Ted Greenwald -- 30 years later

Back in 1979, I published Ted Greenwald's Common Sense, effectively a selected poems up to that point. The money to do it--I was just a struggling poet myself at that time, plugging along in a government job which I always thought would be a temporary gig, but which continued for another 22 years--came from the National Endowment for the Arts Small Publishers grants program. (Full disclosure: I've been officially opposed to government support of the arts for at least the last 15 years, despite my once having been a beneficiary, albeit for publishing, not for my writing.) Ted's collected poems was one proposal in my grant application, and it turned out to be one of the best projects I've ever undertaken. Up to that point in time, Ted had only published short mimeo pamphlets--which was the medium of the day--and I thought his work deserved the sort of professional presentation ordinarily accorded primarily to mainstream poets. We agreed on terms, and Ted encouraged me to "edit" his collected works from his previously published books. This wasn't very difficult. Ted's work was consistent and clear, and chronology as a guiding principle of organization didn't seem to be an over-riding concern. We were both happy with the resulting collection. Appearing concurrently with Ted's other major collection that year, The Licorice Chronicles [Kulchur Press, 1979], it lent greater authenticity and legitimacy to his reputation, as an "underground" poet to be reckoned with.       

 

 

From my first exposure to Ted's work, I realized he was an "original,"--in the words of Ezra Pound (referring to the young George Oppen)--a writer whose ideas were "not gotten out of any other man's books")--a writer who invented his own literary (or non-literary) contexts, and whose style met the demands of a personal vision which he shared with no one. Some writers are original by design or mastery of will, others simply are ineluctably, undeniably themselves, sans any premeditated compulsion to pretend to be anything they aren't. There was never anyone who wrote the way Ted did, and there may never be. He's the genuine article: A poet with a voice and a way of seeing the world that is unique.  

 

 

 

In the years since, Ted has continued to publish, and by now must have well over a thousand pages of published work(s). 

 

Two books I found recently at SPD in its Berkeley warehouse--In Your Dreams [BlazeVox, 2008], and 3 [Cuneiform Press, 2008], confirm that Ted's as busy and inventive as he was when I "collected" him thirty years ago. 

 

I've referred to Ted before in print as an "urban primitive"--a term which for me captures some of the rawness of the life of the the big city streets, while implying a sophistication that encompasses his brilliant appropriation of middle-brow speech (language) for the purposes of high mimetic. Ted, who began publishing in the mid-1960's, was a "Language Poet" years before the Language Poets even knew they had a name, or an identity. They naturally adopted Ted as a comrade-in-arms, even though, in point of fact, Ted was too elusive a quantity, too original and genuine an artist, even to need a literary association to define his importance. Ted discovered language poetry technique(s) before most of the Language Poets had graduated from college. This may sound somewhat argumentative, until you realize that talent may not always "rise to the top" in this country, where publicity and promotion usually constitute 4/5's of the public's apprehension of any writer's reputation. That's as true in academia, as it is in New York publishing circles, or in the underground network of the avant garde. 

 

In any case, Ted has turned his attention in recent years to longer works. Ted's shorter poems usually function as the pirouette of a single turn, but in the longer poems he works out complex patterns of incremental repetition and variation, playing off phrases which are augmented by the changing focus of attention. Greenwald has always stuck stubbornly with his daily speech, seeing in it a key to the meaning of his rhythms, obsessions, fascinations. He burrows inside these, explicating them based on a personal code, which then becomes a part of what is happening/falling apart. The changing reorientation becomes a series of subtle adjustments, each of which opens or disintegrates before our eyes. In Your Dreams is a long (247pp, 79 72-line poems) series of meditations set as centered lines, all of which are capitalized, without any explicit punctuation (periods or commas).

 

 

WONDERING HOW

Carving living darkness

Guard down

Run out of paint

Carving living darkness

Run out of paint

Stand looking

Carving living darkness

Guard down

Stand looking

For what?

Personality under glass

Stand looking

Personality under glass

Back to where?

Stand looking

For what?

Back to where?

Conversational lyrics

Handheld romance

Back to where?

Handheld romance

Needy talking about

Back to where?

Conversational lyrics

Needy talking about

Tissue loneliness

Vanity glue

Needy talking about

Vanity glue

Belief waa waa

Walk the floor

With the ceiling

 

 

--and so on. The order of the lines here is ABCACDAEDFGDGHDFHI...and so on. What this incrementally shifting recurrence does is create a dialectic in which individual phrases are interlocked, but never "return" to a beginning. Life presents us with millions of obsessive little lyrical formulae, most of which never recur in quite the same way twice. What these strictly organized rehearsals do is record the shifting preoccupations of the mind, in language. Each phrase, in the mind, has a characteristic rhythmic and denotative identity, a resonance which spins in place, undergoes slight change, then is replaced with another. We are always subconsciously "trying phrases out" for size, like pairs of pants in the changing room of a department store. "Does this fit?" "How do I look?" "This plastic security device is really heavy." Such phrases then become a part of the process of living, or of thinking through the poem itself. 

Does this fit?

Trying phrases out

Replaced with another

In the mind

This plastic security

Become a part of

Thinking

      Does this fit?    

 

 

I don't know that anyone has ever written a work quite like this one. John Giorno used to write poems that were repeated sentences, broken up into different lengths, but he wasn't experimenting with the transformations of individual phrases and conceptual relationships the way Greenwald does. Ron Silliman works with/through repeated phrases in a similar way, but his separations are much wider and meant to queue thought rather than, as with Greenwald, the mental jingles which are toyed with, with such obsessive, curious, precious determination.

 

Greenwald's style depends upon the rhythmic triggers that set unconscious thought processes into action. The poems become echo-chambers; or function perhaps as a "ghost tracking" of stray particles in linear accelerators. The particles are phrase units, sometimes familiar, sometimes not, which get stuck in the conveyor and spin or wobble there for a second, then are swept along the belt towards memory's ultimate warehouse. Such metaphors from physics or industry fail to account for the multi-contextual frames the poems set up. Their origin may be wholly synthetic (born in the imagination), zooming in on the air waves, or may derive from some interaction in the "actual world" of street talk, the human commerce of the everyday, pushing along or waiting in line, hurrying through the yellow semaphore before the surveillance camera clicks gotcha!   

 

Ted's poems have never been referential in the usual sense, but exercises the mind plays, balanced between need and hooky, crisis and cure, distraction and the sweet spot of contact. Ted's poems are about what it feels like to be inside "Ted." An amazing place, no question.