Ted Greenwald

The Age of Reasons


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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.

      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