GREENE, Jonathan (Edward)

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 19 April 1943. Education: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, B.A.1965. Family: Married 1) Alice-Anne Kingston in 1963 (divorced 1968), two daughters (one deceased); 2) Dobree Adams in 1974, one step-daughter and one step-son. Career: Since 1965 founding editor, Gnomon Press, Lexington, later Frankfort, Kentucky. Apprentice printer, 1966, Printing Department, University of Kentucky, and assistant production manager, production manager, and designer, 1967–75, University of Kentucky Press, Lexington. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969, 1978. Address: P.O. Box 475, Frankfort, Kentucky 40602–0475, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Reckoning. Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Matter, 1966.

Instance. Lexington, Kentucky, Buttonwood Press, 1968.

The Lapidary. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1969.

A 17th Century Garner. Lexington, Kentucky, Buttonwood Press, 1969.

An Unspoken Complaint. Santa Barbara, California, Unicorn Press, 1970.

Scaling the Walls. Lexington, Kentucky, Gnomon Press, 1974.

Glossary of the Everyday. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1974.

Peripatetics. St. Paul, Minnesota, Truck Press, 1978.

Once a Kingdom Again. Berkeley, California, Sand Dollar, 1979.

Quiet Goods. Monterey, Kentucky, Larkspur Press, 1980.

Idylls. Emory, Virginia, Iron Mountain Press, 1983; revised and enlarged edition, Rocky Mount, North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1990.

Small Change for the Long Haul. Barrytown, New York, Station Hill Press, 1984.

Trickster Tales. St. Paul, Minnesota, Coffee House Press, 1985.

Les Chambres des Poètes. Asheville, North Carolina, French Road Press, 1990.

Inventions of Necessity: The Selected Poems of Jonathan Greene. Frankfort, Kentucky, Gnomon Press, 1998.

Of Moment. Frankfort, Kentucky, Gnomon Press, 1998.

Other

Editor, Kentucky Renaissance: An Anthology of Contemporary Writings. Frankfort, Kentucky, Gnomon Press, 1976.

Editor, Fiftieth Birthday Celebration for Jonathan Williams. Frank fort, Kentucky, Truck-Gnomon Press, 1979.

Translator, The Poor in Church, by Arthur Rimbaud. Lexington, Kentucky, Polyglot Press, 1973.

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Bibliography: "Gnomon Press and Jonathan Greene: Two Bibliographies" by James D. Birchfield, in The Kentucky Review, XI(2), spring 1992.

Manuscript Collection: State University of New York, Buffalo.

Jonathan Greene comments:

(1970) Friendships early on with deep image poets important; close ties with Robert Kelly, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser.

No school, but a tradition involving individual poets felt strongly: Blake, Yeats, and more recent incarnations.

(1980) My recent work has delved into psychological/philosophical ruminations as well as being concerned with living in a rural setting.

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Jonathan Greene may be placed among the group of writers affiliated (through shared concerns rather than influence) with Robert Kelly. (Others include Charles Stein and Harvey Bialy and the prose writer Richard Grossinger.) Kelly published and wrote the introduction for Greene's first book and was his teacher and friend at Bard College.

The hermetic tradition as mediated through such writers as Blake, H.D., and Robert Duncan is a major informing presence in Greene's work. One consequence is a frequently baffling abstractness and allusiveness, but even in the most obscure poems there is evident a care for the weight and sound of each syllable. Greene speaks of "the work, / which is / love / persistent" and of how "the care- / takers / portion out / their harvests, / the bounty." The bounty for us, in the most successful poems, is a delicate but tough lyricism; see, for example, "The Definition" from The Lapidary. Much influenced by Jung, Greene writes out of a sense of poetry as "given" from a source "beyond" and thus inevitably dealing in archetypal material. "A Palimpsest" opens with

   The old story keeps writing itself.
   Dark woods & the turn of the road
   again. I do not write it. A turn
   of the road, writes itself. A
   changed life, interpolates from
   an unknown source. Underneath,
   the writing still goes on.
   The true writing.

A haikulike poem from Instance puts it more imagistically: "the old tales are told, /migratory birds / come home to / the heart."

Greene's later work shows a welcome inclusion of more directly personal subject matter. At the same time, however, it retains the qualities of ear and of access to depth evidenced in his earlier books.

—Seamus Cooney