Jumping the Line - Softcover

Greenwald, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0937804770 ISBN 13: 9780937804773

Publisher: Roof Books, 1999

Synopsis

Conversational, spontaneous, and dynamic, Ted Greenwald's poems hinge on the line, sometimes repeated, always with a difference.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Greenwald authored more than 25 books of poetry, including Lapstrake; Blink; The Life; You Bet!; Common Sense; Word of Mouth; Looks Like I’ m Walking; You Go Through; Something, She’ s Dead; and The Up and Up. In 1978, Greenwald and Charles Bernstein co-founded the Ear Inn Reading Series, which became the Segue Reading Series, a venue for developing and promoting the Language poetry movement, which is still in operation. Greenwald has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Kulcher Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He lived in New York City until his death in 2016.

Reviews

No poet has taken the idea that poetry should be at least as good as overheard conversation as seriously as Ted Greenwald. In his longer collections from the '60s through the '80s (Word of Mouth; Common Sense; and the soon-to-be-reprinted Licorice Chronicles stand out) Greenwald presented enormous catalogues of very plain phrases, sometimes inflected with a tough-guy persona. A former art gallery proprietor, Greenwald invites comparison to minimalist sculptors and installation artists, and it might not be too much of a stretch to connect his cool repetitions with the rise of ambient music. In the '90s, Greenwald's work has ventured into forms such as the triolet and the pantoum, and his deadpan deferrals of closure have given way to more overt jokes: "Millions moviegoers missing/ Just brown and serve," he writes in one of the 111 30-line poems in this collection. Each poem has five lines that repeat, so to do the math, there are 2775 lines of poetry on the order of "All smiles," "Daybreak," "Don't wait up" and "Out to lunch," any of which could serve as Ed Ruscha slogans, or as Bruce Nauman ad libs. In Greenwald's new form, such lines are like a flavorless but triple-digit-proof liquor, an acquired taste to be sure. 'Meditative' is the rubric under development for this kind of work, rooted in minimalist and language poetries. As Greenwald might say, done there, been that: "Quack quack/ It's for you/ Stranger central." (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Roof Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0937804770
• ISBN 13: 9780937804773
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 116