Ted Greenwald | Common Sense / 2006

a critic of our failures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Greenwald Common Sense (New York: L Publications, 1978), reprinted (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2006)

 

On June 17, 2016 my friend, poet Ted Greenwald, died at the age of 74, far too young for an end to such a remarkable poetic career.

      Born and raised in New York, involved with both the New York School (he was the editor of the  The Poetry Project’s Newsletter during the 1970s and served on that organization’s board for many years) and the “Language” poets (with a particularly close friendship with Charles Bernstein). Although obviously, since I lived elsewhere, I saw Ted far less often, but whenever we might get together I truly appreciated his street-wise talk and his savvy knowledge of nearly everything New York; Ted, during most of his adult life, was a hard working-class man, doing stints to support his wife, Joan, and their daughter, at nearly everything that none of the other “Language” poets nor New York School writers did, driving taxis, delivering newspapers, before later on working in art galleries (a New York School kind of occupation); and, at times, he clearly resented the fact that he did not have more time to write.

     Despite that fact, he wrote more than 30 books and did numerous collaborations with poets such as Bernstein and Bill Berkson (who died on the very same day as Greenwald). I published one of those books early on in my Sun & Moon career, Word of Mouth, and included a substantial number of his poems in my anthology From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 in 1994.

    Overall, I might describe Greenwald as a rather eclectic poet in his connections with everyone from Frank O’Hara, the British poet Tom Raworth, Bernadette Mayer, and Bernstein, as well as his connections to William Carlos Williams, Joseph Ceravolo, and contemporaneous poets such as John Godfrey. Yet there was never a question of Greenwald writing in his own voice. The poetry could be highly formal or radically disjunctive, but it was always clear that it was Ted’s work.

     Particularly in books such as his early Common Sense of 1978 (recently reissued by Wesleyan University Press in the year of his death) and his 1979 masterwork, Licorice Chronicles (a book I have written about previously) the poet built his works of densely dissociated fragments which he weaves together into a personally expressive whole, often pointing to the natural world or simply the society in which he survives. In his lovely testimony to Greenwald after his death, Bernstein wrote something similar about his later poetry, but I find the same “shimmering fabrics” in this early work:

 

"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 streetwise-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."

 

     Consider, for example, the opening stanza of his great poem “Privets Come into Season at High Tide”:

 

          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 almost farcical scene, a kind of comical scenario that might almost be out of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, Greenwald combines an almost Wordsworthian sense of nature with cartoon like characters all in search of the notion of freedom and poetic investigation. People and things rub up against one another, spilling over into a magnificent display of wonderment, almost as might a tale by Scheherazade. And, in the end, the poem itself almost speaks of 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, it appears that Greenwald is so determined to consider alternate possibilities that his poetry breaks down into parathentized units, literally 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)

 

    In this poem everything is unsettling, even the poem’s punctuation, moved apart from the very phrases it is attempting to present. Nothing is quite determinate, the way one might suffer a severe migraine, where images and language seem to cut across reason, sharp jabbing visions that sever the logic of the poem giving one the sense of complete disorder and doubt of one’s reason.

     In the poem that follows, 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 which ironically distorts the very notion of “Common Sense,” while also revealing what true “common sense” is about, our sometimes romanticized notion of the world against our gritty day-to-day living. And in that respect, there is a deep yearning in Greenwald’s poems for encounters that sometimes seem impossible in the world in which he must make his daily living. I perceived this almost always in the poet’s sometimes flippant evaluations of others, his judgment of friends who couldn’t quite see just how much he desired their attentions and love. There are dozens of examples of this in Common Sense, but I’ll just quote from a poem, “Goes On,” which reveals even his determination to stay in the dance:

 

       The beat

       Comes out the speaker

       Bodies start of 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,” suggesting we all need to get in touch with our relationships with nature and our desires for one another, that we become fuller human beings in our exchanges with the planet. I miss that sometimes (maybe even often) critic of our failures. I think we need him now more than ever.

 

Los Angeles, April 23, 2018

Reprinted from Hyperallegic Weekend (May 2018).