Corrupted Into Song (ebook)

Argumento de Corrupted Into Song (ebook)

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definitive edition of Feinman's complete work, which includes fifty-seven previously published poems and thirty-nine unpublished poems discovered among his manuscripts, introduces a new generation of readers to the lyrical intensity and philosophical ambition of this major American poet.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.

Alvin Feinman (1929–2008) taught literature at Bennington College from 1969 to 1994. He was the author of Preambles and Other Poems and an expanded edition of that work, Poems (Princeton). He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Brooklyn College, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. Feinman's wife, Deborah Dorfman (1934–2015), taught literature at Temple University, Wesleyan University, and SUNY Albany. Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English at Yale University. James Geary is deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.

"Alvin Feinman's poems are perhaps the purest evidence of the extinction of personality T. S. Eliot believed was one of poetry’s necessities. As an aspiration, extinction of personality is as dangerously thrilling as being exposed to a siren’s song. As an achievement, Feinman’s exquisite, visionary poems, tied to the mast of their own making, allow us to behold fierce, unyielding perceptions."--Michael Collier, director of the University of Maryland Creative Writing Program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

"Poetry is making, poesis. And for a time, Alvin Feinman was a maker, a majestic poet who came to embrace his own intolerable limitations, his own dead-end. After long silence, one rejoices in these almost forgotten, rigorous, earthly, purgative poems."--Henri Cole0Foreword 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