Greenfield Reviews

McSweeney's review of Carnage in the Lovetrees was quite problematic to me. The review was contradictory to everything that I had thought about the book. McSweeney states at the end of her review, "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." Particularly the readable and saturated memory disturbs me. I must agree that Greenfield creates a saturated universe of thinking and writing but to me, that universe was unreadable and seemed to lack any sort of comprehensive memory. It seems to me that Greenfield's created universe is meant to be disturbing and incoherent.

I was surprised by the class discussion in which other students said that Greenfields poetry was calming and peaceful. McSweeney however agrees with this point saying, "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." I understand what she means by breathing the heavy air and feeling it like "'the quarterlight dawn,'" but this was not a comforting or satisfying dawn. It was more of an eery, anxious, uncomfortable and tense dawn. In fact, this "quarterlight dawn" which she refers to from "Two In a Series of Encryption" seems especially tense and uncomfortable. McSweeney refers to this specific poem as "beautiful," a word that seems to be avoided in Greenfield's poetry. Beautiful is not a word I would use to describe this poem. Something along the lines of painful would do a better job of describing it for me.

However, this is not to discredit Greenfield because I believe that he may have had this intent with his poems. Jerome mentioned that he thought Greenfield's poetry was unconventional and we were having a tough time pinning down what made it unconventional. McSweeney comments on this idea of what is conventional in poetry saying, "Another of Greenfield’s habits is the shoehorning of boundless abstraction into the syntactic space conventionally reserved for the concrete, and vice versa." This placing of abstract in the space of concrete and concrete in the abstract may have been what Charlotte was referring to in her comment about the use of space in Greenfield's poems and what Jerome was referring to about unconventionality.

I had to try very hard to think of something that Greenfield's poems reminded me of. Then I remembered Jeffrey Lewis, a quite "unconventional" musician. His song, Texas, can be understood as a confessional poem of his relationship with his brother. It could be a pleasing song to some, but like Greenfield, the concept of the song is more enjoyable than the music itself.

Lyrics: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Jeffrey_Lewis:Texas

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx8vdcdHQrg