A MAMMAL OF STYLE
by Ted Greenwald & Kit Robinson
Two serious laddies. Six serial works. 138 pages. Ten years in the making. One helluva book called … A Mammal of Style.
Throughout their long friendship, Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson have developed a way of thinking, talking and writing that picks up on whatever’s “in the air” of contemporary living. In this book they channel a mystery poet whose work emerges from the close interaction of two distinct sensibilities, one on each coast, connected by the U.S. Postal Service, the Internet and the occasional coffee or drink. A Mammal of Style stands with the works of Breton and Soupault, Berrigan and Padgett, Harryman and Hejinian, an epitome of collaborative genius.
"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: Trombon" 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
Ted Greenwald is the author of Comma Fork--Moving Parts; Clearview/LIE; In Your Dreams; 3, and other books. He lives in New York and works on breath.
Kit Robinson is the author of Determination, The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 and other books. He lives in the Bay Area and works from home.