Corrupted into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman

by Alvin Feinman, Deborah Dorfman (Editor), Harold Bloom (Preface by), James Geary (Introduction)

Overview

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definitive edition of Feinman's complete work, which includes fifty-seven previously published poems and thirty-nine unpublished poems discovered among his manuscripts, introduces a new generation of readers to the lyrical intensity and philosophical ambition of this major American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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691170527
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/05/2016
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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 (1930–2019) was 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.

Table of 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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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 Cole

Editorial Reviews

"These poems do have a strong center, which springs from the speaker's intelligence, his measured rhythms and use of rhyme, and his sometimes detached outlook as he examines the world around him. . . . Feinman's work deserves a broader audience."—-Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"A riveting collection by a poet who deserves to be better known."—-Carol Rumens, The Guardian

From the Publisher