Book Nineteen

The Up and Up

Ted Greenwald

ISBN: 1-891190-19-9
Publication: 2004
Pages: 139

The Up and Up is a book of poems in prose without punctuation. The works unfold across linguistic strata to produce a wry comedy of manners vaguely reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Greenwald dissects lingo down to the level of maximally loaded morphemes and recombines these charged particles to observe the social unfolding of their tonal, rhythmic, semantic, and syntactic permutation. The world in the work is revealed through the hyphenations, abbreviations, acronyms, and jargon of a glut of pop registers and conversational idioms.

Ted Greenwald was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and has lived in New York City his entire life. During the course of a career that has spanned some 30 years, he has been the author of numerous books of poetry and of a video, "Poker Blues" (made in collaboration with Les Levine), in which he also appears as the sole performer.

Because his work always involves linguistic and formal invention, Ted Greenwald has often been associated with the Language Writers, but he is unmistakably a New York poet and even, given his street-wise sensibility and his long association with visual art and artists, a New York School poet. But, as readers of The Up and Up will see, Ted Greenwald's writing belongs to a wider poetic history, one that reaches back at least to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary.