Ted Greenwald

THE BOOK I TOSS

The book I toss is Boss

It bangs against the walls

And gets me working

I watch its thin green

Recede into a reed

And think the time right

To set the Boss right

We argue

Cops suddenly appear

I throw them and Boss 

Out the window

And unscrew my ankles

I be my own boss

I be my own police

Ted Greenwald

AIRY RUSHES PUNCH

Airy rushes punch my shirt 

Through a window of sunset dirt 

And send me reeling like a lure 

Through the water nerves of America 

Once on the other side of somewhere 

I relax and become someone else 

Not that I behave different 

Just behave less often 

The sky offers me solace and office space 

And stars I keep in drawers 

Wear nothing 

But a little mist and halo 

I will imagine myself 

A sympathetic headlight 

Knocking on the door of the night 

To borrow a cup of sugar 

From a beautiful neighbor 

Who's moved in 

Without even the clothes on her back 

"Would it be possible 

To borrow a cup of sugar" 

"Sure Sit down, honey 

Make yourself comfortable" 

I ease down in the big dipper

Ted Greenwald

 I have a pet (it’s probably the family pet), a parakeet from Woolworth’s named Admiral. We leave the cage open, he’d fly out and 

            hang out up on the curtain rods, eventually would light on the edge of a glass of water in front of me, dips a beak in for a drink.

            He lets me hold him, bites me lightly with his beak. Periodically, for no apparent reason, he freaks out, flies around weirdly, 
            jumps around the cage. One morning wake up and he’s lying still on the bottom of the cage, the inside of his throat visible, he got 
            caught between the bars and the perch. He died.

John Hughes on Ted Greenwald

Greenwald is fond of ending blocks of reminiscence with the word ‘anyway.’ The word takes on a variety of value, sometimes dismissive, sometimes a relaxed dissipation of energy after a concentrated effort, sometimes a ball tossed to resume a story, bounce down the page to the next paragraph, flight of steps, hallway or block.

Humor abounds. Greenwald’s early life is informed largely by the movies. From which he learns some things gleaned from the silver screen, practiced in real life, produce dubious results. As, per instance, his take on Broken Arrow:

            One Saturday afternoon, come home after seeing Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow. He plays Cochise trying to work things out in 
            the Old West, with James Stewart and, lurking Debra Paget, opposed to the idea of compromise by Geronimo, played by Jay
            Silverheels (the real-life Tonto).

            Anyway

            After eating I guess buffalo meat sitting around the campfire Ira Gossel, from Brooklyn, who is Cochise finishes eating with his 
            hands and uses his biceps as a napkin, wiping off the fat rubbing it into his arms, opines how it wards off the chill.

            That night for dinner we have chicken. I pick up a piece, munch away from my hand, finish, put down the bone, proceed to rub 
            the grease from my fingers into my arms, dignified with a thousand mile stare. My parents, everyone at the table, don’t all talk at 
            once, what the hell are you doing. Just rubbing the fat in, I say, it’s good to ward off the chill.

            Go wash. Don’t do that again.

Ted Greenwald

Staring Doesn’t Help

Staring doesn’t help
Nor does running around
Music doesn’t help
Especially songs
Getting together doesn’t help
Nor does staying apart
Seeing someone else doesn’t
Nor does seeing you
Sleeping doesn’t help
Nor does waking
Dreaming doesn’t help
Nor do any facts
Running doesn’t help
Nor does sitting around

Ted Greenwald

Finally Understanding

Finally understanding
No job, layers of consciousness
Quick hits
Finally understanding

Quick hits
Starmaking machinery
Finally understanding
No job, layers of consciousness

 

********

“industrial…”

industrial
amazement
turns
to
                slush

Ted Greenwald

Bleep

Somewhere (where) in between say 
Index and middle fingers, to one day- 
Wake up and find growing a new rather 
Radish vestigial finger 
Little do you know little do you too know 
Questions. Eyes picking off barrages of mirages soberly. 
Lone. Drinking on an empty beach. Sauterne 
Bottle overturned. Sand thru sievey fingers, 
Listen to prokprok of waves 
Fearing too many great many great 
Thinkers and thinkers of our time 
Busy themselves, usefully. Seeing sprockets as the real 
Real. (And all that entails. 
Spend time dubbing in historical consciousness. 
Makes the heart grow blonder with the distance. 
Waterproofs hair. Air. 
Fingernails grow whatever way you wish 
Sunny nostalgia the way wishes grow,
Whicheverway, are more close to 
OBJECTIVE vestments searched for where 
Disguised as rockets 
One’s free to choose between limits 
Between sign that YIELD 
Either a b c d e or 
Any other squint or 
Sequence found squeezing the fingers. Eh, graft. Being 
Not so much a question of question or of answer. 
Swallowed with unicap and orange juice, but of right 
Detachment from the lips 
Alphabetically precipitate, that really brings out 
Evening crickets bats the real you eating bubbles 
Every and each night of the week, depends 
Combining sequence with each (vague) COUNT. 
Always hoped for sixth toe on either foot. 
Merely sonar, an indication you’re not alone 
And someone somewhere cares for you. 
Detailly, even if vaguely. Please, to mow the maudlin.

]

John Godfrey

GOOD OUTCOMES

In April you try plans
Turns into May
Best thing is I don’t know bleep
Take dressing for sun
Time after time bad target 
Elevated by ungodly machine 
is of good outcomes
Of all sacks what sack fits?
I call you without lines
Does anything come of no one?
And turn into sand no salt 
Deep hole it all disappears 
Guttural languages: lost 
Sliver in tragus: rare 
Armband from funeral home
Don’t go away in madness 
Don’t go away too sure 
What a devil says computes 
Go ahead, have a hey-day 
Sun squeezes into tight sky 
Man walks blocks in search 

John Godfrey

 

Radiant Dog

Radiant dog on doublecross, and I,

by night, a raven fly. My fear

is that eternity has an alm

that is ordinary to ten thousand

and worn from my strings, my console

of limbs, and I a missing part.

It is the world that's new, not I,

and submarines can shoot the land

from the wheelbarrow of sickly pastorals.

Give me the swamp any day! or the huts

that pave the slave to freedom.

From a small cloud in my ears

the song has leapt the valley

curtained with snow, and for ascendant

harmony the gambler thumbs his cards.

Of all the queens one is a witch

whose curse is that she's held.

The horses roll the stone and trot

after their maturity sweepstakes.

This time the homeliest won't ride

my bet into hasty subtract glue.

The pieces fly and here I lie,

triangle of head and gut and thigh.

Put me on my mount, Tomahawk, and

past the river our cortege will dust

the heavy fur, and peasants' prayers

will touch the smell of holy cadaver.

I will have sun and manly rage,

and Mike Atlas will trim me up

to rip the bier from my brother's

hearse, and avenge me for my loss.

The gallows hurt! and for my scheme

I hang on the bridge's span

where my mother will trust my lips

with tears, the ones I send her now.

John Godfrey

 

Lachrymal Humidities

in memory of Ted Berrigan

Lose a brother? Lose a pa? At the sound of the tone it will be exactly

sayonara. Meet me in the lobby of Casa Purgatoria when it's Turkish

bath hour.  We will sweat  out  whatever  the  fuck it is that's unclean

and inside us, at least inside me.  Round and brown and getting cool.

Vestigal  feeling in the monkey I cut off myself.  Having  stood beside

the  catafalque  to  nominte  him for  heroism I did not expect a nom-

ination  for  tragedy  to be so rapidly forthcoming. You saw as well as

I  did  how  the  hot  afternoon  was  grateful  to  him for bequeathing

himself  to  its  mysterious  finitude.  Dry  and  bright and breezy and

the hours were honey.  The shadow of a fully leafed-out tree over our

white  knuckles.  I  would  have  liked  to  have been holding beads to

show how humble  and elated I felt.  I talked of farce as if it were life.

Life itself seemed  more than ever  high hips in a  form-fitting sheath.

I  can  be  restfully  subdued  by  the  sight  of  long  undulant  fingers,

please  let  me  show you  my entire body!  Every time  you see me re-

call  my  neck  sinews,  my  piano-string  forearm  tendons,  my pneu-

matic  sexual flesh,  and  my mild and erotic  eyeballs—forget the shy-

ness  about me  that  you can't understand.  You can easily read in my 

eyes  how  voluntary  my  fantasies are,  and how flattering they are to

you. Body. B-o-d-y.  Ah, the bruises.  Later for laying flowers, says the

body.  O  body,  O  tough  stuff,  O  body  capable of sleep.  I break  the

shaft  of  my  spear  over  my  knee  and kiss a patch of concrete.  Then

from  hands  and  knees  I rise  to my full height.

John Godfrey, "Lachrymal Humidities" from The City Keeps.  C

Dick Gallup memorialized byJohn Godfrey

Hinge Picture. C Press (1965)

“the past zings through the present”

In Memoriam for Dick Gallup by John Godfrey

In 1966, I met Dick Gallup. I had read him in the journals of the mid-’60s and was keen on the works and ideas of the tight group of poets he had conspired with for several years. I was a new guy, shy and intimidated more than somewhat by the group’s quick and aggressive wits (dexedrine) but quickly felt the kindness and encouragement they offered to a “new recruit.” By the fall of 1969 I was in the East Village for good (forever) when the original clusters of poets were about to disperse. But from 1969 until 1973 or so there were occasions several times a week when all of us would be at an event or reading, and during those times I got to know Dick and, moreover, listen to him and his longtime co-conspirators discuss and debate many things—sometimes even writing.

Dick was exactly four years and eight days older than I. I was, so to speak, the freshman and he had just graduated. I must have been around him a lot. In recall I can see him, always with one or the other cap tipped back on his head, even at home. His face was expressive as was his voice. Poets had fun around each other. Dick’s facial flexibility was such that in 30 minutes you could read on it glee, disdain, indifference, interested warmth, disbelief. Dick was as masculinist as anyone else in those days, yet he also demonstrated caring sentiments.

I might be describing his poems.

Sometime before 1974 he departed New York and I can’t remember seeing him more often than the times he was in town to read. Those meetings were warm and happy ones. I missed out on some of his publications when he was in the Rockies or in the Bay Area. When the world is jumping on your trampoline it’s the longest friendships, which are few, that stay active.

Dick read at the Poetry Project shortly after the publication of the real subject of this piece, I think in 2001. I’m not sure I could have made it that night. In those days, at 8 p.m. I would be looking for a parking space and I would have been starving after a 12-hour day at work. But I certainly obtained the book of “new and selected.”

That book is Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things (Coffee House Press, 2000), which is available online, I just checked alibris, so get it. It is an ideal history of Gallup’s writing and gives an idea of ambitions he shared with longtime friends Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan and later with Peter Schjeldahl and Michael Brownstein. Tom Clark had been an ally for several years before his arrival in New York in ’67. He stayed for but one year and shared Gallup’s love of 17th century Romantic era poetry.

Shiny Pencils is put together to a great extent chronologically. In the front of the book are examples of early works by Gallup which are irreverent, disrespectful of traditional values of authorship, intent on insurrection, which was the underground post-‘50s thing. A lot of stealing went on, which today would be called, politely, appropriation. That kind of manipulation had been part of 20th Century writing among the Continental poets, too. Berrigan’s The Sonnets was a tour de force of collaging and shuffling of lines, but for the most part from a lofty (and wiseass) source, Rimbaud. Gallup had been a colleague of Berrigan’s since his teenage years. Berrigan was a major influence, in writing and attitude. Berrigan’s take on Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara and Denby was as influential as his own writing.

Those thefts were in fact acts of imagination. (No apps! No cut and paste! No Xerox!) Gallup was very amorous of 17th-18th English poetry, the meters and fastidiousness, and a lot of the first 50 or so pages of Pencils are gently larcenous. When I’ve read these poems over the years I sometimes believe Gallup made up himself what would otherwise appear to have been harvested. But he also is convincingly deep and it’s more than possible to see a serious “real poem” instead of a satire. I’m amazed each time I read “Life in Darkness.” Where is this “borrowed” material coming from? The Book of Job? Lamentations? John Bunyan? There seems to be a serious purpose to this long (11 page) poem, arising from a deep or unconscious sourcing. A driven “real” poem.

The middle 80 or so pages of Pencils remind me a lot of trends that began with the ‘70s. Gallup wrote then with the glibness that often was part of the era. But he demonstrates the talky, conversational manner, by then very well established, with a definite lean towards a fastidious and non-naturalistic style. Brash, blunt, and easygoing, yes, but with care in diction. His life themes, I guess, had set in. They are, pardon me, existential. Unhappiness and distress, often with himself. In my take, an out-of-place-ness, a loss of illusion with no small amount of bitters. There are sweet moments but not saccharine ones. The occasions of poems are aloneness, rejection, being eaten by reality. But in every case you read Gallup reacting to what he is writing by changing the tone strategically, especially with great inventions of wack images that amuse and, all the same, have accuracy. Feedback as he goes, from the poem in progress back to himself. Juggling a poem.

The last 40-50 pages of Pencils I find to be sublime. Gallup puts all his food on the same plate. The feelings are crystal clear and are served by all the compositional skills and habits he had incorporated. Flights of imagination, occasionally antiqued prosody, honest short of earnestness. A how-to, well earned, of moving “real” poems. On the one hand a diminished self presents and on the other a greater power of insight. Lyricism was in his skeleton and he used it confidently.

This is a time when sensitivities profit from the smartass, the tricky, the distrust of the sincere. Let’s get real, yo. Let’s get compositionally shifty. Let’s bring out the gray. Truth is provisional. We only live once.

Take Dick Gallup, for instance. Get Dick Gallup and his Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things.

Dick Gallup

 

Relaxation

So gay on your lovely head 
The hat cradles the specialty 
Of the house brand new
And hedged with the flowers 
Of the past we have somehow 
Got through. If night
Should fold in on us
Here in the day dripping 
Down the fire-escapes toward 
The ground like poetry
In search of the common man 
In all things, smoky and
Vapid insight coming near 
To what I can't keep my eyes 
Off, the fragile jaws
Of antique life, a fretful 
Crowd of messages delivered 
Long ago in the pouring rain

Then night would find us 
As we are, bright lives 
Dancing in the somber light 
Of history, shiny pencils
At the edge of things.

Dick Gallup

 

Dick, ca. 1968, acrylic and collage on canvas, 41 X 36 inches, by George Schneeman.

Hey, Buster!

When I close my eyes I see a man in a brown suit
sitting in a hotel lobby in 1947 reading the morning
paper. His thoughts are private and probably
beside the point.

Many years later the clouds
still move from west to east and a hawk may
skim the tops of the trees far up the mountainside.

There is nothing to stop us from placing
objects on a table in the sunlight and painting
false shadows under them to confuse our friends,
if we have any—probably not, if we think that
much about confusing them.

                                                     Alas, in such terms
pronouns tend to lose their meaning; lack of
tension or current in between. Life becomes
all a dream, with a nasty kicker when we open
our eyes once more.

Anselm Berrigan

I Remember Hearing Joe Read

I remember hearing Joe Brainard read his poem
    “I remember”
at the Ear Inn when I was eight or nine years old.

I remember that of all the poets I had heard read
    up to that point
Joe was not only the best, but the only one who
    was any good at all.

I remember Joe reading “I remember putting socks
    down my pants
to make it look like I had more,” and wondering if
    he was serious.

I remember going home not too long after the reading
    and putting socks
down my own pants to see what I would look like
    if I “had more.”

I remember feeling embarrassed, and thinking I
    didn’t want anyone
I knew seeing me have more.

I remember taking the socks out and thinking
    poets should keep
their ideas to themselves.

Dick Gallup

 

Dick Gallup, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, Pat Padgett, Ron Padgett (1963)

Guard Duty

A blind child clutches a 3" fish
Summer camp, a miracle on 5th Avenue
Little hints of reality marching
Across the back of the bus
I’m not riding

A quarantine falls over the picture
And it is like nothing was ever there
Or rather there seems to be a bug
On the sidewalk I am examining
That doesn’t figure because I need a drink
And I don’t drink

And then a dog walks through a window
A tiny flashlight
In the pastures of childhood
Which no one seems interested in
Neglecting, bright quadrangles opening
On a square I knew, I guess
In the manner in which a dog knows his master
Or a fish his particular fish pond
Liquids returning to their own level
Or the dog passing another window
In a house I know is there
If only by reputation

fr

Justin Chin

 

from Burn

“He has fallen asleep, passed out, is snoring like the last hog on earth, sweating like a lost marathon runner. His white t-shirt is drenched, the sheets and the pillows are drenched with his sweat. I want to sleep but cannot. I paw him, run my hands over his wet body but he cannot wake as I cannot sleep. I wipe his sweat off on m chest, I pull his shirt up and rub my face into his sweaty belly. I adore everything that comes out of his pores, his bitter toxic sweat, his stinky overheated body.

Our love is bound by chemicals. How I hold my arm out to him and let him run the vein into my vein. How beautiful my blood looks as it surges into the syringe, like a rare flower blossoming, and how beautiful it feels as he pumps it, chemical rich, back into me….”

Dick Gallup

with Ted Berrigan (1961). Photograph by Ron Padgett

BATTY AS THE DOVES THAT FLY 

Reflective images were the darling of another age
Perhaps, as the Century turned
Shapes fluttered out of passing strangers
While neighbors at a cafe emitted and endless series
    Of personalities Quick pulses into the air
That sustained the likes of Ezra Pound

Who saw both before and beyond, it seems, in taste
And, no doubt, drew all his bright images
Out of the fruitful air.

Justin Chin

Surrealist Bookmark

 Directions for use:

1. Find the line in the book where you have stopped reading. Place bookmark elsewhere in the book.
2. Place bookmark in a stranger’s book.
3. Go to a hospital and leave bookmark in a patient’s book. You may also leave bookmark at a public pay phone in the facility.4. Place bookmark in a book that has yet to be written.

Warning:
May cause reader to lose place in book. Extreme disorientation may occur. Loss of connective thoughts and lucid speech akin to dementia may set in. Do not operate pasta makers. Do not mix with herbal remedies. May cause liver damage, kidney stones, cerebral hemorrhage and ulcers. May cause extreme euphoria. May cause false increase in self-esteem. Peripheral nerve damage occurred in 21 percent of test subjects who used a placebo bookmark. Some users report hallucinations of Parisian cafes. Visions of God, Buddha, Vishnu, Jacqueline Susann and Donald Duck may occur in a small percentage of users. Cheese, curry, and spring rolls may never taste the same for some users.

If any of these reactions occur, discontinue use. Remove bookmark and place it in a moist, calm, dark, quiet place until side effects subside

Caroline Bergvall

Her work VIA, for example, consists of 48 translations of the opening tercet of Dante’sInferno (from translations available at the British Library), arranged alphabetically by their first lines. It begins: