t<W
GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN
Even cosmographies, broad orchards
The uncountable trees
Or a river
Seen along the green monotonies
Of its banks
And the talk
Of memorable ideals ending
In irrelevanc.e
I would cite
Wind-twisted spaces, absence
Listening to a broken wall
Mr. Feinman often stands close to the Stevens of
Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction.
He subsumes such subversive commands as "It must
be
Abstract" or "You must become an ignorant man again/ And see
the sun again with an ignorant eye." Sometimes he seems to
realize
what is merely speculative in Stevens. This is the case of "Pilgrim
Heights," an authentic nature-poem which is also the mind in the
act of finding what will suffice (and being enriched by the not finding).
But if his poetics are close to Stevens his poems are not. Their actual
labor of the negative (of "decreation" as Stevens would have said) is
often stronger, more ascetic. There is more of that "sacred hesitation"
which in Mallarme is still touched by tricky religious pathos but per–
fectly naturalized here. And if, as in Stevens and Nemerov, thought
thinks its ruin, this begets no widening speculation.
Preambles
may
prove to be the beginning of a new poetry because it stands beyond
the comfort of speculation as well as story. Sometimes it almost stands
beyond words as well, not because words are doubted vis-a.-vis the
stronger presence of nature, but because they want to return to the
throat, to sheer potentiality. That way lie silence and sterility. I will
not end, however, on a defeatist note. "It must give pleasure"; and
there are many
unditficult
pleasures in Mr. Feinman's poetry. Though
his restraint may result in mannerism and ambiguity, it leads to lyrical
flights that have the pure and peculiar sensuousness of speech. This truly
original poetry recovers a vision of words as first-created, before their
fall into reified signs. The voice that gives being to light also gives being
to itself, as on this "November Sunday Morning":
And the light, a wakened heyday of air
Tuned low and clear and wide,
A radiance now that would emblaze
And veil the most golden horn
Or any entering of a sudden clearing
To a standing, astonished, revealed.
. ..
Geoffrev H. Hartman
