For 500 years teachers and scholars have commended the practice of recording "commonplaces" - that is, striking and noteworthy phrases encountered while reading - for later reference. Few in recent times have taken this advice with such good effect as Jonathan Greene. A poet, publisher, book designer and translator, Greene is foremost a reader of vast range and expansive curiosity. The fruits of over forty years of reading with pen in hand are collected here for the enlightenment and delight of his fellow readers. Ancient Chinese sages mingle with modern jazz masters, Yogi Berra meets Einstein, and the wisdom (and wit) of great minds known and unknown is on parade. In the end, this collection of such seemingly disparate thinkers and themes coalesces into an original work in its own right, an intellectual and artistic portrait of Greene himself, offering new and deeper insights into the mind and heart behind his many volumes of poetry.
Poet, publisher, book designer and prolific and throughful reader, JONATHAN GREENE is the author of over 30 books and hundreds of poems that have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies in a writing career that now spans five decades. He was born in New York City in 1943, and lived in San Francisco twice in the 1960s. He graduated from Bard College in 1965, where he studied American Literature with Ralph Ellison. He has also studied poetry with Robert Lowell and folklore with Alan Dundes.
Since 1965 Greene has edited and published over 50 books under the Gnomon Press imprint, including works by Robert Duncan, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, James Still, Gurney Norman and many others. He now does free-lance book design and has won a number of awards in the field.
Greene moved to Kentucky in 1966, where he lives on a farm on the Kentucky River outside of Frankfort with his wife, Dobree Adams, a noted weaver and photographer.
