Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1954. Educated at Binghamton University and Emory University, he joined the English faculty of Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1980 and retired from teaching in 2020. He is the author of 13 books of poetry and six volumes of literary criticism and has published widely in the fields of modern American poetry and Jewish literature. In 2021, MadHat Press published Where the Wanting Leads Us: Reading the Poetry of Norman Finkelstein, a collection of essays about his work. In the introduction to that book, editor J. Peter Moore writes about Finkelstein, “… widely regarded as one of the major scholar-poets of his generation, Finkelstein has crafted a singular poetics, sensitive to the overlapping traditions of Jewish mysticism, radical poetics and post-modern thought. Taken together, these sources resonate within Finkelstein’s body of work as a profound record of human yearning.” Praised by such writers as Paul Auster, Michael Palmer, and Nathaniel Mackey, Finkelstein, in the words of Lawrence Joseph, “has proven himself one of American poetry’s indispensable makers.”

Like Robert Duncan, one of his most important influences, Finkelstein writes poetry that draws equally from Romantic and Modernist traditions. His early work in Restless Messengers (1992) engages the tradition of the Romantic ode; his serial poem Track (1999, 2002, 2005, gathered in one volume in 2012) is decidedly postmodern in procedure, tone, and movement. Finkelstein describes Track as “a series of controlled discontinuities, the self-conscious dilapidation of the structuralist’s dream as it ascends toward the transcendental signifier. … Track is the lyric of disaster, the disaster of lyric.” More recently, in such volumes as From the Files of the Immanent Foundation and In a Broken Star, Finkelstein experimented with narrative, making elaborate use of code switching and allusion to create a weirdly humorous, Kafkaesque world inspired equally by Spenserian quest romance, H.P. Lovecraft, and Marvel comics.

 Regardless of his particular mode, Finkelstein is a thoroughly Jewish poet. He describes himself as a poet of commentary, practicing what the poet Michael Heller calls a “scribal poetics.” His fascination with Kabbalah leads him toward both Gnosticism and mysticism, but his love of such poets as Charles Reznikoff and Harvey Shapiro— Finkelstein is Shapiro’s literary executor and edited Shapiro’s last, posthumous volume of poems—points him back to everyday life, making him also, according to critic Eric Murphy Selinger, a very “heimish” writer. The tension between secular and religious worldviews deeply informs Finkelstein’s criticism, as is evident in such books as On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (2010) and Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination (2019). His work is perhaps best summed up in the last lines of his poem “Scribe”: 

You have heeded the word of the outside god

and you have heeded the word of no god at all, 

like a prophet turned archaeologist,

a scribe turned into a scribe.