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).
