this season brings
  such —

simply strange when
  we

amass hope so
  but

know how they go
  these

hopes or feelings
  try

against the frost
  trials

we recharge hope
  but

still scour the snow
  for

signs never there
  in

the snow never
  there

but hope’s snow can
  be

there or here if
  we

want some rejoice
  don’t

cover up our
  hope

or our snow don’t
  please

cover our snow
  hope

*

convince me
connivance be

*

abysmal attitudes
as be mal altitudes

*

nourish the flower
flourish in the now or —

*

belated salvation steers souls
on serrated shelves of stars born

*

terra infirma
terror firm

*

pleading with signs
sine waves bleating

*

eyes encased in ice
in case the I is sliced

*

tangential
tan genitals

*

for lest nature we dread or forget
forge tree wood’s new depth

*

seashore, bladderwrack, seaweed
shoal’s wreck, leeward more unset

*

tabula rasa
erase errata

*

strangury
strange augury

*

classical architrave
collapsible archive of

*

whatever I was, am, or aim to be
whether steam or soul, shame fully

*

Ronald Johnson’s justice
jouissance for ever/us

*

night thoughts, shudders,
shapes knot mind-shutters

*

perforated ulcer
pulse, pour forth

*

worn out with this indeterminacy
in the deep wake shorn of history

*

jetting angels’s filigrees
fierce angles of geometry

*

aphasic
“a phase” [sic]

No matter how I strive to compose
images, phrases, the wistful metaphor
and rhyme of its experience, the war
resents its commission to paper.

Which war, I cannot be sure,
the one that occurs, bloody prevalent,
in lines of fire, lines of newsprint,
the reeling lines of this ominous verse
or the war in one’s inner midst
locating and then denying the place,
the war zone actually, of representation.

Empire. Empyreal. Unreal. Too real.

There were no plumes of permeating smoke
reminiscent of Dante’s third, fourth, or fifth
circles viewed top to bottom or vice-versa.
The reconnaissance missions and fire walls
make dubious triptychs of dread. Not Dürer,
not Bosch, the shudder and rush of
these and those aesthetic directives
and their counter-examples. I plead
the third, fourth, and fifth denial of fitness.

Rescue and retrieval. Of language. Of bodies
culled from a pit in Najaf, whichever side or skin.

Were the poem companionate to suffering
(conditionals crop up here as far off there),
and sometimes it can be, this manqué poem
would transfigure into a mark of grief,
a globe of witness, a precinct of patience
in a time of multiple upheavals. But it cannot.

Its apology is itself, a failed consideration
of its materials, an uncoordinated attack
on its own composition.

Would that failure be acknowledged
in another life, another light, another land
as a measure approaching grace.
As of now, the bullet points merely gloss
their subject, I make a run for it,
and resolution is a divine providence
not available to me. Certainly not this poem.
Perhaps not even to the divine. No, not even.

A keepsake forsaken is my souvenir
of this war. Of this poem.

Some call this condition an idealism
while too many others diagnose trauma

No trivial doctrines stare
at a face upended
by the holier brow of arched nerves

We live by the exhalation
of air and now count
our slaves as statistics

Justice is seldom uttered
except as an after-breath

Carry on as if there’s nothing
like a fierce misunderstood book
to menace our sanities

But ignore medical texts:
They vex the bible of blossoming
with the metastasis of misfortune

The honing skills of our scalpels
have not yet become God

Displaced energy runs concurrent
with the motion, the gesture, of this gesture:

partially desecration, part homage

a fusion possibly

An attempt to shore up possibility
whittles down
to a concentrated urge
to break all forms
and sculpt shadows into substance

Then take their constituent parts
and export them, one by one,
to collectors who discern
the difference between catalogue
and corpus

Or evil and purposefulness

Categories prevail to ward off
systems becoming too solvent.
Piecemeal contemplation
rouses mental health
in its forbearance of genre
as wholesale entitlement

Were we or I to insist on the difference
settling between faith and despair
all the while obliterating partitions
maybe the wall would fall or at least shudder
and gradually the strictures would
become less definite

Only when the enforcers of Law
recede into abstinence
might the multiplication table
produce real dividends
not divisions

The practice of patience

permits this
denies that

draws a diagonal red line
through the appalling Absolutes

All of them

The Applause button reddens
in exhaustion and passion

It annihilates the restraint set by
the too exhausted
the too passionate

It is waiting to be pressed.

Breaching Self to accommodate another,
theory intruded:
Brother became Other
while Sister was still Soul —
but still another.

Residing in the inner sanctum —
the Self’s shelf —
an embryonic idea was coerced
by its too-easy resemblance to Mother —
but still another.

The hindrance of distance
derides the need to embrace.
“Father?” I asked. He smiled
and said “Son.” And added:
“Here is your twin brother — still another.”

Prodded by belief, he approached
the Antiquary about setting up solidarity.
This individual grimaced at this inquiry.
“You can be close, but to collectivize
you need to realize still another.”

Worlds, vast worlds, whir by
One’s vision with the plumage
of a smoky bird, a revenant,
a symbol maybe. Yet what is
this aggregate of meanings? Still another.

If you reach for any of these worlds,
any of those birds, you might lose all words
that silhouette the shapes of your sentiments.
Dwell on yourself — and that one over there —
yet always remember: there is still another.

no graves but cuticles grew A house
appeared           Could we live in it?

We cried because we grew
and we grew scared

But the parachutes overhead
graffiti’d with hope
told us something
of our happiness was true
some part at least
and kept it afloat

Was the leavening of our selves our souls?
Skins like tapers fly across the space — disappear —
the body once placed here traces itself in the air

your figure emerges
then suddenly stops
a red shirt, jacket
the color of jade,
glasses that frame eyes
as radiant suns

you greet me with smiles,
no introduction
we know each other
how can this be, R.?
i’ve read your books and
you’ve been dead four years

maybe you saw me
as my eyes gazed down
on your words, pages
like paned-glass
where through the author
watches his reader
as he constructs faith
line by line by line

as the dream went on
you decided to live
up the street from me
in a house painted
in red and jade tones
like your quirky clothes

roberto, you’re close
like a good neighbor
each day I’ll visit
do you read me? good
we will be fine friends
come by whenever

you already do, ghost,
author, companion

help me build a porch
for my citadel
a new addition
to my home you built
long before we met

Recall composing
By halves the pages of a draft
Of words to wound. Which is which,
I dare you to ask, and who to whom?

The reproof
Still wounds.

Lyrical Interference, essays by Norman Finkelstein
Spuyten Duyvil  (ISBN# 0-9720662-2-5); 145 pages. $12.00.

     Let’s talk about voice, a redundant activity, perhaps, but since we are on the page or, more properly on the screen, the task takes on a different dimension. The critic’s voice and the poet’s are by nature distinct. Tone, texture, and analysis all hit different registers and work towards different purposes. But when a poet takes to writing criticism, the resultant voice is cross-sectioned by an analytical focus and a poetic plea for an understanding beyond criticism. Such depth of understanding is rare; rarer yet is the critic who can sub-vocalize the poetic hymn, the poet’s pitch, an understanding of why lines matter and resound beyond critique. Few poets can write criticism with the virtuosity of their craft; critics who are not poets tend to make an exorbitant demand on the activity that they regard with magnifying glass, never the played strings of a poet’s mind and — dare I say in postmodernism’s day? — heart.

Norman Finkelstein is a tremendous poet who need not traffic in criticism but does — for the betterment of us all. His collected essays, Lyrical Interference, were published in 2003 but merits a review if only to garner belated and so deserved praise. What makes the collection so vibrant, so exquisitely touching as well as on the mark, is its sense of urgency, its unremitting honesty, and the shrewdness of its observations. Here, criticism and poetry complement each other implicitly in a fashion I’ve not seen since Michael Heller’s Uncertain Poetries (see my review of Heller in The Jacket Magazine ). Finkelstein is a poet for whom language and writing matter to the extent that he would rather study and use them with the forthrightness that only compassionate concern can allow. One gets the feeling, time and again in this volume, that the poet wishes not to relinquish his artistic eye for the strong arm of the critic; his deft, delicate readings are personalized without being too transparently ad hominen or involved in special pleading. He is concerned with what poems do, and what their significance is and can be in a world not particularly attuned to poetry. This concern fills and fulfills the collection and allows the reader to cherish poetic criticism and critical poetic positions without interruption (or did I mean inter-ference?).

Strangely enough, Lyrical Interference reminds me of Moby Dick. I recently re-read Melville’s opus while visiting Dublin (reading a book disengaged from its geographical context deepens its locality while displacement yields a nostalgia for the book’s power as a universal codicil and menu of particulars. Try reading Ulysses while veering through China’s countryside: double displacement and triple en-gagement).

That book operates as a manual of its content, providing the reader with a history of its subject, how to hunt whales, the metaphysical desperation at the root of tracking whales or human beings. So too this volume in its desire to bring forth the strategies of how to read poetry, the risks and irreducible complexities of being a poet, and the penultimate choices poets make in their forays into the written — and unwritten — worlds of their imaginings.

Moreover, Finkelstein captures the nuances of comprehension to which we must be attuned. He probes, with the flourish of one who understands and yet will only be confident when the readership does to, the theological and ethical implications of endings and silence, the failure to compose completeness and the mission to continue questioning one’s poetic perseverance. Admirably he argues that Pound, Williams, Olson, and Zukofsky seem, at times, to lose sight of what their long poems should do, should mean. Finkelstein claims that these architects of order tend to move waywardly into their subject matter and ultimately fade their words into fathomless pits of circular reasoning, empty feeling, or demote their projects into grand systems when subtler, smaller signs should have taken root. This examination is made all the more poignant when one considers that Finkelstein himself has been long at work with Track, a long poem of several volumes that has happily escaped the pitfalls he ascribes to these other masterful, imperfect works. Part midrash, part exegesis of the abyss of life and the affirmation of language to contend with that life, Track will undoubtedly learn from its creator’s critical bent how to proceed and how not to proceed.

The discussions of the projects and utterances of poets are insightful, as well as his treatises on the language poets and his study of Bronk and Duncan. Finkelstein opens up his full range of poetic and critical powers to invite the reader into the argument of the self, ourselves. Yeats has been much quoted about how the quarrel with others yields rhetoric and the quarrel with one’s self grows poetry. Finkelstein has clarified this difference by thoroughly interrogating the uses of the self, the poetic devices that laminate its representation, and the ethical and aesthetic maneuverings of that individuated, personalized idea of identity that should never be swept away unless at our great, unnecessary peril. The candor, intellect, fine writing, and profound understanding of this collection of essays yearns for the mutuality of poet, critic, and reader. The generosity of the author, the poet, certainly merits your own.