Jack Grapes, Artist, Writer, Author, Instructor: You don’t have to have a story. You don’t have to have an idea. Just connect with that moment and maybe you’ll write crap but you’ll write.
Film Courage: Is that why you love writing poetry, the rhythm of the writing, the rhythm of the word?
Jack Grapes: Well, the rhythm is the rhythm of the voice. I mean that’s the rhythm of the deep voice speaking to someone else in a very intimate way and connecting with him. I talked about my dog Jesse, she had cancer and we had to put her down. It’s in one of my books. I like different sizes. I like when I’m doing a book. I like to think what size do I want it to be? Like Lucky Finds with all the cards. Most of my books are going to be the normal size of a book but once in a while I’m curious. I did a book of haiku and I wanted it to be a flip book so I thought it would be about that thick and it would be 50 haiku but it ended up I wrote 300 haiku and I wrote an introduction that was close to 450-pages.
BIO:
Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor, teacher, and the editor and publisher of ONTHEBUS, one of the top literary journals in the country. He has won several publishing grants and Fellowships in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s also received nine Artist-in- Residence Grants from the California Arts Council to teach writing in various schools throughout Los Angeles. He is the author of 13 books of poetry, including TREES, COFFEE, AND THE EYES OF DEER, and BREAKING DOWN THE SURFACE OF THE WORLD. A spoken-word CD, Pretend, was recently issued by DePaul University. He is also author of a chapbook of poems and paintings titled AND THE RUNNING FORM, NAKED, BLAKE. His most recent publication is LUCKY FINDS, a boxed set of 50 cards that extend and parody the dynamic artistic productions of high-modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson.
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