Ted Greenwald

Ted interviewed me for the Poetry Project Newsletter, part of a series of interviews he did when he was the editor. It was published in the April/May 1998 issue.

Ted Greenwald: What does it feel like to be a poet in the “postmodern” era?

I’m sorry I can’t be there tonight. But sorrier still anyone has to be there. Our dear friend Ted is gone, but books and memories remain.

I read this last night at the Poetry Project memorial for Ted Greenwald.

He is gone now
Taking his body with him
When all the time
I thought it was
The beauty of his mind
I loved
       ["Off the Hook" in Common Sense]

I first met Ted Greenwald in 1975, in and around the Poetry Project. He was my guide to much of what interested me among the local poets: he never hesitated to say what he liked and didn’t in the poems and people around us. It’s not just that he didn’t suffer fools easily, but he was hilarious in skewing pretenses and false premises. We always had a good time talking, with my indirectness dancing with his blunt wisdom like two people doing the cha-cha on the point of a fountain pen.  

Ted Greenwald’s poems sing the commons and dance with a homely grace American poetry has rarely seen.

EPC 
PennSound

Eclipse has made available Ted Greenwald's iconic one-word-a-line poem Makes Sense, originally published by Angel Hair Press in 1975.

In the 1970s Ted and I would meet in the afternoons and talk til night. We even did a recording of a couple of dozen hours of our conversations. I owe a tremendous amount to those meetings and to our many conversations since. On this particular afternoon we talked at the bar in the back of the restaurant (I can't remember the name of the place, but it was downtown).
October 22, 2007