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The Age of Reasons
Uncollected Poems 1969–1982
Edited by Miles Champion
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2016-04-05
The best of Ted Greenwald's uncollected poems from the 1970s
This collection of Ted Greenwald's poetry, edited by Miles Champion, is a sampler of some of Greenwald's most breathtaking work. A New York poet with close ties to the New York School and the Language poets, Greenwald has written daily since the early 1960s, and none of the poems in this book are included in any of his books to date. These discrete works were written in advance of or alongside the extended explorations of a mutated triolet form that increasingly occupied him from the late 1970s on. This book can be seen as a companion to Common Sense, and provides further evidence of Greenwald's ability to think with his ear, to hear what's said as it arrives as a fresh sound or shape in his head. This work is singular in its pattern-making, its music-making, and its ability to simultaneously follow multiple paths. An online reader's companion will be available at tedgreenwald.site.wesleyan.edu
TED GREENWALD has published extensively for over fifty years. He is the author of over thirty books, including Licorice Chronicles, Word of Mouth, Jumping the Line, In Your Dreams, 3, and Clearview/LIE. He lives in New York City. MILES CHAMPION is the author of How to Laugh and coauthor, with Trevor Winkfield, of How I Became a Painter, among other books. He lives in New York City.
"Ted called things as he saw them and didn't suffer fools. He was in it for the long haul, had absolutely no illusions about who he was, and built his work to last (let's see where we all are in 200 years). Words can't say how grateful I am to have been his friend."
~Miles Champion, The Poetry Project
"In this book, chock full of sparkling but unknown works by Ted Greenwald, poems sing in the commons and dance with a homely grace American poetry has rarely seen."
~Charles Bernstein
"Is it cynical or is it innocent? He has an almost machinic way. But is it utopian? The most progressive of Ted Greenwald's poems are just that. No, they all are: forward thinking, Sagittarian, and wildly Americanly kind.""
~Eileen Myles
""[T]hese poems reward re-reading. They are studded with lines, thoughts, conjunctions that can flip readers' perceptions Greenwald saw through humankind's natural inclination to piece together fragments to craft narratives that are whole, smooth and make sense. He believed in 'Rejoicing in fragments'.""
~Graham Allison, Poetry Salzburg Review
""As a volume, Age of Reasons shows Greenwald's poems assert a potential for a common experience of being turned over whether their sense is apparent or not. Slippage between meaning on the surface and meaning through feeling manifests both in poems and striking prose pieces.""
~Rachel Levitsky, The Poetry Project
""Ted called things as he saw them and didn't suffer fools. He was in it for the long haul, had absolutely no illusions about who he was, and built his work to last (let's see where we all are in 200 years). Words can't say how grateful I am to have been his friend.""
~Miles Champion, The Poetry Project
""The tone is upbeat, pun-loving, personable, while also take-no-prisoners, wise ass, and/or so what?... Ted had various different hobs, but there is no doubt what his real job was: poetry, 100 percent. Yet his work was not literary, but literally all about being a person, one among many.""
~Kit Robinson, The Poetry Project
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