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Jan. 27th, 2011 08:33 pm14. Preambles & Other Poems
I think I read most of these a year or two ago, but couldn't remember which, so just went on through. A few I've known for a long time because of Hollander's anthology Poems of Our Moment - and Bloom's essay on him in Ringers in the Tower - and others I've found or been given online, but Feinman's like Crane in that it's hard to retain a poem of his even if you broke your head grasping it. Presumably later attempts are much easier, at least. But also like Crane and late Stevens, and like Dickinson used to be for me, it is very important to be healthy, well-rested, unhungry and undistracted if you want even that first attempt to work. And for that matter Feinman marries a lot of the difficult points of all three poets: Dickinson's streamlined grammar, Stevens' jarring image transitions, Crane's every poem being a train of thought caught in medias res. Actually all three of them do all of those. I think what I actually mean is he does three times as much of all of them as all of them - and all at once.
Difficulty can be divided into good and bad types, like Pausanias divided love in The Symposium: there's the kind that signals that a work is for the few and not the unwashed multitude, that doesn't want to be understood because it has nothing worth understanding, that just tries to see how extreme it can get. But then there's also the kind that's somebody straining as far as they can, finding something so important for what it is that it must not be simplified, hence possibly lost, the kind that's so much a crucial conversation held with oneself on paper that to try straightening it out later is to intrude something foreign, some new and irrelevant self, the kind that wants you to work for something that's more yours for that attention - and that deserves that attention. Feinman's is the good kind - maybe avoidable, but you respect the dignity of his diffidence.
There's also the kind that fears it has nothing worth conveying, or that it will be esteemed that way, and therefore becomes a shy, private language, and I'd say the avoidable difficulty of his work is mostly due to that. He did find some readers, mostly other poets - Bloom, Hollander, Strand, Tate, Aiken - but you wonder if he knew what to do with them. Still, this fear usually manifests as not writing poems in the first place, or writing literally incomprehensible ones, or simple stand-ins for thoughts too complex to let yourself think publicly. Feinman often wears a poet's self-esteem.
He even has a few immediately lucid pieces: True Night, November Sunday Morning, Relic 1, maybe Noon and Late Light.
The story told is the necessity but also necessary failure of meaning, like in Stevens, but emphasizing the latter. He's a post-structuralist poet, yes, but the only kind I can stand: one who realizes there's nothing to say about post-structuralism past describing its stages and what they're like - i.e. making a model of how models fail. He's not attacking words, he's pointing out the surging reconfigurations of our senses of self and cosmos and what ties and what separates them. He's actually surprisingly positive at times - again and again a larger life washes back into us through or despite our imposed meanings. You abandon meanings purposely for something meaning more.
I think I read most of these a year or two ago, but couldn't remember which, so just went on through. A few I've known for a long time because of Hollander's anthology Poems of Our Moment - and Bloom's essay on him in Ringers in the Tower - and others I've found or been given online, but Feinman's like Crane in that it's hard to retain a poem of his even if you broke your head grasping it. Presumably later attempts are much easier, at least. But also like Crane and late Stevens, and like Dickinson used to be for me, it is very important to be healthy, well-rested, unhungry and undistracted if you want even that first attempt to work. And for that matter Feinman marries a lot of the difficult points of all three poets: Dickinson's streamlined grammar, Stevens' jarring image transitions, Crane's every poem being a train of thought caught in medias res. Actually all three of them do all of those. I think what I actually mean is he does three times as much of all of them as all of them - and all at once.
Difficulty can be divided into good and bad types, like Pausanias divided love in The Symposium: there's the kind that signals that a work is for the few and not the unwashed multitude, that doesn't want to be understood because it has nothing worth understanding, that just tries to see how extreme it can get. But then there's also the kind that's somebody straining as far as they can, finding something so important for what it is that it must not be simplified, hence possibly lost, the kind that's so much a crucial conversation held with oneself on paper that to try straightening it out later is to intrude something foreign, some new and irrelevant self, the kind that wants you to work for something that's more yours for that attention - and that deserves that attention. Feinman's is the good kind - maybe avoidable, but you respect the dignity of his diffidence.
There's also the kind that fears it has nothing worth conveying, or that it will be esteemed that way, and therefore becomes a shy, private language, and I'd say the avoidable difficulty of his work is mostly due to that. He did find some readers, mostly other poets - Bloom, Hollander, Strand, Tate, Aiken - but you wonder if he knew what to do with them. Still, this fear usually manifests as not writing poems in the first place, or writing literally incomprehensible ones, or simple stand-ins for thoughts too complex to let yourself think publicly. Feinman often wears a poet's self-esteem.
He even has a few immediately lucid pieces: True Night, November Sunday Morning, Relic 1, maybe Noon and Late Light.
The story told is the necessity but also necessary failure of meaning, like in Stevens, but emphasizing the latter. He's a post-structuralist poet, yes, but the only kind I can stand: one who realizes there's nothing to say about post-structuralism past describing its stages and what they're like - i.e. making a model of how models fail. He's not attacking words, he's pointing out the surging reconfigurations of our senses of self and cosmos and what ties and what separates them. He's actually surprisingly positive at times - again and again a larger life washes back into us through or despite our imposed meanings. You abandon meanings purposely for something meaning more.
