In music or forgetting, E. Tracy Grinnell’s first collection, poems are diachronic cartography. As in the title, a single line may be her memory and conjecture being the same space and time at only “the present time of the poem.” Or, her memory and conjecture are the same, cumulatively absorbed, as if there is no speaker or seer in a long quiet present, which becomes its music: “historically / waves are either synchronic, / spatial, or / new presence of body presupposes dialogue.”
E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of five books of poetry, including Hell Figures (Nightboat Books, 2016), and portrait of a lesser subject (Elis Press, 2015). With Isabelle Garron, she is the translator of way by Leslie Scalapino into French (Éditions Corti, 2020). Her poetry, essays, and visual art have also appeared in a wide range of collections and publications, including BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing, edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris. Grinnell’s poetry has been translated into French, Serbian, Polish, and Portuguese. She has taught creative writing at Pratt Institute, Brown University, and in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the Founding Editor and Executive & Artistic Director of Litmus Press.