Roger Greenwald

Roger Greenwald Poems

Roger Greenwald Biography

Roger Greenwald was born in New Jersey, where his father, a physicist, worked at the Fort Monmouth Signal Labs. He grew up in New York City (the Bronx) and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. In 1966 he received his BA from The City College of New York, where together with Richard Strier he edited four issues of the college literary magazine, Promethean, and participated in the weekly Promethean Writers Workshop, which included, among others, Peter Anson, Robert David Cohen, Samuel R. Delany, Joel Sloman, and Lewis Warsh. Greenwald then spent one year doing graduate work at New York University and attending the St. Marks in the Bouwerie Poetry Project Workshop, led by the poet Joel Oppenheimer (assisted by Joel Sloman). Participants there included Sam Abrams, Scott Cohen, Michael G. Stephens, and Tom Weatherly. After moving to Toronto, Greenwald earned his MA (1969) and his PhD (1978) in English from the University of Toronto. He taught creative writing, translation, and composition at Innis College, part of the University of Toronto, until 2006. In 1970 Greenwald founded the international literary annual WRIT Magazine, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1995. From 1982 onward, the Canadian poet Richard M. Lush served as Associate Editor. The magazine was supported by Innis College and the Ontario Arts Council. Special issues of WRIT included two devoted entirely to translations; starting with Number 19, each issue featured one translated writer. Greenwald was the regional editor for Denmark and Norway (and, with Rika Lesser, for Sápmi) for the 2008 anthology New European Poets. Greenwald began writing poetry at the age of eight and was first published when he was in high school. His first notable publication was a poem that appeared in The World in 1968. In Canada his poetry won the Norma Epstein National Writing Competition in 1977. He published his first book of poems, Connecting Flight, in 1993. The next year he was the winner in the poetry category of the CBC Radio / Saturday Night Literary Awards. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Panjandrum, Poetry East, The Spirit That Moves Us, Pequod, Prism International, Leviathan Quarterly, ARS-INTERPRES, and Pleiades. He won First Prize for Travel Literature in the 2002 CBC Literary Awards competition. Greenwald is well known as a translator of Scandinavian literature, especially poetry. He has published three volumes of work by the Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen (1907–1994), most recently North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen, which won the Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association. His other major translation from Norwegian is Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas, which was shortlisted for the 2001 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Further translations of poetry include three books by the Norwegian Poet Paal-Helge Haugen; Picture World, by the Danish poet Niels Frank; and from Swedish, The Time in Malmö on the Earth, by Jacques Werup and Guarding the Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding., Greenwald has also translated two works of fiction from Swedish, the novel A Story about Mr. Silberstein, by the actor and writer Erland Josephson, and I Miss You, I Miss You!, a young-adult novel by Peter Pohl and Kinna Gieth. He has received numerous awards for his translations, including the American Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize (twice), the Inger Sjöberg Translation Prize, the F. R. Scott Translation Prize, and the Richard Wilbur Prize.)

The Best Poem Of Roger Greenwald

To Spring

Dreaded season when light's too long too soon,
winter turns to you before its work is done.
Along with snowdrops, forsythia, anemone,
along with tulips breaking out of their bulbs,
comes the long memory of the fatal spring
when I was thirty-three and my love wasn't there,
had gone without waiting and said she'd return,
but winter's work done, was still gone.
Absence stronger than flowers, steaming in sun,
poisoned the season, buried morbid winter
and filled imagined summer with vapors. Light,
light spring drifts in like a feather
used for torture, its touch
too much and not enough.

Roger Greenwald Comments