Chapbook published by antiphony Press. 30 pages.
Error uses intentional language error, fragmentation, the remixed text of Guy Debord and others, and capacious, nonlinear temporalities to attempt a space parallel to narrative progression. Error always only attempts. It mistakes and glitches in place of success; meanders and digresses in place of resolution. Despite this reshaping of language’s materiality, something adjacent to narrative emerges. It cannot not emerge. Error, then, might be said to create through failure. A failure of childhood in Michigan’s crumbling palm. A failure of childhood with an auditory processing disorder. A failure of parental abuse. A failure of animal companion deaths. A failure of the afterlife of trauma, itself a failure of memory to stay memory. Error owes a debt to Lyn Hejinian, Anne Carson, and others like Shane McCrae and his looping, loping syntax. ee Cummings and his unlogos that “the thing perhaps is / to eat flowers and not to be afraid.” Error eats flowers – lips stained apple blossom, stained rhubarb – but rejects the call to be unafraid. Error fears, and in that fear finds “new hope / for rodents.”
Reviews
Trampoline Poetry (scroll to read)
“In David Greenspan’s “Error”, every visual full stop drops one into a bracing sonic beginning. The spaces in-between, like the references across thinkers and texts, offer the fragment as sample in looping recitation. Relieving words of their prison sentences, Greenspan honors every syllable to shatter linear and normative ideas of narration. Together, and at times against, language splinters and interflows across the senses into newly formed socialites and spectacles. And like a seasoned DJ, with an ear from generative dissonance, error is rather another fine-tuned record in a memory score for being with words, being with the notations of others.”
“If you prefer dressage to wild horses, don’t read this chapbook. If you enjoy a golf course more than a tidal flat, ditto. If, with Kenneth Koch, you enjoy staring into “a bottle of sparkling pop,” you will be perfectly at home with these poems. David Greenspan is a wonderfully skilled and anarchic poet who understands the beauty of arriving somewhere previously unimagined.”
Enough performance, enough color pulled from mouth, leaked on error. You stands on Ferry Trail, pick up leaf, crack between fingers, smell noise of. You places sap on memory. You child, you between cars passing, you in adjectival phrases, you of living’s glossy difficult.
“Sadness
a privilege,” he theories over tire pressure. Debord’s desk
symmetrical with Wite-Out. He paints teeth an oyster
unknown to the even
richest sturgeon.
“David Greenspan’s “Error” takes on the silence and erasure and dissociation of a character whose identity slips through “I” to “you” to complete absence in the telling of child abuse, while “father” and pieces of Michigan landscape and domestic life remain solid. The terror and pain in the book find their grammar, reveal their syntax. Philosophers are called upon to help make sense of the senseless: Debord, Hegel, Kirkegaard, to little avail. Such riveting, honest investigations, where humanity is stolen from the human, are rare. I’m in awe in the work of this writing. Its accomplishment in not seeking answers, but rather, in its ruthless attempts at relaying experience.”
“In David Greenspan’s collection “Error”, living oscillates between the language of correction and the language of error. Conceived in the roil of an auditory processing disorder, time breaks and breaks again, interrupting the reader’s order of hearing. What is processed in error, doubles, redoubles, and questions the spectacle of knowing the world in only one unified dimension. “You’re error of speech simple as fine linen.” Yes. “But fraudulent leaves, meager something or mother.” What the eye reads in the inky lettering, “mother,” echoing “other,” the auditory slippage conjures the doubled ghosts within both utterances. The ghost of familial relations, the aphoristic slippage, and the uncorrectable distance of the “other.” To err is to other, and yet in Greenspan’s ear, error vibrates into possibility. In equal and equivocal relation, Greenspan ruptures the stronghold of correct language. All language is saved, and Greenspan sings it beautifully.”