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- Common Sense
Reissue of a seminal Greenwald collection
First published in 1979, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers—musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald's work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable. An online reader's companion will be available at tedgreenwald.site.wesleyan.edu.
Whiff
Fog Rolled In
P.S.
Airy Rushes Punch
Bleep
For Ted, On Election Day
And, Hinges
Stop For
Note To A Dumb Friend
The / Skeleton
Pore Suspension
Privets Come Into Season At High Tide
The / Form
Miami
Quick
His / (The
Detonator
Radio Crop
Dew, Discrepancy
A Thought
I Hear A Step
Fat Lines, Turn
Tracer
Four Days of Books And High Fever
I Forgot To Remember
Transformational Grammar
Lapstrake
Common Sense
Something Nice Happened
One / Thing
We Pass Slowly
Jiggles
Elegance And Umbrellas
Comb
Fatty
Making A Living
Zero Hour
A Man Was On A Hill
Mister Tree's Manual
For Laffs
Straight On Bearing Left
Standard Air
Prime Meat Clouds
Looks Like A Busy Week
To Use
Happy / Dolphin
Come In And Look Thinking
Snatches Of Music
This Is The Right
The Pears Are The Pears
Swan Leg
The Words To The Song
Ah!
Other Vase
Restless
Human Events
Always / Surprised
Poem
She Looked
Saturday Night
Goes On
For Joan
Body
One Foot
The Piano Shivers
Getting Through
Germ Warfare
Strange Dreams
Blazing Down Sun
Blink
Superfluity
Wash
Backscratch
Cool / Cool
Candling
Food Cycle
Such A Long Time
Hand Over
Ghost
Next Week
Clean Glass Poems
Howdah
The Mutt's Laser
The Life
Modern Times
Ninth Street
The Words Drone On
Quiet Dampness
Complete Balancing Weather Meets
What Were His Last Words
You're Welcome
Sitting Around
Off The Hook
Gray Out
The Book I Toss
Seated On The Back
Poems / Pile Up
Last Five Minutes
Acknoweldgments
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.
"No poet has taken the idea that poetry should be at least as good as overheard conversation as seriously as Ted Greenwald."
~Publishers Weekly
"Ted Greenwald knows what real American talk sounds like, understands the rhythm and pulse of the language, and knows how to write poems that are built around that knowledge. He is one of America's most ambitious and provocative poets."
~Terence Winch, Jacket 19, October 2002, reviewing Jumping the Line
"Craftsmanship of line breaks. Motored by mind. Stark insight. Truncated adventitiousisms. Balls. The Age of Reasons, poems from half a lifetime ago, demonstrates why Ted Greenwald has inspired so many poets ever since. When it ships, it should be packed in laurels.""
~John Godfrey
"Ted Greenwald's poems 'give voice' to a variety of New York idioms, and with that, a distinct attitude toward both language and experience. His hard and insistent surfaces admit to an extraordinary range of feeling, humor, observation and often ironic commentary. His ultimate strength as a poet is his basic humanity, something that can be claimed for very few.""
~Bill Berkson
""The poems are quick, fervent outbursts of song... Greenwald's Common Sense celebrates the beauty of ordinary language. These are poems unique in their attitude toward language and humanity, and they provide us with an absolutely vital reading experience. The poems are strong words from an even stronger mind unafraid to endow the words with flesh and bone. Greenwald is the ultimate poet's poet.""
~Sonja James, The Journal
""No poet has taken the idea that poetry should be at least as good as overheard conversation as seriously as Ted Greenwald.""
~Publishers Weekly
""Greenwald's poems, from the start, were so much their own method and approach, that he seemed to have sprouted like some hybrid from the grey dense concrete of Manhattan streets.""
~The Compass Rose
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