Donald Finkel is one of those poets I’ve yet to get around to seriously reading but whose poems stand out enough that I actually remember them long after serendipitously discovering them in journals such as The Paris Review and The Chicago Review. Finkel’s name also comes up regularly in conversations and interviews with poets, courtesy of his reputation as a fine, fine teacher and his long-term association with Washington University.
Recordings (Part 1 and Part 2) of a tribute to Finkel are fun to listen to and give you a glimpse at the high esteem in which Finkel was held. Also of interest are profiles of Finkel in STLtoday and the St. Louis Beacon.
Here are a few of his poems:
“Burden”
Nouns were the first to slip away.
Was it because they were easier to forget,
or the most dispensable?
Funerals back then were milling
with nouns whose names he’d forgotten,
if he’d ever met them.
Evidently, somewhere out there
a swarm of improper nouns
had prospered and multiplied.
Odd nouns came knocking every day
looking for work, till the old bard
left off answering the door.
Verbs were beasts of another persuasion.
For a while some stayed behind,
pacing the halls or curled on the living room sofa.
But they had to be fed. Some nights
they sank their claws in his thigh
when they were hungry.
As the last syllable crept away,
he felt a peculiar lightness,
like the wisp that rises,
from a smoldering wick—
as if words were the burden
he’d been bearing, all his life.–Donald Finkel
From: Cortland Review
“The Invention of Meaning”
In the beginning was the hand
and the poem of the hand,
a breathless trope, a floating hieroglyph,
seamless as water.Then the hand spoke, and the hand said
“Let there be meaning,” and the meaning sang:
“Let there be love,” and the hand
shaped itself another hand of clay.Now, where there had been
but one meaning, there were two.
So the hands wrestled all night
till they saw it was pointless.So together they shaped themselves
a cunning tongue, to arbitrate.
Now, where there had been two meanings,
there were three.And the hands wrung one another,
abashed, and the tongue took over.–Donald Finkel
From: Natural Bridge
“The Ape Who Painted”
Toward the end of his painting career, Congo was
producing excellent circles, but nearly always filled them
in immediately.
–Alexander Alland, Jr., The Artistic Animalfrom time to time he would pause
to examine an apple, turning it
in his long, sensitive fingers, or fish
a dust-mouse gently from under his bed
not a hair displaced
or moon for hours, sprawled on his favorite tire
praying to his thumb
how fortunate we are to have captured on film
this miraculous thumb, in full career
sweeping in a great assured acc from left to right
trailing a gleaming Indian Red parabola
counterclockwise, following its own law
tailing up again, toward its beginning
deftly dividing out from in
then filling carefully the bowl of zero
with precious red, horizon to horizon
toward the end, the painter’s cage was strewn
with fallen suns, great bloody periods
pages from some cosmic calendar
while he grew more taciturn than ever.–Donald Finkel
From: What Manner of Beast
