Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Subterranean
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1969
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2002042298 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2002042298 |
| HEADING: | Greenfield, Richard, 1969- |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Greenfield, Richard, |d 1969- |
| 670 | __ |a Greenfield, Richard. A carnage in the lovetrees, 2003: |b CIP t.p. (Richard Greenfield) data sheet (Greenfield, Richard Allen; b. Jan. 18, 1969) galley (Richard Greenfield; Englewood, CO) |
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PERSONAL
Born January 18, 1969, in Hemet, CA.
EDUCATION:Portland State University, B.S., 1996; University of Montana, M.F.A., 1999; University of Denver, Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and educator. New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, instructor, 2009—, Bates College Learning Associate, 2010, associate professor, director of creative writing program, 2011-13; Puerto del Sol, Las Cruces, NM, editor-in-chief; Apostrophe Books, cofounding editor. Teaches writing workshops.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems to anthologies, including Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. Contributor of poems to publications, including Boston Review, Five Fingers Review, Lana Turner, West Branch, LIT, and VOLT.
SIDELIGHTS
Richard Greenfield is a poet and writer based in El Paso, TX. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Portland State University, a master’s degree from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver. In 2009, Greenfield joined New Mexico State University. He has served as a Bates College Learning Associate, associate professor, and director of the school’s creative writing program. Greenfield is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, the literary magazine associated with the university. He also cofounded an independent publishing company called Apostrophe Books.
In a lengthy interview with a contributor to the Minnesota Review website, Greenfield described the literary magazine. He stated: “Puerto Del Sol, which has been around for over 50 years, in its earliest decades focused on more of an engagement with the local, which is an ethos I appreciate and support. As a mostly regional southwest magazine, its orientation was toward representation of literatures, communities, cultures, histories, canons of the southwest—and that would mean also how the landscape is represented as a part of that culture, history.” Greenfield continued: “Yet, when I look at these older issues of Puerto Del Sol, I see far more white men and realist and heteronormative representations of reality bracketed within a southwest context than is present in the contemporary Puerto Del Sol.” Greenfield added: “The big turn in the magazine began in about 2009 when Carmen started to overhaul the design of the magazine and the types of writers we were looking for. She started to turn it away from being exclusively contextualized as a regional magazine. Puerto Del Sol became much more expansive in its publishing goals and in reaching a broader audience.” Greenfield also stated: “We are lucky that we typically do get a very diverse pool of submissions and the editors—both the students and editor-in-chief—are very conscious of soliciting and thinking about where we are lacking and what we need—and that can happen on a issue-by-issue case.”
In the same interview with the contributor to the Minnesota Review website, Greenfield discussed Apostrophe Books, stating: “It’s a micro-press. We only have been bringing out one book every year and a half. I run it with Mark Tursi in New Jersey. We do everything by phone, Skype, email.” Greenfield continued: “We first talked about it in 2005 and then brought out our first book in 2007. At the time we were graduate students, and we had a particular worldview about the kind of poetry that was being published and the kind of poetry that we thought was represented—and this was utterly aesthetic—but we wanted work that was strange. We just wanted to publish weird poets, weird poetry.” Greenfield added: “Many books were crafted in an MFA-kind-of-way that resulted in homogenous poetry, and we thought poets writing strange, challenging books were finding it difficult to find supportive presses because the books were too outside the perimeters of dominant trends in poetry.”
A Carnage in the Lovetrees
In 2003, Greenfield released his first collection of poems, A Carnage in the Lovetrees. In the works in this volume, he compares emotional states to natural landscapes. As in the title, on various occasions in his poems, Greenfield combines two words to create a new one.
Joyelle McSweeney, critic on the Verse website, offered a favorable assessment of A Carnage in the Lovetrees. McSweeney remarked: “Richard Greenfield plates the red meat of lurid, psychological content—yet it is not in its seeming confessionality but in its language, its self-consciousness, and its careful technique that A Carnage in the Lovetrees is a strange and memorable book.” McSweeney added: “Greenfield’s achievement in A Carnage in the Lovetrees is to have created a readable, saturated universe of thinking, writing, and memory, in which no term provides purchase on another.” Writing on the Double Room website, Jeff Menne commented on New California Poetry‘s praise of Greenfield and his work. Menne suggested: “Whether Greenfield ‘will help define the emerging generation of poets,’ as New California hopes, is left to the future’s domain. He does offer a possibility, at least. The editors at New California seem to be selecting poets that can be arrayed on the two poles of Language poetry, as Charles Altieri sees them represented in Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein. Hejinian points to a possible fusion with the Romantic, but made anew. Greenfield advances her suggestion with a book that, while howling with loss, is blessed with survival instinct.”
Tracer
Tracer, Greenfield’s second poetry collection, was published in 2009. Many of the poems in this volume use first-person point of view, but the narrator is meant to represent American society as a whole. Post-9/11 topics, such as torture, terrorism, sensationalist reporting, and explosions, are included in the works.
Writing on the Boston Review website, Haines Eason commented: “Tracer doesn’t lapse into casual irony or acquiesce to the quick fix of consumer culture. … It is a surprisingly nimble, quietly important book.” Andy Frazee, critic on the Quarterly Conversation website, suggested: “Tracer, Richard Greenfield’s second book of poetry, ups the promise—and the ante—of his first book, 2003′s A Carnage in the Lovetrees. In that volume the poet proved himself relentlessly and bravely willing to bare emotional traumas within the context of equally relentless cutting-edge poetics—translating, as it were, Plath’s confessional shriek into the post–Language Poetry landscape and adopting a measured, even flat tone and testing personal detail against linguistic inventiveness (and vice versa). Where in Lovetrees Greenfield explored the past, Tracer takes on the now.” Frazee also stated: “In Tracer, Greenfield upends Whitman’s paradigm of personal and national self-making, reversing it into a question of how much of the self is self-made and how much is received or constituted by the culture. … Greenfield, in short, engages in a kind of personal and national soul-searching.”
Subterranean
In Subterranean, which was released in 2018, Greenfield once again includes natural imagery. However, the poems in this book are darker, focusing on death, decay, and the grotesque.
“Readers willing to travel with Greenfield into the root system he unearths will be rewarded by the sensory reorientation [of] his words,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of Subterranean, p. 50.
ONLINE
Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/ (July 1, 2010), Haines Eason, review of Tracer.
Double Room, https://doubleroomjournal.com/ (July 6, 2018), Jeff Menne, review of A Carnage in the Lovetrees.
Minnesota Review, https://minnestoareview.wordpress.com/ (December 8, 2017), author interview.
Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/ (June 19, 2018), author profile.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (December 7, 2009), Andy Frazee, review of Tracer.
Verse, http://versemag.blogspot.com/ (July 3, 2004), Joyelle McSweeney, review of A Carnage in the Lovetrees.
Richard Greenfield is the author of three collections of poetry, Subterranean (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), Tracer (Omnidawn Publishing, 2009), and A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press, 2003). He teaches at New Mexico State University and lives in El Paso, Texas.
QUOTED: "Puerto Del Sol, which has been around for over 50 years, in its earliest decades focused on more of an engagement with the local, which is an ethos I appreciate and support. As a mostly regional southwest magazine, its orientation was toward representation of literatures, communities, cultures, histories, canons of the southwest—and that would mean also how the landscape is represented as a part of that culture, history."
"Yet, when I look at these older issues of Puerto Del Sol, I see far more white men and realist and heteronormative representations of reality bracketed within a southwest context than is present in the contemporary Puerto Del Sol."
"The big turn in the magazine began in about 2009 when Carmen started to overhaul the design of the magazine and the types of writers we were looking for. She started to turn it away from being exclusively contextualized as a regional magazine. Puerto Del Sol became much more expansive in its publishing goals and in reaching a broader audience."
"We are lucky that we typically do get a very diverse pool of submissions and the editors—both the students and editor-in-chief—are very conscious of soliciting and thinking about where we are lacking and what we need—and that can happen on a issue-by-issue case."
"It’s a micro-press. We only have been bringing out one book every year and a half. I run it with Mark Tursi in New Jersey. We do everything by phone, Skype, email."
"We first talked about it in 2005 and then brought out our first book in 2007. At the time we were graduate students, and we had a particular worldview about the kind of poetry that was being published and the kind of poetry that we thought was represented—and this was utterly aesthetic—but we wanted work that was strange. We just wanted to publish weird poets, weird poetry."
"Many books were crafted in an MFA-kind-of-way that resulted in homogenous poetry, and we thought poets writing strange, challenging books were finding it difficult to find supportive presses because the books were too outside the perimeters of dominant trends in poetry."
Interview With Puerto Del Sol & APOSTROPHE BOOKS Editor Richard Greenfield
December 8, 2017 / The Minnesota Review Creative Writing Staff
Richard Greenfield is the editor-in-chief of New Mexico State University’s (NMSU’s) literary magazine Puerto Del Sol and the co-founding editor with Mark Tursi of APOSTROPHE BOOKS. He is an associate professor of English at NMSU where he teaches poetry to graduates and undergraduates. He has published three books: Subterranean (forthcoming Omnidawn 2018), Tracer (Omnidawn 2009) and A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press, 2003).
Over the past week or so I have had the privilege of interviewing Richard Greenfield about what it’s like, behind the scenes, to edit pieces for both a literary magazine and small book press. The following is a compilation of phone interview notes and email correspondence. Read on to learn more about print versus digital platforms, issues of diversity in literary editing, an editorial perspective on soliciting and negotiating differences of literary opinion among staff members, and how enthusiasts might go about starting their own small press.
YASMINE KAMINSKY: I am very interested in Puerto Del Sol’s byline “weirding it up since 1964”: could you speak more on this philosophy?
RICHARD GREENFIELD: I think one thing to keep in mind about Puerto Del Sol is that it’s had a lot of varied stewardship, which is typical of literary magazines hosted in universities with continuously rotating staff. I have only been editor in chief of the magazine since August of 2017. Before that, Evan Lavender-Smith was doing it for two years. Before that, Carmen Giménez Smith for seven years. It’s evolved over time.
Puerto Del Sol, which has been around for over 50 years, in its earliest decades focused on more of an engagement with the local, which is an ethos I appreciate and support. As a mostly regional southwest magazine, its orientation was toward representation of literatures, communities, cultures, histories, canons of the southwest—and that would mean also how the landscape is represented as a part of that culture, history. Yet, when I look at these older issues of Puerto Del Sol, I see far more white men and realist and heteronormative representations of reality bracketed within a southwest context than is present in the contemporary Puerto Del Sol.
The big turn in the magazine began in about 2009 when Carmen started to overhaul the design of the magazine and the types of writers we were looking for. She started to turn it away from being exclusively contextualized as a regional magazine. Puerto Del Sol became much more expansive in its publishing goals and in reaching a broader audience. During her tenure—and in Evan’s and my recent taking over—the magazine has much more of an emphasis on work in translation, work by diverse ethnicities, sexualities, aesthetics, artistic practices, and genre-blurring. Also, there has been a shift to publishing more emerging writers, which I think results from empowering the students to make decisions from the open submissions.
Along with this turn, we began building up a digital presence and embraced experimenting with what we can do in a digital framework. One of our most massive, time-consuming projects was to digitize the archive of past issues to be read online.
I did notice that Puerto Del Sol’s website features issues parallel to the magazine such as its Black Voices Series. What can you tell us about Puerto’s website and its relationship to the magazine?
We have updates on a weekly basis to keep it active and topical to readers because the print magazine now only comes out once a year. The Black Voices Series was launched recently, initiated by one of our graduate students, Naima Yael Tokunow. She wanted to continue working on the magazine after she finished in our MFA program. Naima is a poet who felt the magazine should provide a space to provide increased exposure to Black writers in contemporary literature and art.
We are also starting a Latinx series soon, which we’re all very excited about. In the future I hope we will expand these editorial spaces on the website. We want to create a kind of continuous virtual presence of the magazine that is different from what you would get in an annual print magazine.
And I think these editorial spaces are interesting too because they are online. We are able to represent writers whose projects challenge being printed in a magazine. Artists who are doing digital media, music, and visual work as a sort of hybridity with literature can achieve effective representation of that work in a digital format.
I think the diversity we are talking about in genre is a diversity of platforms: offering people multiple ways of experiencing a literary magazine, redefining what a literary magazine is, and providing a topical, contemporary picture of the wild diversity of genre and platform use that’s happening in literature.
We don’t want to make something static. We see a lot of literary magazines that use a PDF or an html page to represent sampled writers from a given issue—which is something we do, too, but is not all we do. I think there’s some concern with some publications about “giving away” too much of a magazine for free on a site—a valid concern mainly if you’re being distributed. We are in Barnes & Noble stores for example. When magazines don’t sell, they rip off the magazine cover and send it back to the distributor for credit. Most literary magazines have more returns than sales. Editors may be concerned about further damage to sales if the magazine is available online.
Our print magazine is another platform. I wouldn’t necessarily argue that the print version is hierarchically more important than the digital magazine. I do think that the digital magazine still has room to grow and improve and become something greater than it is. As a new editor, I’m excited about new possibilities of pushing the web magazine in different directions. I think a lot of students who are coming into this and working on the magazine will have some pretty conservative ideas about what a journal is or can become.
That surprises me since writers in MFA programs tend to be early in their writing lives.
Well, I think a lot of students come from undergraduate creative writing departments with journals devised to be distributed among the university. It’s a big transition, rethinking ideas of what a magazine is and what it means to be published.
And I think there is a lot of valorization of publishing work in a print magazine. Younger writers have been exposed to the idea of having a virtual self and having the complete ability to self-publish, and thus the idea of an active curation, a process of peer review, has more significance for them, even as the digital publication provides greater access for audiences. The role of the magazine editor is just as important in reaching a wider audience as it always was. It’s not so much that a text is in print. Cultural capital may not be the right word given the marginalization of so many literary magazines in our culture, but within the literary communities, in being actively reviewed and accepted by a peer, there is a sense of community affirmation. This hasn’t gone away, even with the vast expansion of digital publishing.
Students have to learn the politics of editing as well. There are many, many different approaches to what makes a piece of writing “good.” I think about seeing how pieces you select play off of one another, become more exciting and enhanced in a community. They learn what happens on a political level when you select work for publication. What if we end up with all white people? What if we end up with all men? They start to think about a diverse representation of writers—how they are going to get more diverse work and attract more diverse writers. The only way to do it is to publish a diverse magazine in the first place.
And how do you suggest editors go about making sure their publications are diverse?
You need to solicit, run contests, publicize that your magazine is looking for diverse content constantly. You cannot be relaxed or non-vigilant of reminding people that you exist. We are lucky that we typically do get a very diverse pool of submissions and the editors—both the students and editor-in-chief—are very conscious of soliciting and thinking about where we are lacking and what we need—and that can happen on a issue-by-issue case.
We are currently working on the “science issue,” and one of the earliest conversations we had this semester when we met for an editorial meeting was that we were not well-represented in women’s prose writers, so I made a list of women writers I associated with science-concerns and began actively soliciting, alongside the students. The editorial board initiated the conversation; these values are being passed down through mentorship—cultivating editorial values organically.
But these values had to be built up. It doesn’t just happen naturally. Magazine staffs themselves may not be diverse. It is possible for them to be almost entirely white, which is a concern—and one that creates an inherent collective blind-spot when we are not careful.
We should work hard when we don’t have diverse representation. I’m really pleased that recently, a couple of our staff initiated sending out emails to the broader university community asking for new potential diverse readers to apply to be on our team. In this call for readers and editors, we expressed an interest in building a diverse editorialship.
That is not something I have considered, reaching out to the community for additional readers.
And you have to be conscious that a lack of diversity is present. Self-awareness comes from these values being disseminated every year, as the staff continues to change annually. I think Carmen was initially responsible for cultivating that community, but now it is so well-organized, it continues to flourish.
Returning to an earlier suggestion you mentioned—soliciting. How and where do literary journals solicit for submissions? How might editors approach a writer when they want them to make edits to their piece?
A lot of editors handle this very differently. I vacillate. I don’t respond to all of my soliciting experiences the same way. Is the writer someone I know? If that’s the case, I might have the social basis to more actively engage in an editing process with the writer.
Not all writers invite a conversation about editing their work when they submit though. The idea of the editor as someone who makes editing decisions on a particular piece is an old one—but I’m not sure it necessarily represents mainstream thinking about what an editor does. In some cases, you’re dealing with egos, people who disagree with you and don’t have a relationship with you. You may not even be in their aesthetic encampment. For example, if you think about an experimental writer who is being edited by a person with a preference for realism, there may be different concerns about character development, linearity, conflict, structure. For an experimental writer–say someone influenced by Samuel Beckett—all those elements are suspect. There’s going to be a significant conflict between the editor and the writer that arises from 150 years of evolution of narrative writing!
That can make editing solicitations tricky.
Yes, I think because of the diversity of the Puerto Del Sol—we do publish experimental writing; we do publish realist writing; we publish across the spectrum—the editor has to be flexible about these aesthetic traditions before thinking about editing the work. The more diverse the magazine, the more likely it is that the editor is someone whose editing responsibilities are more about the shaping of an overall curation rather than editing individual pieces on a language or craft level.
Other magazines are narrow in their aesthetic niche—something understood by people submitting to that magazine—for these publications, the fact that the editors and writers are participating in a dialogue about that literary niche makes it more possible to edit based on common ground.
When I solicit writers that I don’t know, I typically have to spend a lot of time “foregrounding” in my email. I put together in my email a greeting that signals to the writer that I have read the writer’s work in the past, that I value it, that I see that potential writing by that writer would fill out my curatorial desires for that magazine. I typically provide a lot of information about the magazine: where it’s distributed, how long it’s been around, links within the email that the writer can check out to get a sense of what the magazine is and whether they think their writing is served by being in the magazine.
That can depend on what kinds of audiences the writer is trying to reach and with what types of writers the writer wants to appear. For example, when I publish as a poet, I publish based on my familiarity with other writers in the magazine. I want to be in a kind of community with other writers. The places I publish are consistent in the types of communities they support in their writing. For example, Lana Turner, which is a magazine published by Cal Bedient and David Lau, has this kind of Marxist ethos and is interested in how art and poetry historicize our moment and responds to our political realities. It’s one of the more political engaged publications in the poetry world. I’ve published in 2-3 issues of it. The reason I send them work is that I am very honored and astounded by seeing my work by alongside the work of people who are equally politically engaged.
And on the other hand, a magazine like Poetry is interesting because it has evolved from being a magazine people associated with high modernism to middle-road modernism to narrative lyric in the American mainstream and then evolving yet again to being open to writers across the spectrum, from experimental to prosodic or formalist work or lyric writers or narrative poets. It’s a magazine you can’t really pin down with one specific aesthetic editorial tradition unless you contrast the tenures of its various editors over time, and you get the sense that American poetry—and actually it does publish international writers in translation, but it mostly still publishes American writers—that poetry is incredibly pluralistic and varied. Honestly, as a reader, it’s always a mixed bag with Poetry, which I’m just using as an example that is illustrative of most literary magazines. Some of the writers I admire, and others, I cannot connect to the work. Of course, that’s the point of a literary magazine: it’s a site of engagement and disengagement. Poetry gives you a comprehensive snapshot of what is happening in poetry; there seems to be a more open editorial mission behind broader aesthetic representation behind it all. I think this is very different than Lana Turner, which is quite focused in its politics. Puerto Del Sol is probably right in the middle on the spectrum between these magazines.
But getting back to your question about soliciting, when I solicit someone, I assume they care about the kind of magazine their work is appearing in: what this publication is, what our vision is, and how their work will be read in this magazine.
The hardest part for me in the soliciting process is when a writer sends you work you are not necessarily excited about—or perhaps when I champion work but others on the editorial board are not excited about it, and now I’m in this position as editor-and-chief, and I have to think about how I will navigate the situation. I want to respect the editorial board and their position—sometimes, I try to convince them that there’s merit to the work. There have been a few times in past magazines where I felt I had to make an executive decision and put work in that I thought very strongly needed to be in the magazine.
It’s hard to go back to a writer and say there was nothing here that we can use at this time. It seems especially fraught because you’ve gone to the trouble of soliciting the writer. I think if you reject something you solicited, you spend a lot of time in that communication about what it was that wasn’t working, trying to be very positive about it: you emphasize that it’s a “fit” issue rather than a rejection of the work. It can be an opportunity to invite more work from a writer that may be a better “fit.” I also see trying not to frame it as a wholesale rejection of the writer. You remain a supportive reader of their work. You have to be diplomatic. But of course, not all editors have that perspective.
I am sure a lot of writers appreciate editors who take the time to be sensitive.
I have encountered a lot of sensitive writers. A lot is at stake in having submitted their work to you. In a lot of cases, you’re the first person to see the work, especially with writers who are productive but may not have trusted readers. Your reaction to it can be a surprise to the writer.
That’s a really good point. Switching gears, though, you are also the co-founding editor for the small poetry press Apostrophe Books. Would you like to tell us about that?
It’s a micro-press. We only have been bringing out one book every year and a half. I run it with Mark Tursi in New Jersey. We do everything by phone, Skype, email.
We first talked about it in 2005 and then brought out our first book in 2007. At the time we were graduate students, and we had a particular worldview about the kind of poetry that was being published and the kind of poetry that we thought was represented—and this was utterly aesthetic—but we wanted work that was strange. We just wanted to publish weird poets, weird poetry.
We felt that most of the books we were seeing were participating in trending stylistic ruts or tropes. There’d be a dominant stylistic mode. We could see trends happening in poetry and not a lot of risk-taking happening. Many books were crafted in an MFA-kind-of-way that resulted in homogenous poetry, and we thought poets writing strange, challenging books were finding it difficult to find supportive presses because the books were too outside the perimeters of dominant trends in poetry.
The first book we published was definitely outside the norm of what we were seeing at that time—Tonight’s the Night by Catherine Meng. The title refers to Neil Young’s album Tonight’s the Night. The song is itself an elegy for someone Neil Young knew who died. Reportedly there was a concert where Neil Young performed this song over and over again, angering the crowd. Catherine Meng became interested in fugues and depression and reading pianist Glenn Gould. His Goldberg Variations is considered to be controversial because of the way he performs it and the studio qualities that were present. There was a squeaky chair and he kind of moans and groans. He was an eccentric. The book was centered on this guy called the professor, who, in a state of dementia, is caught in a fugue. All the poems are named “Tonight’s the Night.” The book brings to together dementia, fugues, Bach, Glenn Gould (who suffered from hypochondria), Neil Young, grief, and recursive grief. It was a kind of book that a larger poetry publisher was unlikely to publish. It was a weird book.
APOSTROPHE BOOKS was modeled after the brilliant and canon-disrupting Action Books, edited by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson. They inspired us to start a press when we saw their first books at a conference at the University of Denver. All of the books we published at that time were strange—pataphysical, conceptual, and resisting the well-crafted poem. One book (coincidentally or not coincidentally) by Johannes Göransson (A New Quarantine Will Take My Place) was influenced by European high modernism and featured Jean-Luc Godard-style interruptions. The third book, Paul Foster Johnson’s Refrains/Unworkings, presented the world of a postmodern flaneur responding to post 9/11 urban space in Manhattan. Our next book, Jessica Baran’s Remains to Be Used, was a series of feminist ekphrastic prose poems that try to understand and subvert the male gaze. All the poems refer directly to pieces of male gaze art or film. I mean, I could talk about every one of our books, which I’m proud to have played a role in bringing to an audience.
That is quite a variety.
Yes. What makes them all similar is an emphasis on books that are challenging, that don’t fit into specific stylistic encampments. Books that enact their own ideas. They tend to be project books where the poet has successfully found a form over the course of a book. We are currently on book number nine!
At this point, you have selected several books for APOSTROPHE BOOKS as well as several pieces for magazines like Puerto Del Sol. How does reading submissions for a poetry press compare to reading submissions for a literary journal? Do you engage with submissions differently for a book press versus a literary journal?
It’s very different. For the press, I am only choosing one manuscript, so I’m not thinking about how the work I’m selecting is fitting into a relationship with a collective magazine. On the other hand, the series of books on the press is kind of like a collective. We also think, how is this book similar to a book we’ve done in the past?
We publish a letter on each of the bindings of the books spelling out the name of the press as the books come out. When it’s all done, we’re coming out with a slipcase for the whole series. We think about it as a singular project. We think: what’s the relationship of this book to the books we have already published? The final letter in our name for the press, the letter E and the tenth letter in the word “apostrophe,” in our logo features a red box around it. When we finally reach book 10, we will publish new poems by the previous nine writers, an encapsulation of the whole series into a community or chorus.
One of the issues for me and the other editor is that we never agree on the book we should publish, so it ends up being a battle.
How do editors of a small-scale operation negotiate these differences in opinion?
One way is I make the case for the book I am backing. And then he (Mark Tursi) makes his case for the book he’s backing. We go back and forth talking aloud and acknowledging what we find valid about the criticisms of the book the other person is trying to support. Eventually, we reach a compromise where the other person is convinced by the other person’s argument. I’ve convinced him to publish books that he was not initially interested in, and vice versa.
Another way is we will take two books and individually back the one we really want. Because we’re a micro-press, this doesn’t always happen.
A third way is neither one of us ends up with the one we wanted, but we go with the book we both have solid feelings about. We go through our lists looking for common ground.
What other issue have you run into, aside from editorial differences?
Money has been an issue for us because we pay out of our own pockets for the expenses of the press, the largest expense of which is printing the books. We are not a nonprofit. We don’t do enough business and production to warrant a non-profit status. We became an LLC for a while, but that did not help us out much except to keep track of expenses. How we envisioned being able to write off the cost of producing the books did not ever meet substantial deduction numbers where it was worth all the hassle. We have never made a profit. I know small presses that have made a profit, though. You have to run contests, and you have to continually put 100% of your free time into promoting and running your press. Then there are the distribution costs. We have to pay a distributor fee for every title. We have to pay for shipping to our distributors like SPD and Amazon and Ingram. After the cost of printing, distribution, promotional events, and web hosting, etc.—we end up in the red. We have never made a single cent.
But that’s not why we did it. It’s opened a lot of doors for us in other ways. It’s provided access to, and participation in, communities we care about. There are so many friendships that started with Apostrophe. We love supporting writers. Our publications have helped emerging writers gain a readership. Our books do help the poetry community and add to its aesthetic diversity. We have fans who come to our AWP table and say they love our books. That’s so rewarding.
What advice do you have for readers who are looking to start their own small presses?
It depends on how ambitious you are about your press. You have to start with what kind of press do you want to be. How many books do you want to bring out a year? How much work are you willing to do for your writers? You have to do a lot for your writers. And they don’t always do a lot for you. They don’t necessarily promote their events. Some of these writers can’t afford it. They work full time, and it’s an extreme expense for them to fly somewhere to give a reading of their poetry book.
You need to have a clear sense in advance about what kind of poetry or fiction you want to publish, how many books you want to bring out, how you are going to support your writers other than publishing their work, and what you expect to get out of this in return. You should have a serious dialogue about the potential disappointments you are going to face if you have grandiose ideas or expectations about the material reimbursements or spiritual rewards.
I think there is an extreme sense of pride about publishing a book for me—almost like bringing a baby into the world—and I want to support it, and I think everyone should read it. There are a thousand other publishers who feel the same way about their books, though.
When you buy a book of poetry, you are investing in the health of the community. I invest in a press. Anytime there’s a subscription for a press, that’s how I buy their books. They’re raising money to print their books in a subscription model. I give donations to presses that I care about. I want to see them flourish. I just think wherever you have your money is a vote you’ve made in support of the people running that press and their ability to bring out more books, their ability to keep all of this going.
I think it’s really fun too, to publish books. If you decide to publish books, it’s like you put the pause button on your own writing to do this work, and you see how it makes you feel to participate in bringing something out to the world and supporting another writer. It’s not a coincidence that so many small press publishers are writers, too.
Richard Greenfield is a professor of creative writing and poetry at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and is editor in chief of the literary magazine Puerto Del Sol and co-editor of Apostrophe Books. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Subterranean (to be released this spring of 2018 from Omnidawn), Tracer (Omnidawn 2009), and A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California 2003), which was named a American Booksellers Association BookSense Top University Press pick. His work has been anthologized in Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, and most recently in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. In 2016, he was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Distinguished Professor at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea, and has held writing residencies at Willapa Bay AiR, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Yasmine Kaminsky is a first year poet at Virginia Tech. She is a poetry reader and the blog editor for the minnesota review.
Richard Greenfield
By jengland | Published August 5, 2014
photo_richard greenfieldBackground and Education:
Richard Greenfield was born in Hemet, California, spent his early childhood in Southern California, and later lived in the Pacific Northwest. He earned a BS in Arts & Letters (in English & Philosophy) from Portland State University (1996), an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana (1999), and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver (2005), where he was a Frankel Fellow.
Publications:
He is the author of Tracer (Omnidawn 2009), which was a finalist for the Sawtooth Prize, and A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press, 2003), which was named a Book Sense Top University Press pick. His work has been anthologized in Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry (Autumn House Press), The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Books), and most recently in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean). His poetry has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, VOLT, Lana Turner, LIT, Five Fingers Review, and West Branch. He has published criticism on Anne Carson, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Marjorie Welish.
Teaching and Professional Experience:
Richard Greenfield began teaching at New Mexico State University in 2009. In 2010, he was a Bates College Learning Associate (2010). At NMSU he teaches graduate workshops in the MFA program as well as undergraduate courses in poetry. Recent courses have included seminars on the sonnet form, surrealism, the grotesque, hybridism, somatics, ecopoetics, and post-World War II American poetics. From 2011-2013 he was the director of the creative writing program at NMSU. He is one of the founding editors of Apostrophe Books, a small press of poetry, which began publishing books in 2007. He also teaches community workshops in Las Cruces, such as at Desert Writers, and he is founder of a community outreach poetry workshop—the Arroyo Poetry Group.
Contact: rgreenfi@nmsu.edu or 575-646-3931
Dr. Greenfield also can be found at the following links:
QUOTED: "Readers willing to travel with Greenfield into the root system he unearths will be rewarded by the sensory reorientation [of] his words."
Subterranean
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p50+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Subterranean
Richard Greenfield. Omnidawn, $17.95 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-63243-050-2
"Growth used to be growth before it ate itself," writes Greenfield (Tracer) in his challenging and transfixing third collection. Nature here is sprawling and grotesque rather than beautiful ("Run- off fed the dead lake"), and wealth is a marker of decay: "such abundance--of carcasses." Ostensibly an elegiac musing on the death of a father, the collection exerts itself through strange, contorted language to account for every thought a death might affect. The result is an intricate and engrossing journey in search of precision, even when the results are lengthy, or dense, or ugly. The poems take form somewhere between prose and center-justified lineated verse, a liminality supported by the uneasy mood that Greenfield's em dashes and caesuras create as phrases collide with and then separate from each other. When a more traditional prose poem, "Occupy the Specter," appears halfway through, the contrast of its pace and assertiveness serves to affirm the other poems' commitment to what Greenfield calls "Slippage, in mindlessness.". This is a difficult work, attuned to language's harsh and combinative forces as well as to decay engendered by economic growth often assumed to be purely positive. Readers willing to travel with Greenfield into the root system he unearths will be rewarded by the sensory reorientation his words offer. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Subterranean." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 50+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357498/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=70cc54a7. Accessed 31 May 2018.
1 of 2 5/30/18, 11:56 PM
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357498
2 of 2 5/30/18, 11:56 PM
QUOTED: "Tracer doesn’t lapse into casual irony or acquiesce to the quick fix of consumer culture. ... It is a surprisingly nimble, quietly important book."
Poetry
Tracer
Haines Eason
Tracer
Richard Greenfield
Omnidawn Publishing, $15.95 (paper)
“I was thinking of the things / I thought / I needed” concludes Richard Greenfield in his second collection, Tracer, having previously observed in the same poem that “Self-alteration is an easy transaction / of buying the very selves / we always wanted to be.” But, while some consideration of the interplay of commerce and subjectivity does motivate the collection, the reader has to step outside the framework of the self as consumer and commodity to appreciate the full complexity of Greenfield’s work. Tracer is much larger than an investigation of self as accumulator and accumulated, encompassing meditations on the self as sensor, filter, and as tracer—in military parlance a lethal, glowing projectile that illuminates the dark, which it defines and is defined by. In “Hellfire,” he writes: “the act, the trace embodies // the pain of pain; narrative // shrapnels into its spectators // the aftermath a red fountain // (post-ethic) font, flashbang of // the untitled, the still unframed // concussion (the firstlight) or // the casting of my soul.” In their ontological campaigns, Tracer’s poems take it all in by collapsing distinctions between natural and artificial, center and periphery, suburban and wild: “I hear a faint frequency / in the clouds, near the speakers and / the hanging panels of a false ceiling / . . . / un-tapped desire is encoded there / all of the hype swallowed and gagged / it costs too much.” When not shredding the mundanity of our sprawl-plagued lives (“loud nails in the drywall / leak autobiography”) or upending the sterilized (“I lifted the screen and / set the little excess loose to the night”), Greenfield’s speakers foray into what remains of the wild in poems that grow out of hikes or other escapes to the fringe and beyond: “here in the outskirts // nothing I do is witnessed, nothing I build lasts, I am happy.” Broad in its comprehension and wide in its awakeness, Tracer doesn’t lapse into casual irony or acquiesce to the quick fix of consumer culture—nor does it deny those forces their appeal and might. It is a surprisingly nimble, quietly important book.
QUOTED: "Richard Greenfield plates the red meat of lurid, psychological content—yet it is not in its seeming confessionality but in its language, its self-consciousness, and its careful technique that A Carnage in the Lovetrees is a strange and memorable book."
"Greenfield’s achievement in A Carnage in the Lovetrees is to have created a readable, saturated universe of thinking, writing, and memory, in which no term provides purchase on another."
Saturday, July 03, 2004
NEW! Review of Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees [Joyelle McSweeney]
A Carnage in the Lovetrees by Richard Greenfield. University of California Press, $16.95.
Reviewed by Joyelle McSweeney
When served up the rarefied souffle of poetry-writ-from-academia, many are the readers who gnash their teeth, pound their flagons and cry for "content!" In his first book, Richard Greenfield plates the red meat of lurid, psychological content--yet it is not in its seeming confessionality but in its language, its self-consciousness, and its careful technique that A Carnage in the Lovetrees is a strange and memorable book.
In the field of traumas come the base savannas--crosshairs tighten
on the flaring pink of the evening.
Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened
to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after--
These couplets open the book and its first poem, "Schema," though almost any stanza in this book could serve as well as another to represent Greenfield’s sensibility, which fact speaks to the claustrophobic Cinerama that is this poet’s paradoxical metier. Greenfield writes long lines which brim to the margins, yet these lines progress phrase by painstaking phrase, girded by patterned syntax, partial rhyme ("traumas"/"savannas," "tighten"/"evening") and assonance. That even the seemingly abundant is fractured and effortful is the book’s subtheme and its governing aesthetic.
Another of Greenfield’s habits is the shoehorning of boundless abstraction into the syntactic space conventionally reserved for the concrete, and vice versa; witness "the portioned stereo of love and grandeur," and the "flaring pink" and "bit of blue" which substitute for sunset and dusk in the passage above. Also characteristic is a kenning-like compression of parts of speech so that noun is pressed into service as adjective, verb as noun. Thus, birds become ‘sorrowbirds’ or ‘roofbirds’; trees become ‘flametrees’ or the eponymous ‘lovetrees.’ Many lines feature both effects, as in "I watched the windowbird at the honey-feeder eating loss, eating love-me."
It is this overtly writerly world that the reader is then commanded to "recognize." And in the firm hands of this poet, we do begin to recognize, to breathe heavy air, to feel, as an overwrought phrase in another poem has it, "the quarterlight dawn." But Greenfield’s overwroughtness is not contemptible, as it might be in the hands of another poet. Indeed, it is often lovely, and also useful, in that it points up again and again the wroughtness of memory, selfhood, and certainly poetry. This awareness dominates the book. Poem titles that suggest confessional account ("The Abuses in Color," "Burn the Family Tree") are outnumbered by those which brazenly insist on the artifice of what follow ("Schema," "Vantage," "Vectory," "Piece Together," "Two in a Series of Encryption," "Cipher in Scene," "Camera Obscured," etc.). The poems themselves are rife with beautiful metapoetic passages:
In a revision of the line, I walk among electric ruins and memory
loss. In another, nothing happens. I find the crop. I see it framed--
I see it arrive. I see it replayed endlessly.
This pastiche of metapoetics and imagery creates a lush, well-seamed, repeating landscape for the speaking "I" to traverse--and because this "I" is a product of these same artificial processes, he can indeed traverse it, to wondrous effects.
Ironically, the madeness of this speaking "I" is particularly emphasized when the speaker asserts his own immediacy. "I have called it the fluttery bird-heart. I have seen the everlasting burn of the forest," he declares, but the symmetry of these statements, their order, and the hyperbolic poeticism of both the "fluttery bird-heart" and the "everlasting burn" suggest that witness ("I have seen") has no precedence over madeness ("I have called"), and that the witness’s account is no less artificial than the poet’s invention.
What, then, of the threads of confessional-seeming content running through the book? Incest, beatings, parental drug use, abandonment, incarceration, and (possibly) murder put in appearances in these poems, forming a vague undernarrative of something very bad indeed, and the speaker’s continual return to the vantage of childhood seems to gesture towards the autobiographical nature of these referents. Yet this disembodied account is but one element in a potently edited montage and, if anything, is crowded out by a welter of imagistic and linguistic novelty. Greenfield’s achievement in A Carnage in the Lovetrees is to have created a readable, saturated universe of thinking, writing, and memory, in which no term provides purchase on another.
QUOTED: "Whether Greenfield “will help define the emerging generation of poets,” as New California hopes, is left to the future’s domain. He does offer a possibility, at least. The editors at New California seem to be selecting poets that can be arrayed on the two poles of Language poetry, as Charles Altieri sees them represented in Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein. Hejinian points to a possible fusion with the Romantic, but made anew. Greenfield advances her suggestion with a book that, while howling with loss, is blessed with survival instinct."
Book Review
Jeff Menne
A Carnage in the Lovetrees
Richard Greenfield
New California Poetry Series
University of California Press ($16.95)
You’ll most quickly find the heart – the heart external, that is – of Richard Greenfield’s debut collection of poems, A Carnage in the Lovetrees, by cribbing vocabulary from Donna Haraway; i.e. by examining ‘the situatedness of its system.’ Greenfield comes to us with two ready associations: his book shows up on New California Poetry’s roster as an implicit term in its ongoing argument for a new poetry, but he also comes with certain claims made on him by the putative movement of New Brutalism. So in terms of critical reception, these two facts will do the early mediating.
To consider first his press, Greenfield is a clever fit for New California’s mission statement, which persists in being the flypaper for whatever useful aesthetic debris can be sifted in the wake of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Meaningfully, they’re a continuation of, rather than a corrective to the “Language” innovation. New California, in their own words, seeks “works that help define the emerging generation of poets – books consistent with California's commitment to the Black Mountain tradition and reflective of California literary traditions – cosmopolitan, experimental, open, and broad-ranging in their intellectual makeup.“ Greenfield certainly shares in the average Language poet’s phenomenological bent, positioning himself as the observer whose disinterest is each moment being keened, glad if perplexed to watch “the familiar machinery of language moving by”; but at the same time, he seems invested in mimesis and Romanticism. As an amalgamation – the mongrel pet of critics – he’s James Wright mixed with Lyn Hejinian. He makes good sense as a New California poet, shading more to the Haryette Mullen and Fanny Howe end of their spectrum than to the Geoffrey O’Brien and Myung Mi Kim end. But he negotiates each end, and his middle ground proves credible.
Greenfield’s other association, the more dubious of the two, is with New Brutalism, originally a reading series that has come to be mistaken for a movement. The movement counts among its practitioners James Meetze, Kasey Mohammed, Noah Eli Gordon, and Cynthia Sailers. Greenfield appears to be only obliquely attached to this movement, and perhaps this arises from his participation in the reading series, or perhaps from his collaboration and friendship with Joshua Corey. However, the obliquity of this connection may be for the best. New Brutalism presents itself as movement by fiat alone, and, at best, a cyber-age lobby for visibility by the lumpenliterati whose addiction to blogging can cloy – if you let it.
Greenfield’s book on the level of ding an sich, however, transcends its associations. It’s not that smart to group him as a New Brutalist, which is pure marketing, but it’s always wise to place a poet in a tradition, which is intertextuality (“Because each prophet is aggregate of the other prophets, the forthcoming song came from the ruinous literary kin”). In this regard, he bears many of the marks of the Romantic: the real stuff of knowledge is phenomenological, not social, except that for Greenfield, language, which is socially-held, presents a din from which we both make/are made and know/are known (“but the making of my self was not distinct from the knowing of myself”); a consequent sense of isolation (“The three stages are not loving & not being loved, loving & not being loved (the present case) and loving & being loved—“); and, finally, a focus on the primacy of youth and childhood memories, not only as the matter of poetry, but as the unchanging quantity from which all thought is stretched.
Of course, Greenfield’s allegiance to the Romantic tradition is outspoken: “I want the costly moon, the romantic among the landscape, the bifurcated lineage that became catalog or compressed lyric.” An awfully PoMo move on the poet’s behalf, to identify his velleities of poetic habit as a prolepsis to full disclosure of the “real world”: “Instead the desert opens with a cynic’s raked history.” The interesting half of his Romantic impulse turns out to be the half that desists, the half that finds the world—phenomenological or not—failed by the demiurge. Greenfield bankrupts the demiurge as the first term of his poetry; any reader hoping to visualize a field of Romantic forces sans the demiurge may randomly conjure the barren space of his poems, the craggy desertscapes that hold impalpable cities aloft (L.A. and Las Vegas, in this case), where the quenching blue one expects of both water and heaven has left behind only the ambiguously-charged word ‘blue’ (surely the most frequently occurring word in this volume, unless it be outnumbered by ‘memory’ and its variants). As one suspects, then, the word ‘heaven’, too, obsesses over the demiurge that has made it a “heaven so in love//with its own perfection, it was selfish, hovering above the cries, above the bodies of pain.”
This is, I maintain, the point of departure for the book. The first poem, both nominally and thematically, offers itself as map and legend for the entire collection. “Schema” begins:
In the field of traumas come the base savannas—crosshairs tighten
on the flaring pink of the evening.
Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened
to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after—
The lines amount to an establishing shot, with memory yoked together by the violent pitch of trauma, and what follows is the zoom shot of a shattered landscape made quintessentially American with but a few deft strokes:
Traffic flows or stops on elevated structures in denial of the seven-
point-two,
and in the aftermath of advertising, children wander the highway in
search of litter.
Greenfield takes for his locus the depredated countryside that demiurge hasn’t the reserves to fix. And this is where he tunes-up the solipsism of Romanticism: the book strives to calibrate the subjective history, the plotting of an individual life (as in the Romantic credo, enunciated in Jeremy Taylor’s spiritual language “We confess it in our lives”), to social history, the history we profess in our textbooks, across our silver screen and flickering on our TV screens. It’s the poetic wish of a wandering boy under the sign nihil, and ex nihilo comes: “another, liminal language through the wall.” Comes: “Heartbreak after ha ha heartbreak.” Comes: “a muscled romp, off-key and funereal.” While Greenfield goes on draping sentences over the ruin, sketching what seems to have been a terrible childhood against this desperate backdrop, he’s recursively drawn to the redemptive factor in music. It’s his melopoesis that will save, not the demiurge that will match our vitiated object world to the world of eternal forms. It’s mere music that coheres in all the clatter. Even if the music gets divined by a drug-addled parent –- his father is played off Judy Garland thusly: “My father, kitchened in the need of his veins… he sleeps in amphetamine gloss” versus “Then Garland’s contaminated song.” No matter where the music comes from, its power is felt: “the volume shakes my body on the floor. First there is music. Second there is music. Third there is music.”
Whether Greenfield “will help define the emerging generation of poets,” as New California hopes, is left to the future’s domain. He does offer a possibility, at least. The editors at New California seem to be selecting poets that can be arrayed on the two poles of Language poetry, as Charles Altieri sees them represented in Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein. Hejinian points to a possible fusion with the Romantic, but made anew. Greenfield advances her suggestion with a book that, while howling with loss, is blessed with survival instinct.
QUOTED: "Tracer, Richard Greenfield’s second book of poetry, ups the promise—and the ante—of his first book, 2003′s A Carnage in the Lovetrees. In that volume the poet proved himself relentlessly and bravely willing to bare emotional traumas within the context of equally relentless cutting-edge poetics—translating, as it were, Plath’s confessional shriek into the post–Language Poetry landscape and adopting a measured, even flat tone and testing personal detail against linguistic inventiveness (and vice versa). Where in Lovetrees Greenfield explored the past, Tracer takes on the now."
"In Tracer, Greenfield upends Whitman’s paradigm of personal and national self-making, reversing it into a question of how much of the self is self-made and how much is received or constituted by the culture. ... Greenfield, in short, engages in a kind of personal and national soul-searching."
Tracer by Richard Greenfield
Review by Andy Frazee — Published on December 7, 2009
Tags: poetry
Tracer. Richard Greenfield. Omnidawn. 90 pp, $15.95.
Tracer, Richard Greenfield’s second book of poetry, ups the promise—and the ante—of his first book, 2003′s A Carnage in the Lovetrees. In that volume the poet proved himself relentlessly and bravely willing to bare emotional traumas within the context of equally relentless cutting-edge poetics—translating, as it were, Plath’s confessional shriek into the post–Language Poetry landscape and adopting a measured, even flat tone and testing personal detail against linguistic inventiveness (and vice versa). Where in Lovetrees Greenfield explored the past, Tracer takes on the now, particularly the post-9/11, post–Patriot Act, post–Iraq invasion world—the departed George W. Bush’s world, yes, but also a world whose legacy Barack Obama’s America must grapple with. In this milieu, Greenfield’s “I” acts as both an autobiographical signifier and allegorical Everyman; indeed, the book’s great theme is the relation between the individual and his or her culture (and, especially in the second part of the book, his or her natural environment) —as well as the question of where, exactly, culture or environment ends and the person, per se, begins. In Tracer, Greenfield upends Whitman’s paradigm of personal and national self-making, reversing it into a question of how much of the self is self-made and how much is received or constituted by the culture—particularly those darker aspects of ideology and national mythology that the speaker, we are to understand, would normally, consciously resist. Greenfield, in short, engages in a kind of personal and national soul-searching; his dissections of cultural values are also, necessarily, dissections of self, and vice versa.
Thus the book’s first poem asks, who is “I” to speak for “we”? “Already I am we,” states the aptly titled poem “Speaking For,” less as a sheepish apology than as a recognition of the movement of “I” from the specific to the universal, even when it doesn’t intend to— and calling attention to the consequences of such a movement. The poem, along with its bookend counterpart, “Guideline,” serves to summarize Greenfield’s poetics, and his vision of what we might now call Glenn Beck’s America: a vision, and an America, marked by tinges of paranoia and the apocalyptic, framed in the commonplace and domestic. At one point later in the book the poet confesses, “I am also subject to / the hysterical point of view”—though, importantly, the poet takes this mindset itself, whose “needs // are formed behind blast shields,” as the object of his inquiry:
Our mail is here,
I read here too that the corner influence brings up the price,
that in the State, questions are protected until they are
answered, until we listen and
turn the noon into an archived document of torture, until falling
statues precede the capital that permeates after, until our needs
are formed behind blast shields and sharpened into form
and played in the role of rage
which I read now is emitted as a remotely-activated hypothesis,
until what could be
terrified could be the embryonic atoms of a greater terror
Here, and throughout the book, Greenfield’s speakers are alive to the material and ideological worlds, and to the ideological-as-material world of need-forming capitalism. The speaker—and by extrapolation of the Everyman trope, everyone—the book implies, is in some way complicit in these personal, national, and global waste lands, and the drama of the book revolves around the speaker’s recognition of this. Even readers of the book are reconfigured, in “Speaking For,” as being on the other end of the “listening devices” which serve—in an unsettling of John Stuart Mill’s definition of the lyric as overheard speech—both to surveil the speaker’s movements, and, ironically, to provide the kind of public attention to private events that certain models of contemporary, celebrity-obsessed selfhood yearn for. “[O]ne is so small in the age of terror as to be vast . . .” reads the concrete poem “Harm,” “many devices are tuned to our choices. . . . ”
In place of Whitman’s conflation of the “we” into the “I,” the poet forges a dialectic of personal and public that we have seen in the work of Adrienne Rich and others. Yet in Tracer the two are so subtly intertwined as to be essentially synonymous—even horrifically so:
my occupation lies in the stains, in the in medias res radiance of the
missing curtains,
the room cleared of the fixtures, cleared of the clutter from old
rooms, interlocutors between my body
and its incentives, with rot in the air,
with the open wound of leaving in the midst, taking seconds,
with the dawn’s effacing
daylight, the rooms evacuated, loud nailholes in the drywall
leak autobiography
In these lines from “The Sign,” the poet’s attention to language opens up multiple worlds, most prominently that of a military occupation; one can imagine the blasted-out interiors of urban warfare in Fallujah and elsewhere. Yet ultimately, through the hinge-word “occupation,” the poem situates this violent world in the domestic, even banal, setting of a rented apartment somewhere in the American heartland, and the nailholes—which just as easily could have been bullet holes—not only leak autobiography, but bloody history. Here, there are no “private” and “public” worlds, only the world, and, as with the outgoing tenant above, we—individually, collectively—bear responsibility for its condition, even as we must recognize the limits of our powers of control. “We go on,” Greenfield writes in “The Future,” “as a guess, interposed / between the private and the republic / by default.”
Again and again, the book returns to the valences of the word “plan,” which seem emblematic of the American, if not Western—if not human—psyche: planned communities and the plan of a life, a poem, the planning of civilization, superstructure, the plans of homes. At the same time it shows, in classically tragic style, how hubris—here figured as the capacity to plan society, plan nature, to “nation-build”—always releases unintended, and sometimes catastrophic, consequences: the paranoia of the Homeland Security state, the elongated occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the existential anxieties of the twenty-first-century American psyche, environmental devastation. Against the paradigm of planning illustrated in the manicured lawns and boxy trappings of rented apartments and starter homes, the book enacts the elusive, exploratory, frame-breaking forms of contemporary poetics, in wide spacing and a inclusive, meditative register grounded in sometimes stunning sensory detail: “The horned lark was / in his evening singing,” goes “The Laws,” “the vaunt of the last / western wave, / a trumpet / pouring through the scenes.” But what is most honorable about Tracer is the poet’s willingness to delve into what we might call the Greenfield-American psyche and speak from what he sees there: “We can’t tell ourselves / from those whose loss is actual,” ends the book’s final poem,
I was working on a grocery list, the broadcast was absorbed into four
sealed walls, the resonance met the space, the receiving area was
larger than itself,
a better value than
I would ever pay
I was thinking of the things
I thought
I needed
The intensity of the repetition and spacing of the “I”s here drives home Greenfield’s point about individual complicity in the affairs of the world and responsibility for them—and, indeed, the poetic imperative in recognizing how the very way we use language—”I / thought // I / needed”—is an aspect of the problem. Elsewhere in Tracer the poet gives glimpses of a solution, in straining to forge an ethical relationship with others through a radical self-effacement:
I saw enough people at the park today
I vacated myself
through the veil
of the other.
Yet even at the height of apparent lyrical transcendence, the next line breaks the spell: the speaker is “no nearer to that other.” The practical, everyday difficulties—in the end, spiritual difficulties—remain, the poet implies, as do the real work of making such a life, and such a world.
Andy Frazee’s book reviews and criticism appear in the Boston Review, Jacket, Verse, and elsewhere. His chapbook of poetry, That the World Should Never Again Be Destroyed by Flood, is forthcoming from New American Press. He lives in Athens, Georgia.