Commentary on Greenfield

Perhaps Joyelle McSweeney's description of the many readers who upon reading Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, "Gnash their teeth, pound their flagons and cry for 'content!'" most accurately portrays the goal of Greenfield's work, to juxtapose the romantic with the verse of pain and abstraction, to perhaps find a more well defined self from this tumultuous, beautiful, paradox. Although reviewers such as McSweeney may remark upon Greenfield's work as coming out of the confessionalist tradition, as his pseudo-autobiographical description of fractured parental relationships may presume, his work transcends this exhausted form. In fact the reviewer Jeff Menne describes Greenfield's work as playing off both the New Brutalist and Language poetry movements. As New Brutalism stems from the avoidance of polish and elegance Menne's argument holds some water.

Yet Greenfield creates a full on attack on traditional poetic forms perhaps more alike to a postmodern destruction of early definitions of self. In his piece together he mocks the Romantic, "Where piety kneeled piety prayed through the soft textured ceiling," while showing the inability of this language to grasp the world around it in his description of being beaten by his father, "Whipped with a belt/ until my back bled." In this way Menne's relation of Greenfield to Language poetry seems more solid. Language poetry places emphasis on the disjunction of the signifier. Thus the you, the self, made up of the signifier, has become increasingly lost.

In fact, the elliptical, Stephen Burt, commented as well on Greenfield's description of the memoir, a method of self-description, as disjointed and fractured, again harkening back to postmodern need to redefine self amidst its destruction. Continuing on in the sticky realm of postmodernism, McSweeney described Greenfield's self-concious use of the metapoetical as a richer development towards meaning. She quotes the line, "In a revision of the line, I walk along the electric ruin of/ memory." In A Carnage in the Lovetrees Greenfield beautifully employs the "revision" of self through his "ruin of" traditional and confessionalist methods of coping with "memory" and meaning.