Embedded Files
This site is devoted to the poetry and criticism of Norman Finkelstein, including information and links to publications, reviews, readings, and other events. For Restless Messengers, NF's poetry review blog, go to www.poetryinreview.com.
A new chapbook from The Bodily Press
A new chapbook from The Bodily Press
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Pascal Wanderlust, the androgynous, gnostic adventurer whose spiritual quest has been the subject of Norman Finkelstein’s recent poetry, returns in these “four episodes,” which continue (and perhaps conclude) this phantasmagoric lyrical saga. Part alchemical romance, part philosophical investigation, part psychic comedy of errors, these surprisingly intimate poems track Pascal at various points in a journey charged with symbolic meaning, Lovecraftian weirdness, and Kafkaesque humor. As Pascal declares, “I have collected / all the memories and called them The Solitudes, / called them The Nostalgias, called them and / called them until I lost my voice…”
From Dos Madres Press
From Dos Madres Press
Both a prequel and a sequel to the earlier From the Files of the Immanent Foundation and In a Broken Star, this new volume of poems is Finkelstein at his most uncanny. A dark, fragmented narrative weirdly illuminated by sudden bursts of lyricism, Further Adventures is a philosophical quest-romance that draws equally from the tradition of visionary poetry and from modern pop culture. At its heart is Pascal Wanderlust, first introduced in Broken Star, who, as Mark Scroggins puts it “traverses waste lands recalling those of Eliot, Browning, and Lovecraft, swims and flies through libraries of Alexandria and Babel, and receives tantalizing hints of destinations in colloquies with specters from beneath the sea, from eldritch dimensions and ‘faery lands forlorn.’” A reluctant knight-errant who would rather “sit quietly in a room alone,” the young Pascal is charged with the task of restoring the mysterious Immanent Foundation, where “The horns of Elfland and the summons / of the shofar echo throughout the grounds. / Myth calls to counter-myth, song suggests / song, fallen forms rise again…”
"...Further Adventures conjures a cosmos, through which Pascal Wanderlust, haunted, double-souled Holy Schlemiel of Tarot and Torah, roves, hopefully, sorrowfully, awkwardly, trippingly, in search of the way home, because, like the secret language of every word we speak, though we are lost in this fiasco we call the world, and in the apocalypse we call the heart, paradise is still spread out over the earth, and the gnostic rover's desire to be elsewhere, if the truth be told, is the desire to be truly here..."
—Billie Chernicoff
"The Haunted Quality of Poetry": Joe Safdie interviews NF about Further Adventures at Rain Taxi.
"Norman Finkelstein does not exaggerate the scope of his criticism when he defines it as 'part close reading, part psychoanalysis, part historicism, and 100 percent mystical analysis'—the writing collected here has all those elements and much more. His lucidity and erudition are accompanied by an inspiring openness of spirit—as he considers such poets as William Bronk, Helen Adam, Ronald Johnson, Nathaniel Mackey, and Lawrence Joseph, he gives us a companionate sense of his own developing involvement with their work. These are passionately engaging, fantastically nuanced readings, equally attuned to the circadian rhythms of Johnson, the ghostly ballads of Adam, Mackey’s unfolding mythos, and Joseph’s vision of contemporary catastrophe. His sense of how poets work and why it matters—enriched by explorations of the midrashic traditions of Jewish thought and the competing claims of experiment and tradition—provide uncommon excitement."
—Geoffrey O'Brien
Now available from the Poets on Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press:
Now available from the Poets on Poetry Series at the University of Wisconsin Press:
"For decades, Norman Finkelstein has mined the deep interiority of fellow poets for whom writing extends beyond creative expression and cultural commentary into the realm of the spirit. In To Go into the Words, he continues his groundbreaking work by exploring the visionary poetics of writers as varied as Helen Adam, Michael Palmer, and Nathaniel Mackey. What makes this book — and Finkelstein’s work as a whole — stand out is that in chapter after chapter we see the Philosopher’s Stone being polished by someone who knows that the most engaging criticism is, in fact, a form of celebration."
—Derek Pollard
"Finkelstein, one of our most perceptive poet-critics, gives us masterful readings of important contemporary poets in essays that integrate his decades-long conversation with their work. The last sections examine the gnostic impulse, in poetry and commentary, of secular Jewish poets including Finkelstein himself, that leads them, through language, to 'circle around some. . . absent center which still has compelling power.'"
—Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.
"In these essays on an array of poets from William Bronk to Nathaniel Mackey, Finkelstein provides commentary informed by many systems—deconstruction, New Criticism, psychoanalysis, materialism. Above all stands the idea of gnosis, the quest for insight into who we are and might become. Open this book and open the world."
—Robert Archambeau
Where the Wanting Leads Us: Reading the Poetry of Norman Finkelstein
Where the Wanting Leads Us: Reading the Poetry of Norman Finkelstein
edited by J. Peter Moore
edited by J. Peter Moore
The essays and commentaries collected in Where the Wanting Leads Us celebrate the poetry and critical thought of Norman Finkelstein. Taken together they offer an introduction to the work of a writer who has for over forty years shaped the discourse on modern and contemporary poetics. In serial poems, sounded meditations and citational inscriptions, one finds a poetics of intertextual encounter, where what awaits the reader is another reader looking back at them, with hands outstretched, commencing a séance for the spirit of enlightenment.
Contributors include Robert Archambeau, Joseph Donahue, Burt Kimmelman, Daniel Morris, Peter O'Leary, Kristen Renzi, Mark Scroggins, Eric Murphy Selinger, Henry Weinfield, and Tyrone Williams.
Recent Books by Norman Finkelstein
Recent Books by Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein & Tirzah Goldenberg
Norman Finkelstein & Tirzah Goldenberg
On March 16, 2020, Tirzah Goldenberg sent Norman Finkelstein a poem she had written ending with the line “all’s arc’s dark door to Torah.” Finkelstein responded with a poem of his own that began with Goldenberg’s line, followed by a simple question: “Your turn?” So began an extraordinary poetic dialogue. The two poets, who were already conducting an intense email correspondence focusing on their Jewish identities, had discovered a poetic form through which they could enter a shared “shtetl of the soul.” Months later, after composing a total of thirty-six poems (two times eighteen, twice chai, life times two), Goldenberg and Finkelstein realized that they had collaborated on a book, a book written in what the great Jewish American novelist Cynthia Ozick had long ago called “New Yiddish.” Jagged, telegraphic, yet intensely lyrical, often swerving into the Hebrew of Torah and Talmud, this is a book of the Jewish past and the Jewish present, of ordinary life and of mystical apprehension.
"This beautiful intertwining of voices, minds, and souls of Norman Finkelstein and Tirzah Goldenberg creates a deeply engaging series of poems. Like the braiding of a tasty challah, this poetic dialogue preserves and transforms each strand through the hearing (sh’ma - שְׁמַע) and the sharing (particularly of the initial line of each poem) in an ever-generative conversation and dance. The poems are at once learned and allusive AND accessible in the immediacy of their differently sustained lyricisms. This is a book to read and enjoy, particularly for readers interested in the elusive notion of what constitutes Jewishness, secular and religious, remembered, rediscovered, and reimagined."
– Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit and COVID19 SUTRAS
Norman Finkelstein’s In a Broken Star is a Wunderkammer of shining and enigmatic song-lyrics, memos and dispatches from an extra-dimensional dead letter office, and gnomic fragments of ancient wisdom texts. At its center is the astonishing narrative The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust, in which Finkelstein has reinvented the quest narrative for our own moment—whether postmodern, post-political, post-gender, or post-truth. A knight-errant (or vagrant) in “flowered Docs,” Pascal wanders in quest of—well, they’re not quite sure: origins? genealogies? foundations (immanent or architectural)? answers? Pascal traverses waste lands recalling those of Eliot, Browning, and Lovecraft, swims and flies through libraries of Alexandria and Babel, and receives tantalizing hints of destinations in colloquies with specters from beneath the sea, from eldritch dimensions and “faery lands forlorn.” Where will Pascal find the key to all mythologies: in the Zohar? the Necronomicon? the Standard Edition of Freud? And are they all finally the same book, its pages reshaping themselves beneath the (three-lobed) reading eye? Engaging, nightmarish, intensely erudite in the arcana of canonical literature, philosophy, outsider art, and pop culture, Pascal Wanderlust is one of the most electrifying adventures in contemporary poetry. —Mark Scroggins
A brief review of In a Broken Star in Cæsura (scroll down).
With the great intimacy and insight of a poet-scholar, Norman Finkelstein traces a late modernist genealogy of Jewish American poets as “secular rabbis” who write out of the tradition: both in the sense of being outside it and, poignantly, emerging out of it as they leave it behind. Nuanced and moving, his close readings are anchored in the poets’ own writings about poetry, taking the poets seriously as scholars of verbal art. The book is a celebration of diasporic poetics, a poetry of “wandering meaning” even when it resides, as in the case of the wonderful American-Israeli poet Rachel Tzvia Back, “fully in the paradox of being ever a foreigner at home.”—Chana Kronfeld
In Dark Rabbi, Norman Finkelstein provides an informative account of some contemporary Jewish poetry from the radical midrashic and antinomian to lyrics that court religiosity in the face of diaspora. For these poets, whose quarrel is as much with one another as with God, the secular is never secular just as the holy is invented with each poem. —Charles Bernstein
From the Files of the Immanent Foundation is a beautiful work of hesitant wonder, coaxing stark narration, precept, adage and a strange, winsome yet doleful music out of bureaucratic and documentarian argot and protocol. Its long run of quirks and particulars makes it also a work of rash but strict invention, both an inquiry into invention and its anthem or hymn, its exemplum. Immanence’s openly secret accord with emanation seems to be at issue or at least at work. I read it wishing it would never end.
—Nathaniel Mackey
Recent Poems and Prose Online
Recent Poems and Prose Online
From Thirty-Six / Two Lives, my poetic collaboration with Tirzah Goldenberg, at Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics Blog.
From Thirty-Six / Two Lives, my poetic collaboration with Tirzah Goldenberg, at Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics Blog.
Listen to "Between Magic and Possibility" (2018) for soprano and flute by Ellen Harrison, with lyrics from NF's Track, on Ellen's website (scroll down).
Listen to "Between Magic and Possibility" (2018) for soprano and flute by Ellen Harrison, with lyrics from NF's Track, on Ellen's website (scroll down).
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