Close-reading capital letters

Curtis Faville, over on his Compass Rose blog, writes about capitalization in the poems of Robert Grenier. It’s terrific to see such a thorough close-reading of the use of capitals in the context of work so minimalist, it begs such attention:

The campaign against titles--and capital letters--as symbols or signs of authority--both real and "verbal" (the King's English) , signals a kind of guerilla conflict (or pitched battle) against SPEECH. Capitals stand like the names over the capitals of buildings, as public displays of advertisement or enforcement in the community. Thus in Grenier's work CAPITAL letters are parodied, mocked as the evidences of power, ignorance, unconscious threat--as, in effect, power centers of language.

Faville sees Grenier’s occasional capitalization of a word as not only a forefronting of authority in language, but, because of the way the capitalized words disrupt the possibility of applying sentence-level meanings to the poems, an attack on syntax:

Syntax is a kind of inertia, which, once allowed to gain momentum, creates a music of continuity. Objectifying that inertia, cutting it up into its constituent parts, and then arranging them in unlikely orders or positions, allows their discrete character(s) to be exposed, played and replayed.