gestures most straightforwardly toward what Bill Berkson has termed the “bright abstract scatter” of Greenwald’s early work.5 But Greenwald becomes Greenwald, we might argue, when he dispenses with the fragmented forms and collage techniques so often associated with modernism—the problem with them being, in his view, that “there is no everyday language that can be used to test goodness of fit.”6 His poetry, in turn, becomes a thought process: writing as thinking on the page.
Not included here, although the time frames overlap, are works that explore the mutated triolet form ABCA CDAB, which was to increasingly occupy Greenwald from the late seventies through the eighties and beyond. It is for these works that he is best known, works that recharge what’s in the air even as they archive American ordinary language.7 A good number of these frequently book-length poems are available elsewhere, and in The Age of Reasons I was keen to present lesser-known aspects of Greenwald’s work.
It has been my pleasure to gather these poems over twenty years of friendship with Ted; I thank him for writing them, and for allowing me to arrange them as I saw fit. My thanks also to David Ball, Barbara Barg, Bill Berkson, Charles Bernstein, Steve Clay, Dennis Cooper, Peter Gizzi, Ralph Hawkins, Rob Holloway, Patricia Spears Jones, Gary Lenhart, Greg Masters, Joan McClusky, Maureen Owen, Ron Padgett, Arlo Quint, Tom Raworth, Kit Robinson, Katie Schneeman, Stacy Szymaszek, Fred Wah, and Bill Zavatsky for their help, and to ace Poetry Project interns Sara Akant and Ace McNamara. Ted and I would both like to thank Suzanna Tamminen and her staff at Wesleyan University Press for their care, and the late George Schneeman for his great cover image.
Thanks are also due the editors and publishers of the journals, magazines, and newspapers in which these works first appeared: #, A Hundred Posters, Adventures in Poetry, African Golfer, Big Deal, The Big House (Ailanthus Press), Blue Pig, The Human Handkerchief, Là-bas, Mag City, New York Times, Oculist Witnesses, Out There, The Paris Review, Partisan Review/3, Rocky Ledge, Roof, Salome, Shell, Shirt, Straits, Tangerine, Telephone, the, This, Un Poco Loco, United Artists, W.B., washington review of the arts, and The World.
MC, January 2016
NOTES
1. Ted Greenwald, “Spoken,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, vol. 2, no. 7 (March 1979): n.p. See also the four prose works “No Eating,” “No Doubt,” “No Way,” and “No Regrets,” recently collected in Own Church (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).
2. Charles Bernstein, unpublished essay on Greenwald’s work, shared with the editor on March 26, 2015.
3. The Coast was performed at 541 Broadway over three nights in October 1978, with a cast of Tom Carey, Bob Holman, Eileen Myles, and Bob Rosenthal, and costumes by Judith Shea.
4. See “And, Hinges,” “I Hear a Step,” “Lapstrake,” “Pore Suspension,” “Privets Come into Season at High Tide,” and “Wash” (all 1964); as well as “Bleep” and “Elegance and Umbrellas” (both 1967). See also Licorice Chronicles, written between 1964 and 1969 and published by the Kulchur Foundation in 1979.
5. Bill Berkson, “In Ted Greenwald,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, vol. 2, no. 7 (March 1979): n.p.
6. Greenwald, “Spoken.”
7. For an early, and discrete, example, see “Finally Understanding” in “Language Sampler,” ed. Charles Bernstein, The Paris Review 86 (Winter 1982): n.p. See also Exit the Face (with Richard Bosman; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982) and “Going into School That Day” in 3 (Cuneiform Press, 2008), among many others.
The Age of Reasons
man
who write
one
million poems
in
one
day
maybe
know what’s up
I light
cigaret
rain smoke
SHOW AND TELL
When I first saw you
I liked you You
didn’t come on the way
you thought you came on
My first impression of you was
you’re a person
who I’m really glad to know
who’s interested
in intellectual thoughts and true meanings of things
and I figured
since I was so glad to really get to know you
you’d be pretty glad to get to know me
and maybe I would touch your face with my hands
like I’m in the process of doing now
and look at you at arm’s distance
and then closer in
when and if it’s ok with you
and we could walk out of this room
arm-in-arm or shoulder-to-shoulder
just touching every other step or so
and go get a coke
or a pepsi and some grilled cheese
I really’d like a cheeseburger more
and talk about books and movies
and just exchange
if you’d want to do that with me
intellectual thoughts
and true meanings Just
about ourselves We would be able
to share and explore
all the little thoughts and feelings
that really can mess up the day
if
