Corrupted into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman

By Alvin Feinman, Harold Bloom and James Geary

A definitive edition that introduces a major American poet to a new generation of readers

According to Harold Bloom, "The best of Alvin Feinman's poetry is as good as anything by a twentieth-century American. His work achieves the greatness of the American sublime." Yet, in part because he published so sparsely, Feinman remained little-read and largely unknown when he died in 2008. This definitive edition of Feinman's complete work, which includes fifty-seven previously published poems and thirty-nine unpublished poems discovered among his manuscripts, introduces a new generation of readers to the lyrical intensity and philosophical ambition of this major American poet. Harold Bloom, a lifelong friend of Feinman, provides a preface in which he examines Feinman's work in the context of the strongest poets of his generation—John Ashbery, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons—while the introduction by James Geary, who studied with Feinman at Bennington College, presents a biographical and critical sketch of this remarkable poet and teacher. Corrupted into Song restores Feinman's work to its rightful place alongside that of poets like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, with whom his poetry and poetics have so much in common.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781400880485

Book preview

Corrupted into Song

Corrupted into Song

The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman

Edited by Deborah Dorfman

With a foreword by Harold Bloom and an introduction by James Geary

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press

Introduction copyright © 2016 by James Geary

Foreword copyright © 2016 by Harold Bloom

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art: The Written Sea © Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

All Rights Reserved

The present volume contains previously unpublished poems in addition to the complete text of Poems, published by Princeton University Press in 1990, which included poems first published in Preambles and Other Poems, Oxford University Press, 1964, with some revisions. A version of The Tree appeared in Harper’s Magazine, copyright © 1970. Reprinted from the October issue by special permission.

Frontispiece photo of Alvin Feinman courtesy of Deborah Dorfman.

ISBN 978-0-691-17052-7

ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-17053-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015956951

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon LT Std

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword by Harold Bloom ix

The Constant Crime of Speech: The Life and Work of Alvin Feinman, by James Geary 1

PREAMBLES

I

Preambles 23

Old World Travelogue 26

Landscape (Sicily) 27

II

Pilgrim Heights 31

The Sun Goes Blind 32

Scene Recalled 33

Solstice 34

Snow 35

Waters 36

Waters (2) 37

Earth and Sorrows 38

III

Relic 41

Three Elementary Prophecies 42

1. For Departure 42

2. For Passage 43

3. For Return 44

What Speaking Silent Enough? 45

That Ground 46

This Face of Love 47

For the Child Unanswered in Her 48

Relic (2) 49

Relic (3) 50

Responsibilities and Farewell 51

The End of the Private Mind 52

This Tree 53

Death of the Poet 54

IV

Statuary SIX POEMS 57

1. Tags, or Stations 57

2. All of This 58

3. Portrait 59

4. Sentinel 60

5. L’Impasse des Deux Anges 61

6. Covenant 62

Noon 63

True Night 64

Annus Mirabilis 65

Mythos 66

Mythos (2) 67

Visitations, Habitats 68

V

November Sunday Morning 71

Stare at the Sea 72

Swathes of March 73

Stills: From a 30th Summer 74

Late Light 75

Day, Daylong 76

Double Poem of Night and Snow 77

Circumferences 78

LISTENING

I

Summer, Afternoon 83

At Sunset 84

Cancellations 85

1. Graffiti 85

2. Hiatus: Between Waking and Waking 86

Nightfall 87

II

Listening FOUR POEMS 91

1. Morning, Arraignment with Image 91

2. The Listening Beasts, the Creatures 92

3. Then Leda 93

4. False Night, or Another 94

Wet Pavement 95

Second Marriage Song 96

THE UNPUBLISHED POEMS

I

The Way to Remember Her 101

For Lucina 102

Letter to Jane 103

For Enid and Jerry 104

Soliloquy of the Lover out of Season 105

The Reading 106

Sunset with Male Figure 108

[ untitled ] 109

[ untitled ] 110

[ untitled ] 111

A Farewell to the Grammarian of the Heart 112

In Praise of Space and Time 113

II

Intruder 117

Lament for the Coming of Spring 118

Backyard, Hoboken, Summer 119

Evening in the Gentile Town 120

The Islander 121

Matinal 122

III

Socratic Adieu 125

Neither/Nor 126

Song 127

Song for Evening 128

Postlude for the Metaphysician 129

[ untitled ] 130

Epilogue: Zone and Invocation 131

The Innocents 132

[ untitled ] 133

[ untitled ] 134

Preamble for a Stone Age 135

Stanzas for W. B. Yeats 136

IV

Song of the Dusting Woman in the Library 139

Natura Naturans 140

An Heretic to Heretics 141

A Motive for the Fallacy of Imitative Form 142

Fragment for the Necessary Angel 143

The True Spain 144

Moon 145

War Dance of the Apocalyptic Pagan 146

Stone Anatomies 147

Foreword

By Harold Bloom

I first met Alvin Feinman in September 1951, the day before I encountered another remarkable young man who also became a lifelong friend, Angus Fletcher. Alvin was twenty-two, a year older than we were, and a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, where Angus and I were students of literature. Alvin, to my lasting sorrow, died in 2008. Of my closest friends I am fortunate still to have Angus, having lost Alvin, Archie Ammons, and John Hollander, three superb poets and majestic intellects.

I am no poet; I cannot forget. Many of my friends are or were poets: Mark Strand, a recent loss; Robert Penn Warren, and happily still with us, William Merwin, John Ashbery, Jay Wright; and younger figures: Rosanna Warren, Henri Cole, Martha Serpas, Peter Cole.

Alvin at twenty-two was already a poet of astonishing individuation: the emergence of voice in him clarified as rapidly as it had in Rimbaud and Hart Crane. I recall reading the first of his three Relic poems sometime in October 1951:

I will see her stand

half a step back of the edge of some high place

or at a leafless tree in some city park

or seated with her knees toward me and her face turned toward the window

And always the tips of the fingers of both her hands

will pull or twist at a handkerchief

like lovely dead birds at a living thing

trying to work apart something exquisitely, unreasonably joined.

A month later I was introduced by Alvin to this beautiful, intense young woman in New York. Though lovers, she and my friend seemed remote from one another. I watched her hands in constant motion tugging at a handkerchief and wondered silently at the dispassionate tone of the eight-line lyric so precisely called Relic.

Reciting the poem to myself these 60 years I have come to see its relationship to Eliot’s farewell