MC, January 2016
NOTES
1. Ted Greenwald, “Spoken,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, vol. 2, no. 7 (March 1979): n.p. See also the four prose works “No Eating,” “No Doubt,” “No Way,” and “No Regrets,” recently collected in Own Church (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).
2. Charles Bernstein, unpublished essay on Greenwald’s work, shared with the editor on March 26, 2015.
3. The Coast was performed at 541 Broadway over three nights in October 1978, with a cast of Tom Carey, Bob Holman, Eileen Myles, and Bob Rosenthal, and costumes by Judith Shea.
4. See “And, Hinges,” “I Hear a Step,” “Lapstrake,” “Pore Suspension,” “Privets Come into Season at High Tide,” and “Wash” (all 1964); as well as “Bleep” and “Elegance and Umbrellas” (both 1967). See also Licorice Chronicles, written between 1964 and 1969 and published by the Kulchur Foundation in 1979.
5. Bill Berkson, “In Ted Greenwald,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, vol. 2, no. 7 (March 1979): n.p.
6. Greenwald, “Spoken.”
7. For an early, and discrete, example, see “Finally Understanding” in “Language Sampler,” ed. Charles Bernstein, The Paris Review 86 (Winter 1982): n.p. See also Exit the Face (with Richard Bosman; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982) and “Going into School That Day” in 3 (Cuneiform Press, 2008), among many others.
The Age of Reasons
man
who write
one
million poems
in
one
day
maybe
know what’s up
I light
cigaret
rain smoke
SHOW AND TELL
When I first saw you
I liked you You
didn’t come on the way
you thought you came on
My first impression of you was
you’re a person
who I’m really glad to know
who’s interested
in intellectual thoughts and true meanings of things
and I figured
since I was so glad to really get to know you
you’d be pretty glad to get to know me
and maybe I would touch your face with my hands
like I’m in the process of doing now
and look at you at arm’s distance
and then closer in
when and if it’s ok with you
and we could walk out of this room
arm-in-arm or shoulder-to-shoulder
just touching every other step or so
and go get a coke
or a pepsi and some grilled cheese
I really’d like a cheeseburger more
and talk about books and movies
and just exchange
if you’d want to do that with me
intellectual thoughts
and true meanings Just
about ourselves We would be able
to share and explore
all the little thoughts and feelings
that really can mess up the day
if things don’t go right
and all the quote irritations of modern living unquote
that Chekhov discussed so well
and then maybe we could learn to be friends
in this process of discovering
what makes each other tick
Pass me a cigaret
and pass me a cup of coffee Maybe
if we learn to really like one another
I’ll sit next to you the next session we have
and Bob and John and Alice and Kit
and you and me
will move our chairs a lot closer together
and really begin to understand
what really makes us tick in the mind
and straighten out our true meanings
We’ll call each other on the phone
write letters and postcards to each other
when we’re away for vacation
and write poems about what we do each day
and really all the love
even while a lot of loneliness exists in the world
and how we learn each other’s quirks
We’ll better cope with anything and anyone
that might come up and we might meet
and we’ll rent a farm
and start a commune
that probably won’t be as easy as starting a car
and we’ll skinny dip in the pond
take planes to Europe
help the disadvantaged and underdeveloped
make the world a better place to grow in
and when we get old
we’ll look back on all this
and know just know
just six of us had the power
to change the course of things
by learning to get along better
and it all started
with us sitting down
looking each other straight in the eye
and rapping
air like art
moves
from
the
window