Bob Grumman (GRUH min), Poet/Critic/Publisher

Grumman lives at 1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952-4526. His e.mail address is BobGrumman@Nut-N-But.Net, his phone number (941) 629-8045.

Grumman is the SiteMaster of Comprepoetica as well as the proprietor and sole employee of the Runaway Spoon Press, which has been putting out collections of burstnorm poetry and related materials since September of '87. He was born 2 February 1941 in Norwalk, Connecticut. A shrimp most of his childhood and early adolescence, he eventually made it to a half-inch over six feet two; he has remained thin all his life, now weighing around 180. What's left of his hair, which he wears in a ponytail (for convenience and to avoid wasting money at a barbershop or self-barbering) is light brown, with a fringe of gray. His eyes are green. Except for an O'Mara grandmother, his ancestry is thoroughly New England Yankee, most of his forebears coming here from England prior to 1650.

He wore glasses for nearsightedness and astigmatism throughout his childhood and early post-childhood, switching to contact lenses at the age of around 21, mostly to make playing tennis and basketball easier. He has always enjoyed those two sports and also played some tag-team football while in the air force (1960-4). Captain of his high school cross-country team, he continues to jog. He bikes a lot, too--mostly out of necessity, as he does not own a car. He works as a substitute teacher at Charlotte High School. Most of his life he has avoided conventional jobs. His longest job lasted five years at a computer service bureau in North Hollywood, California, where he lived for some 15 years. His lifetime earnings, according to the social security department, were less than $50,000 prior to 1995. The substitute teaching is bringing that up fast, though.

Publication Credits:

Score, Kaldron, Lost & Found Times, Modern Haiku, The Experioddicist, Transmog, Meat Epoch, Industrial Sabotage, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, Juxta and a number of other zines. Grumman also has poetry (mathemaku) and a critical essay (on contemporary minimalist poetry) on-line at Karl Young's light&dust website.

Grumman has had the following books published, all of them chaps except Of Manywhere-at-Once: Poemns (privately-printed, 1966; reprinted by the Runaway Spoon Press, 1997); A StrayngeBook (Score Publications, 1987); An April Poem (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1989) Spring Poem No. 3,719,242 (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1990) Of Manywhere-at-Once (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1990 2nd edition, 1991) Mathemaku 1 - 5 (Tel-let, 1992) Barbaric Bart Meets Batperson and her Indian Companion Taco (a play; Stage Whisper, 1992) Barbaric Bart Visits God (a play; Abscond Press, 1993) Rabbit Stew, an Excerpt (another play; Hairy Labs Publishing Company, 1994) Mathemaku 6 - 12 (Tel-let, 1994) Of Poem (dbqp press, 1995) and Mathemaku 13 - 19 (Tel-let, 1996).

Considerations of Grumman's work (few of great length) have appeared in Meat Epoch, Factsheet Five, Taproot Reviews and elsewhere.

An interview of him by Keith Higginbotham appeared in The Imploding Tie-Dyed Toupee and his essay, "Of Mathemakuetry, Boyhood and Related Strands of my Life," appeared in Volume 25 of the Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Essays series (1996).

About the contemporary poetry scene, he says, "There are a great many contemporary poets of importance to me. Naming names is touchy but I would like to say that the three contemporary poets of my approximate generation whom I am most sure will be considered major fifty years from now are Karl Kempton, John M. Bennett and Will Inman."

As for poets of yesteryear important to him: "again, a huge list. Monolingual, I only know English-speaking and translated poets. My definite all-time favorites are Shakespeare, Keats, Basho, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, Stevens, Pound, Yeats, Roethke, Cummings, Emerson, Frost, Jeffers . . . basically, the standard names (but not Blake and Milton and Tennyson--or Whitman and Dickinson)."

He values critics almost as much as he values poets. "Just about all the absurdly-named 'new critics' are important to me," he says, "and Coleridge, Dryden, Johnson. No recognized current critic seems of much value to me but I think many unrecognized ones are doing important work, such as Richard Kostelanetz (my candidate for top all-around American literary figure of the second half of the twentieth century), Clemente Padin, Harry Polkinhorn, Gregory St. Thomasino, Jack Foley and Karl Young, all of them excellent poets as well as critics." Grumman likes almost all varieties of poetry, but as a critic pushes burstnorm poetry, mainly because it is so little recognized by anyone else. His favorite kinds of poetry, both as poet and critic, are visual and infra-verbal poetry.

Grumman's interests besides poetry are "All the Arts, Tennis, Spectator Sports, Theoretical Psychology, Mathematics, Genealogy, Ancient History, Archaeology, Theoretical Physics (simpled down to my level)."

Note: this is a partial entry; more to come as your SiteMaster finds time to add it.

click here to visit a mathematical poem, with commentary, by Bob Grumman.