Gerry Crinin will be appearing at 7P.M. on August 25th as part of Hemingway’s Poetry Series at Hop Farm Brewing.
In his essay “A Place in the Country,” W.G. Sebald uses the term smallness to characterize the work of Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), calling him a “clairvoyant of the small” and citing his “most radical minimization and brevity.” The same can be said of Gerry Crinnin, and his selected poems Graceful to Be Here, published in May 2026 by Foundlings Press of Buffalo.
Crinnin joins Walser, and a canon of luminaries like Michael Longley, Dorothy Parker, Samuel Menache, and Charles Simic, who are all known for their brief, yet profound poems. Like Simic and Parker, Crinnin’s poems set the everyday alongside the surreal. His “incomprehensible totems”—laundry, driftwood, insects, and his beloved squirrels—share the stage, or the page rather, with an arsenal of odd-ball and weird characters and images, with a kind of W.C. Fields sensibility thrown in.
Though he sometimes drifts into outer space, or loiters in the way back past, in those pre-Rock n’ Roll decades of jazz and hometown wholesomeness, Crinnin is a poet of place, who brings together disparate characters and situations. Where else can you expect to find Louis Armstrong and the Pope inhabiting the same poem? “Now and then,” Crinnin writes, “a little saint/Comes marching in with bagels/Bottles of dark beer and the Vatican sports page,” from the poem “Salvation.” Yet he stays grounded enough for the reader to find moments of grace and transcendence.
Take the poem “Fred’s Drawer,” not simply a poem about looking through his father’s dresser drawer, but an elegy to the man. In it, we rummage alongside the child narrator, discovering “[a] matador hat from Madrid… holy cards of Pope Pius and weird scapulars [the narrator] wore around the house with garlands of fever.”
Or the poem “Old School”: “[In] those days urine was still prized…. Outpockets of piss folk remain…their stories remain largely untold.”
And when you talk about transcendence, you have poems like the wonderfully weird, “Cover Letters,” which recalls the work of James Wright. It starts as a catalogue of quirky details about the speaker’s life:
I have two dogs, Heavy Metal and Country…
a husband from the 60s
and a 2nd wife from the 90s, afraid
of what people will think. I sub
at Quality as a Deli Hag and hope
to express myself in karate someday.
Then in the final stanza, the poem takes a turn and the poet reveals his vulnerability and his humanity:
I can’t carry a tune
my name is easy to remember
it was the name of a best friend,
someone capable of great love.
Other wonderful poems include “Breath Collection,” “Backyard Bird Recordings” and “Envelopes,” where the speaker’s mother asks “Do you want any of these envelopes? and then opens a bag full of perhaps a thousand, decades/of Hallmark, American Greeting and/generic blanks,” that once belonged to his recently deceased father, Fred, of the nightstand drawer fame.
“Nostalgia for the Way Back,” pays homage to “those old-time poets/pissing into an ice age, carving hide or/baking their words in the mudpie sun… who, at the end of slaughter, feast or/first night of fireflies…cry out/glory, disaster, cool water,” and ends with “Many a tooth was whalebone-sharpened/and oh, how the blubber used to come off!”
There is also a selection of presidential haikus. Here are two:
Harry S. Truman
(1945-1953)One shot of Old Crow
and stride into morning like
the atomic bomb.
Richard Millhaus Nixon
(1969-1974)Anger sandwiches
Washed down with bitter press corps.
It makes me Quaker.
There are nature poems populated by starlings that “make no sounds/sculpting the sky,” a squirrel that “fairly quivers for the found nut,” and cicadas “[i]mpossible to locate that appear as this/eerie potato chip.” Then, there are poems of childhood and family: “Pumpkin,” “Retire to Buffalo,” and “Holy Saturday,” as well as poems that will break your heart like the unassuming “Poem,” where Crinnin’s parents, both deceased, traveling on the bus to Heaven, stop in Limbo to visit three of their unborn children who appear as reflections in the waiting pool. And the poem “Aunt,” about a young girl who, one summer day in 1939 while washing the family car, was struck by “the hot rod [that] came around the corner/and broke her life into the mercy of God.”
Wild word play fills poems like the triptych “To the West Coast of New York,” which begins in Binghamton when the speaker bids farewell to “tonic crones and gnomes… ever-loving lollygaggers, wily temps… whiskerandos,” and makes his way, along with his family, down Route 17 to Chautauqua, where“[e]venings are grainier:/the wind’s rock n’ roll wallops/sky-scrapers like beat woofers.” Finally, he arrives at his new home in Dunkirk, where “catsup canners, dog chowers… grape/juicers… [make] a day of the dollar store and spray-ghost shimmers up/from the wave-smash to collect [everyone’s] scowls.”
In the collection’s final poem, “Common Grave,” he writes, It’s mercy to know/that no one’ll ever know/who I really was/or am. Not one to follow poetic or political trends, Crinnin’s vision is essentially catholic in its universal and inclusive meaning.
Crinnin has published several books—Forest Lawn Poems (Igneus Press, 2023), I Know You Know with Peter Temes (Foundlings Press, 2018), and Haiku to the Chief (Ghost City Press 2016)—and traveled the world (including volunteering for a six-month stint in Antarctica, as a D.J. for Armed Forces Radio, while in the U.S. Navy), yet I like to think of him composing his beatific poems sitting in a dim-lit bunker or cave, some outpost in the netherworld of imagination and memory, a can of Labatt’s Blue Light and a smoke of “hooty-toot” within arm’s reach, like a scribe, or Radagast, Tolkien’s lesser-wizard, communing with birds, worms and furry creatures, the occasional saint.
