Tenure

About the Book

Tenure is a ten-year coming-of-age journey in the form of poetry. From ages 15 to 25, Matt Greenfield wrote down poems: poems as assignments for his own teachers, poems meant as life lessons for his own students; poems as bets, poems as birthday presents; poems as silly experiments, poems as philosophical introspection; poems as poems. Collected in this volume is the complete poetry of an emerging writer in chronological order of composition. From the absurd epic of the urinal "Tripdych" to the bold statement of love to an entire city in "Ode to Cleveland," Tenure will obfuscate and amaze, annoy and engage, and chronicle that inward road—that "tenure track"—that young poets and young-at-heart readers all travel upon.

About the Author

Matt Greenfield is a Sisyphean Clevelander who has been scribbling for too many years to remember, not enough to count, but at least since the beginning of this sentence. Or maybe this one. Before the age of 22, he received his B.A. in History (minors in English and History & Philosophy of Science) and M.Ed. in Middle School Education, both from Cleveland-area universities. Then he went off to Florida for three years and wrote 90 plays and taught middle school. But now he's back home in Cleveland, teaching high school history and working on producing at least half of the somewhat-more-salvageable plays through his theatre company, The Oddy Festival. In response to a pretty satisfactory reading of "Ode to Cleveland" after one of his plays, Matt decided to publish Tenure as a way of exposing his theatre audiences to his non-dramatic poetic writing.