FINKEL, Donald

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 21 October 1929. Education: Columbia University, New York. B.S. in philosophy 1952 (Phi Beta Kappa), M.A. in literature 1953. Family: Married Constance Urdang in 1956 (died 1996); two daughters and one son. Career: Instructor, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1957–58, and Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1958–60. Member of the department of English, 1960–92, since 1965 poet-in-residence, and since 1992 poet-in-residence emeritus, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Visiting lecturer, Bennington College, Vermont, 1966–67, Princeton University, New Jersey, spring 1985, University of Missouri, St. Louis, 1998–99, and Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri, spring 2000. Visited Antarctica, 1969–70, at invitation of National Science Foundation. Awards: Helen Bullis prize (Poetry Northwest), 1964; Guggenheim fellowship, 1967; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969, 1973; Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, 1972; Theodore Roethke Memorial prize, 1974; American Academy Morton Dauwen Zabel award, 1980; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook award, 1994, for Beyond Despair; Elizabeth Matchett Stover award, 1995. Address: 2051 Park Avenue, Apt. D, St. Louis, Missouri 63104, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Clothing's New Emperor and Other Poems. New York, Scribner, 1959.

Simeon. New York, Atheneum, 1964.

A Joyful Noise. New York, Atheneum, 1966.

Answer Back. New York, Atheneum, 1968.

The Garbage Wars. New York, Atheneum, 1970.

Adequate Earth. New York, Atheneum, 1972.

A Mote in Heaven's Eye. New York, Atheneum, 1975.

Going Under, and Endurance: An Arctic Idyll: Two Poems. New York, Atheneum, 1978.

What Manner of Beast. New York, Atheneum, 1981.

The Detachable Man. New York, Atheneum, 1984.

Selected Shorter Poems. New York, Atheneum, 1987.

The Wake of the Electron. New York, Atheneum, 1987.

Beyond Despair. St Louis, Garlic Press, 1994.

A Question of Seeing. Little Rock, University of Arkansas Press, 1998.

Play

The Jar (produced Boston, 1961).

Other

Translator, A Splintered Mirror: Chinese Poetry from the Democracy Movement. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1991.

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Manuscript Collection: Washington University Library, St. Louis, Missouri.

Critical Studies: "Donald Finkel: 'There Is No Perfection Possible. But There Is Tomorrow'" by Richard Howard, in Perspective (St. Louis, Missouri), 16, 1969; The Critic's Credentials, by Stanley Edgar Hyman, New York, Atheneum, 1978; Alone with America, by Richard Howard, New York, Atheneum, 1969, London, Thames and Hudson, 1970, revised edition, Atheneum, 1980; "Finkel, Stallworthy, and Stevenson" by Harry Marten, in Contemporary Literature (Madison, Wisconsin), 21, 1980.

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"Plain speech is out of place in the pulpit, / poetry is out of place in the square," writes Donald Finkel, who in his works has attempted to combine prose and poetry and the religious and the secular worlds. As an early poem like "Hands" indicates, Finkel is a strong believer in the power of poetry, even though he is not totally happy with its present condition:

   The poem makes truth a little more disturbing
   like a good bra, lifts it and holds it out
   in both hands. (In some of the flashier stores
   there's a model with the hands stitched on, in red or black.)
 
 
   Lately the world you wed, for want of such hands,
   sags in the bed beside you like a tired wife.
   For want of such hands, the face of the moon is bored,
   the tree does not stretch and yearn, nor the groin tighten.
 
 
   Devious or frank, in any case,
   the poem is calculated to arouse.
   Lean back and let its hands play freely on you:
   there comes a moment, lifted and aroused,
   when the two of you are equally beautiful.

The struggle to make poetry once again a force capable of arousing and disturbing us has led Finkel in his later work to increased experimentation. This began with the use of the collage technique in his long sequence "Three for Robert Rauschenberg" (A Joyful Noise), but the innovation seems pale next to what Finkel attempts in later books. In these amazing volumes Finkel manages to develop a voice and a technique uniquely his own.

Answer Back is an astonishing book arranged around the metaphor of cave exploration. It has six sections, each of which is named after a particular part of Mammoth Cave. Speleology, however, is only one of Finkel's concerns, and other topics include Vietnam, the relation of the sexes, the nature of religion, the function of poetry, and the origins of the universe. His voice modulates from biblical to satiric tones, and his verse ranges from lyrics to doggerel. Interspersed among the bits of poetry are passages of prose, roughly two per page, from such varied sources as Lenny Bruce, Admiral Richard Byrd, Camus, Heraclitus, Hoyle, the I Ching, Jesus, Kafka, the Kama Sutra, the Missouri State Penitentiary, Playboy, Pound, and Lord Raglan. Needless to say, the whole effect is rather staggering. While Finkel's erudition is impressive and the clever juxtaposition he creates amusing, he also seems too unrestrained and has produced a poem that is too fragmented.

Like Answer Back, the long poem "Water Music" in The Garbage Wars has a controlling metaphor (experimentation on dolphins), and it, too, uses many prose borrowings. Yet here Finkel has refined his technique and uses it more subtly. His next book, Adequate Earth, is a masterpiece. Once again Finkel is daring in his choice of subject, for this book is a series of seven long poems about Antarctica. Finkel spent a month on the continent in 1969, and his experiences form the basis of some of the sections. Other parts have as a narrative frame the explorations of Amundsen, Byrd, and others. As usual, Finkel interpolates prose passages from various authors, but here the practice is more tightly focused than previously. And as usual, Finkel tries to bring everything into his poetry, from science to theology to politics to psychology. Here, however, he has finally chosen a subject that can stand the weight and at the same time offer great narrative potentiality. As a result, Adequate Earth is one of the few fine contemporary epic poems. It has a vast sweep: part of it is mythmaking, as Finkel "takes the liberty of quoting at length throughout from the gospels of the Emperor Penguins," a remarkably allegorical document; part of it is devastating satire, such as the section "Pole Business," which is a bitter attack on the commercialism encroaching on our planet's last wilderness; part of it is tragedy in its accounts of ill-fated attempts to explore the polar regions; and all of it is a tribute to man's ability to endure in even the harshest of worlds:

   We'll get used to that bite in the air
   soon enough; we'll get used to
   everything. It's what we do:
   the adaptable animal, whelped in the time
   of ice, we adapt to anything.

Full justice cannot be done to Finkel's work by brief quotations from it; as with a collage, its power comes not from any one part alone but from the interaction of all the parts. Finkel's collages are daring attempts to bring unity to the world's chaos through art. At his worst he can be obscure and pedantic; at his best he can produce works of startling resonance.

It is interesting that Finkel returns to the metaphors of exploring caves and Antarctica in his 1978 Going Under, and Endurance, a volume that is two books in one. Finkel, who has constantly confounded expectations about the proper subjects for poetry, here confounds expectations about the very way a book is printed and presented. The result is a bibliographer's nightmare but a reader's delight. Fortunately, the poems give the reader none of the disappointment one often feels in reading sequels. Indeed, each work is in some way superior to its predecessor, because each has a much sharper narrative focus; Going Under centers on the strange lives of two Mammoth Cave explorers, Endurance on a doomed polar expedition. It is no surprise that Finkel is so intrigued by the stories of adventures; few writers are as ambitious and daring as he.

—Dennis Lynch