By Garett Scott

(Taken from a bookseller's catalogue)

          The enigmatic poet Richard Griffin (born 1857, died sometime after 1932, self-publishing at a fairly good clip between 1913 and 1931) has—with his peculiar cracked talent for atrocious but compelling poetry—created a coterie of enthusiasts. I date my latter-day discovery of Griffin from two appreciations (perhaps an inadequate term) written by bookseller Eric Korn for the Times Literary Supplement in 1986 and later collected in his Remainders (Carcanet, 1989), his essays thence through some good luck ending up in my hands in the mid-1990s. Korn’s essays weren’t quite Chapman’s Homer in shaping my bookselling aesthetic, but from that date I certainly began to keep my eyes open for Griffin while scouting the less travelled stretches of the poetry sections of book shops (and on rare occasions would be rewarded). Generally bound in a pleasing uniform neat green cloth and illustrated with plates showing Griffin arrayed in a variety of outfits and poses (playing the banjo and covered in rubber spiders, attacking a lobster, etc.), the books as objects themselves suggested a dandy eccentric dwelling amid drab neighbours. Brief extracts do scant justice to the enigmatic Griffin (see the poet and translator Bill Zavatsky’s essay on Griffin in the literary journal Siennese Shredder #2 for some possible clues on the poet’s life), though certainly the man went forth with a facile pen, an unbalanced imagination, and a sadistic bent. His minor epic “The Lobster’s Gizzard” recounts the murky quest of one Mike O’Hara to scale the Hill of Tara at the behest of a wizard to consume the gizzard of a magical lobster; other pieces touch in Griffin’s own peculiar way on political corruption, Mormons, or fashion. Most, however, defy easy categorization—viz. “The Elm of Nax” (“The famous tree is spelled either Nax or Nacks. I use both ways,” notes Griffin) or “Notional Nimrod”:

Under the sod
Notional Rod
Nimrod poor clod
In his green pod—
Say—does he fry?
I don’t know, why,
Do You?

          Evidence would suggest that Griffin spent time in an institution; the lengthy poem “Water on the Brain” makes detailed reference to life in “the captivating nuttery.” Eric Korn notes in his original essays that “The more Griffin I read . . . the less can I decide whether we are dealing with self-conscious Manhattan Dada, or barking crustacicidal lunacy.” Correspondence in 2000 on this point—“whether he [Griffin] is a satirist or loony”—drew from Korn the observation that perhaps the distinction is “a false antithesis.”

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