Rob Stanton reviews Norman Finkelstien’s book of poetry Further Adventures, and his book of critical prose To Go Into the Woods in the literary journal Jacket2.
“The lot of the committed poet-critic is a tricky one; the hyphen can be precarious. For some of the greatest dual practitioners in the language — I’m thinking here of Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, William Empson, Laura Riding — prose sooner or later seems to become the “easier” medium, the poetry either slowing down considerably, drying up completely, or being turned away from consciously. Conversely, a critic’s poetry can come altogether too easily — depth of technical and historical awareness leading not to assured maturity, but to work that is too fluent: flat, prosy, pedantic, stuffy in its choice of subject matter or form, mere exercise — in short, academic. (This fate is, alas, too common to need to name names.) The timely appearance of these two books — one of poetry, one of critical prose — demonstrates how Norman Finkelstein has managed to avoid either of these pitfalls by staying productively skeptical about how much the two roles can actually be separated, and remaining attentive to the benefits and risks inherent in how much they can overlap or intertwine.
To Go Into the Words — the critical collection — consists of a brief introduction, seven chapters on individual poets, and three more personal, discursive essays as a conclusion. It has something of an “occasional” feel — most of the chapters on specific poets compile two or more then-contemporaneous reviews of their latest books — but instead of coming across as partial or haphazard, the structure communicates powerfully both the consistencies and the developments in Finkelstein’s interests and tastes over time. The three concluding essays then track how this progression has a parallel trajectory in the shifts of form and focus in his poetry.
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Posted by Dos Madres Press
