More Conversation and Discussion on Greenfield

Both in the roundtable discussion and from reviews by Andy Frazee and Joshua Corey Greenfield's move away from the autobiographical mode of A Carnage in the Lovetrees is apparent. Moreover Greenfield's Tracer works tirelessly with notions of self-effacement while employing content rooted in the description and metaphor of weapons and war. In Tracer Greenfield immediately begins this dialogue. As in our roundtable he said in a draft he deleted all of the "I"s in his poem, the aptly named first poem "Speaking For" complicates both the authority of the "I" and even the role of the reader:

I am the reader there, reading aloud, deploying a plan as a voice as

an imagined moral presence in the listening devices and oscillating

sprinklers that automate into shadows, because

Here Greenfield critiques the traditional reader, using militaristic language present throughout this book, as a "planned" "imagined moral presence." He moves on to work with the notion of self:

Already I am we,

the small rectangles of all the backyards of all of us, our washed

sidewalks, our sweeper nozzles--our detritus colludes at the ends of

the driveways, the leaves in the neighbor trees glisten, the utilities

hung high in the air between houses.

Thus here the I is no more the I. In our current complex, connected existence the I is part of a collective "detritus." The I can no longer (or maybe never could) speak for the whole of America.

In addition Greenfield works with the intersection of the public and private spheres. For instance his poem "Bastion" especially details this. As he spoke earlier this afternoon, Greenfield seems struck by our current connection, that we are connected to the war through the internet and CNN yet have no real feeling of it. Therefore his seepage of the public into the private forces us to look more closely at the world around us:

inscribing one's name in the unfeasible

thrall of the moment, no one is

so real, judgement is its own prison:

now we pay to get into the public space;

Similarly Greenfield makes his militaristic description depict the everyday. Poems such as "Rapier/Ravine" and "Maverick" (the name of a weapons system) find their way into the public sphere.

Tracer moves Greenfield's work into discourse more concerned with poetry in its complication of the self and dialogue into the complex nature of our current "connected" existence, perhaps setting Greenfield's work on a stronger path towards meaning.