The Age of Reasons. Ted Greenwald

The Event | 74

       Art | 75

       “birdsong / kick / this” | 76

       Seated on a Hill | 77

       As If Nothing Happens | 78

       Oh, My Goodness | 79

       When Looking Over the Room | 80

       The Day Following | 82

       Out of Thin Air | 85

       When You Start | 86

       Poem (“clouds / over / the mountains”) | 87

       “industrial / amazement” | 88

       The Outlying District | 89

       From There | 99

       Heartstrings | 100

       Talk’s Disappearing | 102

       Attention | 103

       To Hold | 104

       Spare Hours | 108

       Bagged Whims Excite | 112

       Lock Up the Chairs | 113

      EDITOR’S NOTE

      Ted Greenwald has written on a daily basis for more than fifty years. So prolific has he been, in fact, that the poems in The Age of Reasons are selected from more than two hundred uncollected poems Greenwald published in magazines between 1969 and 1982, years in which he published sixteen books. In some ways, then, the present volume can be regarded as a companion to Common Sense, a selection of Greenwald’s early poems edited by Curtis Faville and published by his L Publications imprint in 1978. Happily, Wesleyan University Press is reissuing Common Sense to coincide with the publication of The Age of Reasons.

      Like many important poets, Greenwald cannot be pigeonholed as belonging to any particular literary movement, and his work evades easy categorization. A formalist with an unrivaled ear for everyday speech, we might situate him as running productive interference between his contemporaries in the second generation of the New York School, and the Language poets, for whom he is a foundational figure. His poetry is of the everyday and the ordinary, but rid of the cocktail-hour urbanity that sometimes mars the more uptown products of the New York School. Its relevance for Language poetry lies primarily in the fact that Greenwald often lets the form or sound of his poems guide them, rather than their sense.

The Age of Reasons presents a wider range of Greenwald’s forms and approaches than is usual in his books. We encounter Greenwald the minimalist, but while it is tempting to point to Aram Saroyan and Robert Grenier as fellow travelers, Greenwald’s aesthetic is different, his palette emphatically more vernacular. His minimalist works, here, are offset by extended pieces composed of verse paragraphs, in which we find Greenwald at his most conceptual (inasmuch as the works function “almost like plans for the future”).¹ If there is another organizing motif as disarmingly simple and casually brilliant as “The Sandwich Islands,” in which every paragraph is both a sandwich and an island, I have yet to encounter it. Indeed, Charles Bernstein has posited the casual made strange—speech unhinged from utility—as the central “Greenwaldian paradox.”² Whatever the scale, the light in Greenwald’s poems is always natural, the surface flat and cool. There are no deep images, although Greenwald understands as intuitively as Ted Berrigan that the surface is more interestingly located at some depth.

Also included in this selection is Greenwald’s play, The Coast, which infuses Beckettian waiting with a sensibility borrowed from art-world happenings.³ Greenwald was involved in that world, of course, having curated readings at Holly Solomon’s 98 Greene Street loft, the Clocktower, and MoMA PS1, and collaborated with artist friends Richard Bosman, Les Levine, Gordon Matta-Clark, and George Schneeman.

Prior to assembling this book, my intention was to present uncollected poems from the first twenty years of Greenwald’s writing, from 1962 to 1982. I settled on the narrower frame partly because the best of Greenwald’s early poems are included in Common Sense⁴ and partly because the 1969 start date finds Greenwald already writing what are immediately recognizable as “Ted Greenwald poems.” Of the poems collected here, “Heartstrings” perhaps 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