‘I am the Foundation’

To Go Into the Words
Norman Finkelstein
University of Michigan Press 2023, 222 pages, paperback $34.95 ISBN 9780472039418

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.

Finkelstein passes one of my basic tests for any critic, instilling in the reader — somewhat paradoxically perhaps — the urgent need to return to the primary texts to read or re-read hungrily in light of the new perspectives provided. To be frank, of the seven poets he devotes chapters to in To Go Into the Words, two I knew I already loved (Ronald Johnson and Nathaniel Mackey), two I felt distinctly agnostic about (William Bronk and Michael Palmer), one I had long planned to read more of but hadn’t got around to yet (Helen Adams), one I had heard of before but that was about it (Lawrence Joseph), and one was entirely new to me (Paul Bray). The writing on the figures I felt ambivalent about I think best demonstrates how effectively Finkelstein jumpstarts interest. For example, I have long admired William Bronk while always finding his work a touch too dry and repetitive to truly love, a little like a Wallace Stevens with all the fun stuff squished out. More patient, Finkelstein attends carefully to what he sees in the mechanics of Bronk’s work, things which he acknowledges might “put some readers off”: “its tremendously compressed but flexible syntax, the radical austerity of its diction, its relentless suspicion of metaphor, its disdain of mere imagery, its seamless sense of measure, and the resolution of its closure.”^[1] It’s all in the words:

                                                                  Once, it had seemed
the objects mattered: the light was to see them by.
Examined, they yielded nothing, nothing real.
They were for seeing the light in various ways.
They gathered it, released it, held it in.
In them, the light revealed itself, took shape.
Objects are nothing. There is only the light, the light!^[2] 

Of this, Finkelstein writes:

The rhetoric at such moments tends toward stark, unadorned assertions that impress by their direct, cumulative syntax, reaching to the final outcry. The rhythm generated by such sentence structure is a rhythm of passionate intellection, Pound’s logopoeia in its purest and most abstract form.^[3]

What might otherwise have seemed merely barren or blank blazes forth anew as something akin to heroic, evidence of a practitioner who is indeed a “model of poetic integrity.”^[4] Bronk’s intense focus on a key set of ideas — of specific words even: nothing, music, light, world, want — is therefore not repletion, but rigour. The abstraction that is his native element is thus, for Finkelstein, not detached or remote, but vivid and alert:

All the opposition there is in the world
is nothing much to this one: the way we try
to talk in sensible terms — what else? — of what
we know escapes (and we want it to) from sense.
Suppose, for example, we were born, as we say we are,
and died, in the end, after a reasonable life:

No would be all I could say to that, which I want
more than anything else that I could want.^[5]

While no miraculous conversion took place as I read this essay — I suspect I will always find Bronk a little too in love with his own austerities, too quick to jump to the Absolute as subject of his contemplation — I did come away with a much-deepened sense of respect: Finkelstein’s passion, teased out through the telling detail, is infectious and energizing.   

This proves typical of the collection as a whole. The essay on Michael Palmer is another good example, in that the composite form adopted throughout shows in this case a transition from an initial interest (tempered by concern over the opaquer consequences of Palmer’s experiments with language) to a fuller-throated acclaim for the lyrical bent of his more recent volumes. Finkelstein has always been clear that his critical focus has been driven by evolutions in his personal concerns (see the introductory matter in such earlier studies as The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature, Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity and On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry for verification) and that these shifts in inclination are intimately connected to his changing needs as a poet. It becomes increasingly clear that the poets assembled in this book are celebrated not only for the intrinsic quality of their work, but also for the enabling effect they have had on Finkelstein’s creative efforts. A pattern emerges: some of the figures (Bronk, Ronald Johnson, Nathaniel Mackey, Lawrence Joseph) show how it is still possible for the contemporary poet to contemplate and execute works of great intellectual heft and scope, while others (Helen Adams, Michael Palmer, Paul Bray) show it is possible to leaven such ambition with lashings of ambivalent wit without dampening the impact. As we shall see, both these dimensions have a role to play in the work he has come to create. His skill as a critic is to not let these debts color his acumen, getting too carried away in sweeping affirmation: he writes, early in the Bronk essay, “I hope to convince, however, through example and explanation,” and that is precisely what he does.^[6]

(An aside: while reading and re-reading the book for this review, I kept wanting to read the title as To Go Into the Woods, a slip that occurred once too often for me to regard it as altogether accidental. I suspect Finkelstein — and his source, Ronald Johnson in “BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus” of his epic Ark: “TO GO INTO THE WORDS TO EXPAND THEM The Voices said” — want something of the Dantean resonance, a brimstone whiff of potential damnation.^[7] Dante-as-pilgrim’s spiritual journey, of course, is all about how to get out of the dark wood (via the long route!): the appeal of instead going further into the words/woods gives Finkelstein’s association of powerful close reading with revelation a questing edge: to go into the details is precisely to risk getting lost, but it may also be the only way to get to the treasure.)

While To Go Into the Words provides an ideal gateway to Finkelstein’s critical work, Further Adventures is — as the title suggests — more of a continuation than a starting point, and even more of a culmination than a continuation: the implication is that this really does mark the last word for Pascal Wanderlust, the character whose narrative Finkelstein began in his previous collection, In a Broken Star. That story took advantage of a location (or organization — it is both, and much more besides) first explored in Finkelstein’s collection before that, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation. It is typical that Finkelstein is transparent, with both himself and his reader, about how he came to write these books,  recounting the story both in the revealing “Afterword” to Further Adventures and in the concluding essay, “The Master of Turning,” of To Go Into the Words. Following the completion of his marvelous, epic-scale lyric-of-lyrics Track in 2005, he found the poems he was writing — collected in Inside the Ghost Factory (2010) — increasingly occupied by abrupt shifts of voice, tone, and register, shifts he associated with the “code switching” that occurred in the leaps between English and Yiddish he recalled from the conversations among his extended family growing up.^[8] Then, an accidental (or was it?) visit with his wife to famous-in-his-day psychic Edgar Cory’s Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach — Finkelstein is very specific about the date: August 10, 2009 — sparked a poem, “Tour,” with a distinct location: the Immanent Foundation. A whole series of poems followed, exploring the machinations of this esoteric organization, with vague characters — Lucy, Emma, Alanna — and hints of an overarching (catastrophic) narrative emerging as the sequence progressed. Even after these poems were collected in From the Files of the Immanent Foundation, Finkelstein sensed he wasn’t done. Then, in February 2018, his wife Alice bought a pair of flowered Doc Martens with a fanciful label: Pascal Wanderlust. (Fanciful not least, as Finkelstein notes, because it was precisely Pascal who famously claimed “all of humanity’s problems stems from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” — a perfect eventual epigraph for the series to come.)^[9] So: a character was born! Recounted like this, in hindsight, such a sequence — increased openness to other, vernacular voices; the advent of a setting; the appearance of a protagonist — might seem inevitable as falling dominoes, but Finkelstein is adamant that he “never intended to write narrative poetry.”^[10] And yet, this apparently haphazard detour has led to some of the most delightful and penetrating writing of his career.

The title “The Master of Turning” comes from the Hebrew ba’al teshuvah, “master of the return,” one who has to some degree turned or returned to the faith (teshuvah also meaning “repentance”).^[11] Finkelstein may also intend an allusion to a Talmudic maxim he has quoted on multiple occasions, itself referring to the Torah: “Turn it, and turn it, for everything is in it.” While the role of Jewish thought and culture in American literature, especially modern American poetry, has long been central to Finkelstein’s critical work, it is fascinating to read that this more personal “turn” is a relatively late development — fascinating, but perhaps not altogether surprising. While Jewish themes and tropes have long appeared in his poetry, whether expressly (the sequence Passing Over responding directly to the text of the Passover Haggadah) or more indirectly (the numerology governing the structure of Tracks), it always seems to have been those aspects of Jewish thought and reflection on the furthest outskirts of the law — particularly kabbalistic and gnostic mysticism — that have most fired his imagination. Another of the closing essays in To Go Into the Words, “Total Midrash,” shows the tensions that can result from this sort of interaction of competing traditions and strands of influence: while powerfully attracted to the model of commentary and exegesis it implies, in both his critical work and his poetry, Finkelstein explains he is hesitant to use the term “Midrash” outside of its specifically religious context, however apt it might prove to describe various contemporary secular poetic projects. Vacillation of this sort can be uneasy and frustrating for the living individual, but — as Finkelstein seems deeply aware — it is pure catnip for creativity, both poetic and critical.

It is hard to think of Gnosticism — in either its Jewish or its Christian flavours — as anything other than a gloomy discipline, precedented as it is on the notion of an intrinsically fallen existence, matter an inevitable prison for the spirit. But this is also its hope: for all that we may be “thrown” into a life and world we didn’t choose, the soul remains capable of bettering itself, reconnecting with that share of the divine spark buried in each of us. Such a sense of homing in on a hidden source lends itself nicely, of course, to a quest narrative. Pascal Wanderlust thus sets out on a journey that is simultaneously interior (seeking a more fixed, essential identity) and external (looking for signs and evidence of a reachable “beyond”, fueled by a deep-seated “desire to be elsewhere”).

Finkelstein adopts a Godfather II-style structure in Further Adventures: while fulfilling the title’s promise of fresh exploits, it also provides glimpses of Pascal’s origin story as well. Borrowing from the gnostic-adjacent field of alchemy — in which “the androgyne represents human perfection and transcendence, a manifestation of the Great Work” — their shifting, genderqueer nature is revealed to be the result of deliberate experimentation, the fusing of a male and female spirit in one.^[12] In, again, a somewhat haphazard fashion that may outstrip Finkelstein’s original intentions, this feels particularly timely: at a moment when LGBTQ+ rights and communities are once again under threat from US legislators and their enablers, the ups and downs of Pascal’s search for self-understanding and self-acceptance take on a distinctly political resonance. When Wanderlust finally does return to their long-sought Pascalian “room” at the end of the book, it feels like all sorts of homecomings.

The adventures in these books are a delirious mixture of high and low cultural references, a self-confessed poeticized “graphic novel” that owes as much to Neil Gaiman as it does to Edmund Spenser. It features such genre archetypes as a wizened, old mentor (the wonderfully named Augustus Sprechenbaum), an ambiguous mother-creator (the ever-elusive rebel, Margaret) and a cynical feline familiar (the best talking cat character this side of The Master and Margarita/Sabrina the Teenage Witch/Kiki’s Delivery Service). One literary model here is Jack Spicer, who (despite his antisemitic streak) Finkelstein praises for his ability to craft poems that “embody both spiritual gravity and cosmic zaniness,” while showing how the poet tends to set him- or herself up to be the “butt of uncanny jokes.”^[13] Also relevant is Paul Bray, revealed in To Go Into the Words (to me, at least) as the playful creator of an unlikely form of cheerful, even gleeful gnostic poetry. (One of the Foundation’s measures of eldritch energies is referred to, in passing, marvelously, as “the Bray scale.”^[14])