Donald Finkel

Donald Finkel Poems

Donald Finkel Biography

Donald Alexander Finkel (October 21, 1929 – November 15, 2008) was an American poet best known for his unorthodox styles and "curious juxtapositions". Life Finkel was born in New York City on October 21, 1929. He grew up in the Bronx, and aspired to be a sculptor as a youth. He attended the University of Chicago, only to be expelled for smoking marijuana. Finkel attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1952. He earned a master's degree in English from Columbia in 1953. He taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, prior to accepting a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis in 1960. He taught at Washington University until 1991, and was poet-in-residence emeritus there until his death. Mr. Finkel’s wife, Constance Urdang, a novelist and poet, died in 1996. In addition to his son, Tom, of St. Louis, he is survived by two daughters, Liza Finkel of Portland, Ore., and Amy Finkel of St. Louis; a half-brother, David Finkel of Manhattan; and two grandchildren. Poetry De Witt Bell, in a 1964 review, called Finkel's work Simeon, "a book of great élan, robust in world view and vigorous in style. Both the poet and the poems seems to be enjoying themselves." Finkel was sent to Antarctica in 1968, as part of a scientific expedition sponsored by the National Science Foundation to send artists to Antarctica. The trip spawned a book-length poem, "Adequate Earth", in 1972, and the subject reappeared in his 1978 book, Endurance: An Antarctic Idyll. Finkel's wrote his poetry in free verse, juxtaposing different subjects against each other. Some of his poetry was extremely lengthy, with single pieces filling a volume. Finkel strayed from abstraction and used common language in his writing. He would interlace his poetry with sections taken from a wide range of works, including the writings of authors including Lenny Bruce, Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, Albert Camus and Franz Kafka to create what The New York Times described as a "multilayered, sculptural bricolage through which Mr. Finkel expanded the reader's sense of what was possible in the genre." Some of Finkel's best-known poems include his 1968 work Answer Back about Mammoth Cave, Adequate Earth, and his 1987 work The Wake of the Electron which was inspired by the story of sailor Donald Crowhurst, who died in 1969 while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. The 14 books of poetry and other works he published include Simeon (1964), A Joyful Noise (1966), The Garbage Wars (1970), A Mote in Heaven’s Eye (1975), Endurance: An Antarctic Idyll (1978), Going Under (1978), What Manner of Beast (1981) and Not So the Chairs: Selected and New Poems (2003). He translated A Splintered Mirror: Chinese Poetry From the Democracy Movement with Carolyn Kizer, which was published in 1991.)

The Best Poem Of Donald Finkel

The Great Wave: Hokusai

But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation, and suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A trained observer. carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a dilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt. (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art)


It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky.

In the painter's sea
All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.
But the innocent bystander, he merely
'Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing': hidden
Behind a screen we hear his cry.
He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,
But he cannot see below Fuji
The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches
His claws against strangers. He is
Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.
He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat
Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.

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