In the Course brings together poems from The Course, which Bernstein and Greenwald worked on daily, exchanging a few lines at a time, during the year before Greenwald’s death in June 2016. Note—“Ted: A Memorial” was originally published as “Ted” in Jacket2, Sept. 17, 2016
TFH 25 Cover art by Brendan Price www.twentyfourhoursonline.org
Ted: A Memorial By Charles Bernstein He is gone now Taking his body with him When all the time I thought it was The beauty of his mind I loved [“Off the Hook” in Greenwald’s Common Sense]
I first met Ted Greenwald in 1975, in and around the Poetry Project. He was my guide to much of what interested me among the local poets: he never hesitated to say what he liked and didn’t in the poems and people around us. It’s not just that he didn’t suffer fools easily, but he was hilarious in skewing pretenses and false premises. We always had a good time talking, with my indirectness dancing with his blunt wisdom like two people doing the cha-cha on the point of a fountain pen. We started to meet for very long lunches, in the early years at the Queensborough Bar and Grill, near the bridge, with its hot trays of corned beef and potatoes, eating pickles and drinking whiskey. We talked so much that we decided to tape 17 hours of conversation throughout 1977, sometimes hanging out at Ted and Joan Simon’s place on Bleecker. I’d like to share those tapes, but the conversation is still too salty for public consumption. Ted always said we lived like rich people because we had our time to ourselves: he was working delivering the Village Voice once a week and I was on and off unemployment. For Ted, free time, making time free, time to write and think and talk, that was everything. And that never changed. In our conversations, Ted would often speak of his college friend Lorenzo Thomas and his most immediate fellow traveler, Tom Raworth. 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 Jewish 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. Greenwald’s poems are airy and contemplative, ambient and rhythmically intoxicating. There are no intimations/imitations of depth here: words skim pages like stones skipping on the water’s surface.
Ted was so very happy for his two new Wesleyan books, the reprint of the masterpiece selected Common Sense and the collection of uncollected poems, Age of Reasons. During the period of his illness, Ted was stoic. He’d tell me what was happening with his killer progressive disease, but never dwelled on it, never complained. He was always making time to write. This is what he loved to do and when he did it he felt like he had entered paradise. In July of 2015 we started on a collaboration, which we continued until June 11, just six days before he died. Ted and I exchanged lines back and forth over email, sometimes multiple times in a day and never less than every few days. After a while neither of us could fully separate what each had done, we were blowing together, back and forth in a duet of, and as, time, bouncing off the moment as if it were a trampoline, tripping out into the eternity of the company, from dark to delight. There was no sense of unnecessary limit, no register we couldn’t play. The experience was of freedom within the constraints we made up intuitively for each poem, The Course is about 500 pages and is dedicated to Tom and Val Raworth. The one thing Ted ruled out was anything that would frame the work in terms of his dying, though he was homebound and in the final months in hospice, under the supernal care of Joan McCluskey and their daughter Abby. Once I suggested the title “God’s Silence.” No way, said Ted, none of that shit. Use No Hooks was his motto. The Course was not about imminent death; it was a way of making the words we exchanged leap to life. Ted Greenwald sung the commons and danced with a homely grace American poetry has rarely seen.
God’s Silence for Ted Greenwald No more wasted Or cunning Than is come again
Ted Greenwald & Charles Bernstein
In the Course
3
1
Š 2017 Charles Bernstein and Ted Greenwald from their collaboration The Course
4
2
Cherry Blossoms on Schuylkill
Geese nibble grass Sun swolles sense Congeals at evanescing sentience Blabber wall Intense with proximity Always, duh, something Concrete melts in air Sloops of exile Drifting into port Heel of shoe Bag hands Call comes Lame proviso Sucker punch salvo Spilled beans with twist Unbelievable! Alive and ivy well 1st Amendment Phhhhhhhhhhhhhh OMG0OMG0OMG See funk think honk
5
3
Easy release weather Bikini wax clouds Loan some artiste Palookaville slugger Right in the swain of tain Arguably … GIMME Cell phone QUIK Sluice, shroop, schlusch Fused with Interspecies buck Coming off (scary) As as as as as The bad year (really scary) Stares right into my eyes & she says, she really does I couldn’t believe it … And she's driving now Forget U Head in bag Hardly even worth mentions (Slow ascent is same as) Forebear is foresworn
4
6
Down runway Best high school hair Fake blood Girds the grid Juice smokin’ and all Sorting the way Drip drip drip drp drip Teenageize getting together A lotta dish elations Swooply, is that it? Egrets, too, just over there Beside the police line All, eternal Morning cut loose Look around new guise
7
5
Sen Sen Cha Cha
Water sound Jumps in Mid sandals Rippling under the hood As a slipcase rewards Looking elsewise Relax throat Around sound A word means Just about nothing As if on a stroll So many as ifs Hold tongue Stranger's hand Word for In a manner of So who was Insufficient unto You ever Siddown Say anything
8
6
In the edge world Curving behind Goddamn big gulch Didn't say Left elbow bend Goes around Fellow feeling Say what? I’ve got All the tin in the world Could-it clouds Easterly blues Last seen In dirigible (How do you spell that?) Come on, come clean Door as portal Postal a (gum and) go A-game (with me) outrigger Longing for longing But banking on next stop ’ll be the next one Wait up Nice out Step up
9
7
Focus behind Feel what’s were What’s when Useless use-to Name comes up Way when Leaning on left Hurts enumerating Wisp of wish Flesh out Curves in space Sounds how ’bout that, she, it Flying without trespass On my so-called lawn A new word a day A new day Word for word Inebriate of sound Debauching dawn In search of night Monsoon ringtone Deliver weave levels Heal thigh's danger range
8
10
Athwart a lack Beside the hey Amidst such rubble Unrunging bell Beyond cloud U Funny cater feel Absent any honor Fear gnawing at heart Then back again Swingline same line Bread and without pause Butter up emboss As in: it’s all a toss Count me out ’til the melody Going on behind Getting off and on Note for note train Remains insoluble At the door of Instinctual abhorrence Is how treats Unsigned be have Kweep offering
11
9
Stuff, stuff, stuff Stuff, stuff, stuff Stuff, stuff, stuff
12
10
Double Tap
Main Street disarray All chem afterlife Something's gaining Endemic patalife Churning boost In love of mocha Terrible trues Drapes back Keep remove As mores wane Fashion tains Garbled cycles Face glass Walk in Find out A murmur
Wall off Below brow Tha
Tell you
Raisin 13
11
Or not Or even-steven Or resoluteness Fills Inambulate foostiary Brazen betrayal (Betrothal Announces quipped Jellificaton Pent-up for a thousand Moments, fecund flip Fogs forever rips Not leaving Without who Referee Big bite No foul Previous See doctor Side effects Today's weather This is last week Looks like early Previous
14
12
Imbue
Dunes Sleepliness
Solvent for the moment Rolling in lacklusterousness (tone!) Guardian stares deep into (
)
Brace self, closet Othernesses, fealty Bounds behind Pop up again Reddish (Unwritten) Learning
Curve See on flim
Laminated clouds Reply gosh woods Peak cola Bam Cash back Belly up
15
13
Gripppling the (a) Baggage Shut / Shut / Shout Grimly at game Slim slice of (Just a, justa) Sincerely rim Torques filament (Soupy?) Command out of excavate (Bench press retort) [Mags?] Starts with intercept
On outside
Puts on brakes Go back Last week Stylo Rule down One more look @ 13 Nerver batter Gazooks!, she screamed Into her innter logic
14
16
On the outside Couldn’t find it
While
Sheer
Beamishness in the lurch Thursday on
Simpers tempers Sweet tenders allay Gridiron echelon Take up sex Plato Interior Wait cloudy day Upper hinge No roof skim Metallic green White interior With Ari Kaching CA Late 60s
Alternate universe Foops flops
Floops incompadre Elemental sojourn Cuts three ways
17
15
Saturate Obliterate Declination Ennobles quagmire (Corner salooned) Frequently mummery Stalls past reticent Heliopathy ((>?]]) Look into crime Define CLOUDS Poll numbers rise So happy Only election Nice smile Look good Young Man sweats The wiredest thing Logicless More than ever All day listen One more season Woodpecker laff
18
16
Litttterbuff cropes Amoong ammonunition Flaying way lakers Jets (are it?)) Fit for mulling ((quilt? Ambers its rump So close to immoculatte Sourcer (sorcerror, so sure) Gobs, that’s it, Streak Mind rays Cloud cover right back Showers wind back Nice sunny Allegation Caption Recharge No interest for month Poppy slop Health of others Workers exposed Syllable delivery V hic Sleeve slo momo muumuu
17
19
Ammo Domini Fix it or It fix you Yolk the fox (says the ‌) Relentlessless Mummy, on flute Sphinx bass Sure say something About the flight of man (Five classic brews) Sure make hey Sure thing Go back Yours do But weight The song She is heavy You're kidding, no Go for it again Same it Car sophically Winterize quasi freebs Below wish canto lopes
18
20
Quasi-julip devioration Mints excerpts Erupt minor bathos Tributary tribulations (triangulations) Forswear Galapagos magic, mimicking Ichabod hootencies Sheer crust Embraces occipital Farmer's cheese In slow houses Chord
Chord Chord
Scream, yo
Same gun Come home
Let's see Some. More drums The walk walk (Solo) On balance Installment purchase
21
19
As wisp becomes Clear swear Abounding Agent of &@":/( Cleaves to tidal Rift )incorrigible Derringer Silo rigs rope Slap prance Souciant warning Times out Nature's bluff As big as life In this town For awhile What's this Can do
Here 'tis
After rest Couple mountains Tree tree tree A pizza art Ain't that much fun
Rusted out 20
22
Wrist warp (gooble) Trains around a fop Inclemency is my Ardence, twain on blue Curlicue (bordering Tumescent logicolloquy Fritter In as much as Tippling in beehive Throttle break-kneck Copper wire (her lips Bedevil Forthwith Yon kidding Tell about see what Linked reverses Soap nationally
Verb fritters
Just to be talking Yak butter idols Melt into crowd Fill in each crow Syllables close for renovation Phobia moda 21
23
Alon which twwitchhh )Who?(
Surface under air
Each molarity obtains Slurping gazebo(at)s (Amy filters, John offs) Mine cold and stony heart Field marsh Begs the governor “I did not do it� Nor foreswear My cup to lids
24
22
About the Authors Ted Greenwald (1942-2016) published more than thirty collections of poetry over fifty years. In 2016, Wesleyan University Press published two books by him: The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems, 1969–1982 and Common Sense, a selection of his early poems. For more information go to his page at the Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu). Charles Bernstein is the author, most recently, of Pitch of Poetry, essays (University of Chicago, 2016) and Recalculating (Chicago, 2014). He teaches poetics at the University of Pennsylvania. More information at his EPC page. Â