Ted Greenwald

A Mammal of Style Ted Greenwald

Poetry. A MAMMAL OF STYLE is funny and swell. Greenwald and Robinson, two great mammals of the American idiom, combine ingenuities to make ordinary language sing. In totally transformed trad forms (sonnets, sestinas, haibun--yes, haibun!), these poems are perfectly off-kilter and full of 'clean energy.'--Nada Gordon

I LOVE SPEECH-tinkering. No accent soloist in a dialectal orchestra, 'Enter: Trombone' with collocations, frozen expressions, idioms, hyponymy--preconditioned stuff of a spoken commons. A, not the. Maybe sperm whale, maybe jerboa. Mammal, not algorithm, of style, as in, not automatic. A manual transmission. Of style, not writing. Fourteen liners, phrase-prose, sestinas, an autumnal Spring N All, pithy tercets with titles that come and go. 'The time is now // And then.'--Louis Cabri

Collaboration--the kind I like anyway--creates environments in which attention and care towards the other is primary, and the ways we've learned to pin down subjectivities become unmoored. Greenwald and Robinson volley playful, critical, and fluid language within live forms, attuned as they are to local stations' signals. USAmerican English idioms are twisted and reworked; computer commands are made to emote; the remix occurs concurrent with 'the original, ' giving lie to singularity.--Alli Warren

A MAMMAL OF STYLE lets language light the distances between mind & matter, sound & sense, form & metamorphosis, confession & concept. This book is an unstable beauty. --Arlo Quint