Greenwald combines a
Wordsworthian sense of nature with cartoon-like characters.
Douglas Messerli
On June 17, 2016 my friend,
poet Ted Greenwald, died at the age of 74, far too young for such a remarkable
poetic career to end.
Greenwald was born and
raised in New York. He was involved with the New York School as the editor of
The Poetry Project’s newsletter during the 1970s (serving on that
organization’s board for many years) and the Language poets (he was a close
friend with Charles Bernstein). I appreciated Ted for his street-wise talk and
his savvy knowledge of nearly everything New York. Throughout most of his adult
life, he supported his wife, Joan, and their daughter, driving taxis and
delivering newspapers — jobs that few other Language or New York School poets
ever held — before later on working in art galleries (a New York School kind of
occupation). At times, he clearly resented the fact that he did not have more
time to write.
Despite his limited writing
time, he produced more than 30 of his own books and numerous collaborations
with poets such as Bernstein and Bill Berkson (the latter of whom died on the
very same day as Greenwald). I published one of those books, Word of Mouth, and
included several of his poems in my anthology From the Other Side of the
Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 in 1994.
Particularly in Common
Sense from 1978 (reissued by Wesleyan University Press in 2016) and his 1979
masterwork, Licorice Chronicles, about which I have previously written,
Greenwald weaves together his densely dissociated fragments into a personally
expressive whole, often pointing to the natural world or the society in which
he survives. In his tribute to Greenwald, after his death, Bernstein wrote:
Ted Greenwald’s poetry has
the down-to-earth feel of the spoken woven into dazzling patterns. While some
poems seem off the cuff, his later work is as intricate in its phrasal
repetitions as a Persian carpet. Greenwald’s poems often have a no-nonsense, shoot
from the hip, hard-boiled style, as if he is speaking with you on the most
intimate terms. But this substrate is overlaid with a crystalline, multicolor
lacquer. His Jewish accented vernacular speech is sounded out as musical tones,
rough edges made exquisite in the alchemy of his poetry, which spins base
materials into precariously shimmering fabrics.
Bernstein is referring to
Greenwald’s later poetry, but I find the same “shimmering fabrics” in his early
work. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of his great poem “Privets Come
into Season at High Tide” from Common Sense:
Privets come into season at high tide.
The night on the Great Neck side
near Steppingstone the bargeman walks
over the water the refrigerator opened
the mailman fell out.
Opening the closet the grocery boy
fell out
banging his head on the floor his
knee.
The snow bushes 40 years preparing
dinner,
or the laugh on the rug, fold threads
weaving in
& out over the bodies on the floor.
First sack, the corrugated box lit up
under the lawn lamp the rippled
footsteps
running from the scene of the hiding,
tumbled out on-
to the floor. “What are you doing in
there?”
“I am searching. It is good to be free
again.”
In this semi-farcical
scene, a kind of comical scenario that might be out of the Marx Brothers’ A
Night at the Opera (1935), Greenwald combines an almost Wordsworthian sense of
nature with cartoon-like characters all in search of freedom and poetic
investigation. People and objects rub up against one another, spilling over
into a magnificent display of wonderment, similar to a tale by Scheherazade. In
the end, the poem evokes the enchantresses’ magical escape from death in the
telling of the tale:
Her maple thigh—mole…cheek—
the chattering of teeth on the ground,
count out plums & grapes
leading the eyelid bay & stars.
The line.
The whim drawing the danger thru the
dust out of the corner,
The underbrush kelp. Transforming the
hedge circuits.
At times, Greenwald it
appears so determined to consider alternate possibilities that his poetry
breaks down into parenthetical units, jiggling the reality of what he is
attempting to say, as in the poem “Jiggles”:
targets cluster . (or is it) targets huddle
.
(my) headache’s been with me for 3
days .
unsettling (my) eyes settle in a cloud
.
(or is it) (my) ,
eyes settle on a cloud .
or my (is it)
eyes settle
or on (is it)
my , eyes settle in (is it) a cloud
on or in
a settle
(my) cloud (or is it)
Everything is unsettled in
this poem, even the punctuation, separated from the very phrases it ostensibly
structures. Images and language seem to cut across reason (almost as in a
migraine headache): sharp jabbing visions that sever the logic of the poem
create the sense of complete disorder.
In the following poem, the
beautiful “Elegance and Umbrellas,” the poet seems to meld a trip between Paris
and New York which suddenly links up the images and scenes of Gene Kelly’s famous
dance in Singing in the Rain with his later An American in Paris.
To assume a new character, when the old
one wore
Near me, so “lonely” when night to darken
Paired with polar stars sinking over
Paris
Moves in over the dusty coast
And dreamed up a girl “deja vue”
Out. In years days say hours,
The room, the road broad leaves
shivering in the wind
Moves slowly over the Atlantic toward
New York.
Shuffling thru an old picture of you.
I’m all mixed up about things
Throughout these poems,
Greenwald overlays the actual world with a psychological portrait of himself
and his subjects. Ironically, this distorts the mundane notion of “common
sense.” Yet, it reveals the true “common sense” that lies in romanticized life
in the face of one’s gritty, day-to-day existence. In that respect, a deep
yearning exists in Greenwald’s poems for encounters that may seem impossible in
everyday life. His judgment of friends and evaluations of others, flippant at
times, masked a desire for more affection and love, more idealized
relationships. There are dozens of examples of this in Common Sense, but I’ll
just quote from the poem, “Goes On,” which reveals his determination to stay in
the dance:
The beat
Comes out the speaker
Bodies start to move
Yearning to be
Next to leaning
On some other body
They get up to dance
Couples a common
Denominator although
A few threes and fours
Can be seen
Around the floor
….
Can I have this dance
Who wants to know
In the end, Greenwald does
present a kind of common sense — proposing that we reacquaint ourselves with
our relationships with nature and our desires for one another, and that we
become fuller human beings through our exchanges with the Earth. I miss the sometimes
(maybe even frequent) critic of our failures that Ted Greenwald was. I think we
need him now more than ever.
Common Sense (2016) by Ted
Greenwald is published by Wesleyan University Press and is available from
Amazon and other online retailers.
https://hyperallergic.com/444550/common-sense-ted-greenwald-wesleyan-university-press/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Weekend%20Egon%20Schiele%20Wayne%20Thiebaud%20Nicola%20Ginzel%20Ted%20Greenwald&utm_content=Weekend%20Egon%20Schiele%20Wayne%20Thiebaud%20Nicola%20Ginzel%20Ted%20Greenwald+CID_36d8365340ab8680374c8ef9b949cf87&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter
