THE COURSE
by Charles Bernstein & Ted Greenwald
On The Course:
On July 2, 2015, Ted and I started on a collaboration, which we continued until June 11, 2016, just six days before Ted died. Ted and I exchanged lines back and forth over email, sometimes multiple times in a day and never less than every few days. After a while neither of us could fully separate what each had done, we were blowing together, back and forth, in a duet of, and as, time, bouncing off the moment as if it were a trampoline, tripping out into the eternity of the company, from dark to delight. There was no sense of unnecessary limit, no register we couldn’t play. The experience was of freedom within the constraints we made up intuitively for each poem.
– Charles Bernstein
Ted Greenwald (1942-2016) published over thirty collections of his poetry for over fifty years, including two from Wesleyan University Press: The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems, 1969–1982 and a new edition of his early selected poems, Common Sense.
Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss, Pitch of Poetry, and Recalculating, from the University of Chicago Press.
Greenwald and Bernstein founded a poetry series at the Ear Inn, in New York, in 1978 that continues as the Segue Reading Series.