29 pages
August 31, 2024
ISBN 979-8-9907346-0-9
David Greenspan’s "Error" uses language error, fragmentation, remixed text, and nonlinear temporalities to present a failure of childhood/a childhood of failure. Error examines parental abuse and animal death in Michigan’s crumbling palm, while also echoing life with an auditory processing disorder. Logic subordinates itself to aural pattern in Greenspan’s failures, turning from stutter to sustained wail.
See Justin Lacour's review in the current issue of Trampoline: https://www.trampolinepoetry.com/reviews
Advance Praise for "Error":
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.
--Jimin Seo
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.
--Gillian Conoley
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.
--Angela Ball
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.
--Sandra Ruiz, PHD
Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies
Theatre & English
David Greenspan is the author of "One Person Holds So Much Silence" (Driftwood Press). His next book, "Milk Sickness", is forthcoming from Querencia Press. Find David online at https://davidgreenspanwriter.com/.