in ruins and the Seine has overflowed its banks
Here Greiner sets up what might be a temporal loop, beginning in Paris one rainy spring day and ending up in the same place after being diverted to a sunny spring day in New York—presumably, a different spring. But possibly not. Time is ambiguous in the poem and everything in it may be happening at the same time, in the mind or in memory; the rain in Paris at the end may not even be in spring, not the Parisian spring the poem started with or the spring seen in New York or any spring at all. The references to time and season feel vaguely melancholic, though, and create an ambience of present-tense, quasi-nostalgia.
The associative thoughts and imagery that run through much of Greiner’s poetry may demonstrate his ability to access that network of arational linkages that André Breton described as inhering in the secret life of words, but his language nevertheless remains recognizably the language spoken in the street, sometimes in its most demotic form. Consider:
I prefer scum, gunrunner, slave trader, pimp, customer service rep, switchblade slicer through Times Square castrating tourists and lights crooked cabbie lacking change, 9th Avenue whore, Coney Island clown, busker on the 3 a.m. train, scheister, charlatan, tarot card reader in shop front window
These lines are from “Razor for Rimbaud,” which recalls in fittingly disordered and aggressive images the French poet’s stay in Paris in 1873, when he impressed many of the Parisian poets as much with his disreputable behavior as with his poetry. Greiner transposes Rimbaud’s anti-social impulses to contemporary New York, which itself isn’t lacking in its own anti-social tendencies. If Ockham’s Razor is meant to cut away superfluous explanatory entities, then in Greiner’s hands Rimbaud’s Razor is a tool to shave off the encrustations of respectability—with a boorishly dull blade.
Although most of Greiner’s poetry works through his engagement with language as spoken, a handful of poems, such as “Breakup This Bit of Meaning” and “Ecstasy,” with their dismembered words, and the multi-part, neo-Beat “Miss Americana,” exploit the visual dimension of the written word. Both make good use of typographical scattering to create an effect of kaleidoscopically impacting thoughts and sensations. “Booth Reaction” takes this one step further by arranging its lines in such a way that they can be read horizontally as a unitary, if space-broken poem, or vertically as two parallel poems, or even as a random blend drawn from both axes, depending on how one wants to parse the syntax.
Some of the meanings yielded by unconventional readings of “Booth Reaction” carry the humor of the comically inapt juxtaposition. It is a kind of humor that runs throughout the book in the background, like a self-effacing continuo that allows itself to be heard occasionally but doesn’t overwhelm the import of the main melody. But sometimes it’s the entire point. The short poem “The Floor Barren” reads like a set-up culminating in a non-sequitur finish that serves as an absurd punchline because—because why not?
Whether humorous or nostalgic, imaginatively outlandish or discursively fragmented, the voice, and its associated sensibility, that comes across in In an Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky is distinctive and memorable. To spend time with Greiner’s poems is to spend time in the good company of a sharply observant artist with a transformative eye.
This review originally appeared in Otoliths, a magazine of many e-things
issue sixty-four, southern summer, 2022 →
To order In and Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky →
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. His music is based on the complex interrelationship between pitch and timbre in the context of free improvisation and the interpretation of indeterminate compositions. His album In/Completion (2020) presents his realizations of graphic and open-form scores by contemporary composers from Greece, Italy, Japan and the US. As a composer, he creates verbal, graphic and other scores using non-standard notation for soloists and small ensembles; his scores have been realized by performers in Europe, Asia, and the US. As an instrumentalist, he has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary works for various online journals, and is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published in October, 2021.
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