Wayne Greene

Besides being an author, I am also a digital imagist and a photographer. I was born in Brooklyn on April 24, 1932 to George Meyer Warshaw, a businessman, and Rose (née Zwaifler). In 1965, I married a fellow social worker and former classmate Hyman Bogen; the marriage was annulled in 1969. In 1989, I married my present husband, Austrian-born Arnold Greissle-Schönberg, oldest grandson of Arnold Schönberg and Mathilde von Zemlinsky. Both of my husbands wrote their memoirs, which were published. 

I am a graduate of the Rockwood Park School for Young Ladies of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, hold a BA from New York University (1953), and an MA (1962) and PhD (1968) in English literature from Columbia University. My doctoral dissertation, A Critical Edition of William Blake's Book of Thel with a New Interpretation was published by Brown University Press in 1971 and named to the Scholar’s Library of the Modern Language Association. Through the years, I have authored scholarly articles on Blake, which were published in leading academic journals. In the mid-1970s, I wrote a manual on the reading and writing of traditional English verse, which was published by Simon and Schuster as an Arco book in 1990 and has since gone through two more editions, the latest in1998 put out by Peterson’s. Recent scholarly work incldues an article on Wallace Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which appeared in The Explicator; in progress is another on Hart Crane’s prosody and "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge."

From 1967-76, I served as assistant professor of English at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where I devised many new and unique multi-media approaches to the teaching of literature. After receiving a promotion to associate professor in 1976, I served at the College of Staten Island (the result of a merger of Richmond with Staten Island Community College) until I retired in1997. A decade before my retirement, I was involved in a lawsuit charging sex-discrimination that was brought by the CUNY Women’s Coalition against the university, and won my individual case in court; as a result, I was promoted to full professor and now enjoy the status of full professor emeritus as a retiree.

My three novels (see below) were written during my teaching career. The late John Gardner was an ardent admirer of the first one, Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home, calling it a "nearly perfect work of art." My literary work has been represented by Susan Lescher of Lescher and Lescher, Virginia Kidd, Maximillian Becker, and Olga Wieser of Wieser and Wieser. I have a novella in manuscript titled, "Painter Woman," which was written during the first Gulf War and is a fantasy-satire on art and war. There’s a companion piece in notes, "What the Thunder Said," about the adventures, in art and love, of a woman composer of a certain age.

Through the years, I have photographed extensively both here and abroad, and have had three one-person shows in galleries in New York: Out My Window, Greenwich Village Side Streets, and The World’s A Stage. Photos of mine are in the permanent collections of the Maverick Concert Hall of Woodstock, NY, Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and distinguished countertenor emeritus Russell Oberlin, among others.

With my retirement from teaching, I decided to make a right-angle turn and founded the performance group The Lark Ascending. Since then, I have taken an active part in devising its programs as its artistic director and have also designed its visuals from digital images of my own creation. Among my individual credits are the dramatic monologue Coeur de Lion, Mon Coeur, which I wrote and illustrated, and slide choreographies for Arnold Rosner’s Responses, Dino Ghezzo’s Eyes of Cassandra, which includes my reading of Hart Crane’s "To Brooklyn Bridge," Elodie Lauten’s Verlaine Variations, and Black on Black / 13, which includes Richard Brooks’s Chorale Variations and a reading of Wallace Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Nicolas Flagello’s Ostinato. In 2003, I designed, wrote the text for, and illustrated the Lark Ascending website-http://www.thelarkascending.org--and in 2004, I did the same for the website of my husband: http://www.schoenbergseuropeanfamily.org.

My performance piece "Twelve-Tone Blues," about an Austrian-Jewish serial composer and his Iowa-born wife, was performed as part of Etwas Altes, Etwas Neues, a Lark Ascending event in the fall of 2006. I recently finished is a two-act play titled "Lost Morning Eyes," about a pair of lovers, both women, who come together after a forty-year separation, and the American scene they viewed from the death of Kennedy to 9/11. My latest book, Be a Poet! is just out.

As bacteria are to viruses, so we humans are to what we term "the universe." We are and will forever be no more able to see "the whole picture" than a virus the bacterial world or for that matter a bacterium the viral world. For all we know, there are universes in the components of the most minutet items of matter–infinitely smaller than Blake’s "grain of sand." And while our telescopes and the like are able to perceive the limits of our greater universe, very likely there is a larger scheme of things and a larger yet and so on, which we may end up hypothesizing about but never be able to perceive directly. Yes, we humans, who are infinitely smaller than the tiniest of viruses in the greater scheme of things, are likely to go on viewing everything through the minuscule prisms of our senses and thus miss the whole "show," much as bacteria and viruses miss the whole earthly show as well as one another. If there is a creator and/or a maintainer deity, it is far removed from us earthly humans and clearly has no interest in us per se; indeed, because we are so minuscule, it may not even be aware of our existence! In the end, it appears that we humans are bound to this planet and its environs, like all of the other creatures that are native to it--and we are alone. Such tragedy as there is, if such it can be called, is that only we humans are capable of being aware of all of this; truly we are aliens.

So there it is: I’m an earthling agnostic. However, by no means do I disbelieve in human law, biased though it is and always will be–in every society–toward the rich and powerful, and based though it is on the pronouncements of an inane deity concocted by the same individuals as a further deterrent to their conception of wrong-doing and a baby-like "pacifier." I am acutely aware that The Law is all that we have to keep us humans from doing each other injury and destroying one another.

When all is said and done, I find myself loving life, most especially my brother and sister humans as well as my cousins, the other animals that suckle their young and leafy vegetation, whose DNA is so close to ours–even if they don’t love me back–though I do draw the line at those who would seek to harm me or insensitively disregard my well-being and wishes. And because I am human and can feel into things as, alas, many of my fellow humans cannot, I try and help where I can toward making the lives of some individuals I encounter along the way more meaningful and productive in terms of their individual goals, doing so without any hope of reward or recognition.

I, now 77, will leave this life with only one regret: that no one, including the late John Gardner, was able to wave a magic wand over my novels, especially Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home, which he called a "nearly perfect work of art," and Bagatelle-Guinevere, which has so much to say about our lives as humans. That alone is a bitter pill.