Corrupted into Song
The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman
Edited by Deborah Dorfman, with a foreward by Harold Bloom and an introduction by James Geary
According to Harold Bloom, "The best of Alvin Feinman's poetry is as good as anything by a twentieth-century American. His work achieves the greatness of the American sublime." This definitive edition of Feinman's (1929–2008) complete work, which includes fifty-seven previously published poems and thirty-nine unpublished poems discovered among his manuscripts, introduces a new generation of readers to the lyrical intensity and philosophical ambition of this major American poet.
Biographical information about and selected poems by Alvin are available on the Poetry Foundation site and the Academy of American Poets site poets.org.
Alvin’s manuscripts and papers are available for research at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A riveting collection by a poet who deserves to be better known.
—Carol Rumens, The Guardian
Poetry is making, poesis. And for a time, Alvin Feinman was a maker, a majestic poet who came to embrace his own intolerable limitations, his own dead-end. After long silence, one rejoices in these almost forgotten, rigorous, earthly, purgative poems.
—Henri Cole
Listen to Harold Bloom read two of his most beloved Alvin Feinman poems, Relic and November Sunday Morning. Recorded at Bloom's home in New Haven, CT on April 8, 2016.
Read my article on Alvin's poems as self-consuming artifacts in the May-June 2022 issue of PN Review.
Read three recently discovered poems by Alvin Feinman, as well as an essay by me about Alvin's work, on LitHub.
Read an excerpt from the introduction and four previously unpublished poems in the Harvard Review.
Read Harold Bloom's preface in the Spring 2016 issue of The Hopkins Review.
Gefluisterd Licht (Whispered Light)
Published by Athenaeum in Amsterdam in 1996, this is the first translation of Hart Crane's poems into Dutch. I wrote the introduction, and the translations are by Lloyd Haft, an American poet and sinologist who lived in the Netherlands for many years.
Read my introduction (in Dutch).
In 1994, Lloyd Haft was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize for his volume Atlantis, a collection of poems in both Dutch and English. As part of the festivities, I interviewed Lloyd and he read some of his poems on May 20, 1994 at De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam—two Americans talking about poetry in Dutch.
came in its own Ziploc plastic bag
Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Anon (Four, 2006)
Matins
Orbis (No. 131, Winter 2004)
Entanglement
Nightingale (June 2002)
Serre Bourson
June, 1993
Socrates Is Mortal
Malthus (Issue 3, 1987)
After graduating from college in 1985, I moved to San Francisco, where I eked out an existence working in restaurants and driving a van, surviving mostly on boiled rice and vodka. When I first moved to the city, I discovered e.g., a second-hand bookshop located right around the corner from my apartment. I used to spend a lot of time there, browsing through the shelves and playing chess with the proprietor, David Highsmith. I soon learned that David also ran a small press in the back of the bookshop. So I showed him Words for Refrigerator Doors, which I had written over the previous two years as part of my undergraduate thesis. He liked the work and agreed to publish it. So in December, after just a few months as a starving young poet in San Francisco, I had managed to get my poems published. I was very happy.
The first edition of Words for Refrigerator Doors consisted of 12 poems and 12 aphorisms. The book sold pretty well for a small press edition; it was reprinted in February and July of 1986. I did regular performances of the poems as well, appearing at arts venues in San Francisco and Berkeley, where I also sang (badly) and showed some of the short films I had made in college. And I kept writing, too. By 1987, when e.g. published an expanded fourth edition, Words for Refrigerator Doors consisted of 24 poems and 24 aphorisms.
Larry Blake's
Berkeley, CA
August 17, 1987
This is a recording of a reading I gave at Larry Blake's, at the time one of the premiere venues for poetry in the Bay Area. It includes a rendition of The Existential Hangover Blues, which was a regular feature of the poetry performances I did when I lived in San Francisco, from 1985 to 1989. Halliday Dresser and Mike Bailey played guitar; I played guitar and violin and sang, all badly. In the audience that night were some distinguished and soon-to-be distinguished writers: the poets Jack Foley (host and MC), Larry Eigner (who asks when the fortune cookies will be distributed) and Leslie Scalapino (visible in the front row); Jonathan Lethem is behind the camera. My goldfish also make an appearance.
Intersection for the Arts
San Francisco
October 21, 1986
This is a video of a poetry performance I gave at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. The large box you see contained, among other things, an umbrella, a toy boat, a chessboard and chess pieces, a mannequin's head, a toaster, a toilet seat and, of course, my goldfish. I also distributed my own fortune cookies at each reading. I had the cookies made at a little fortune cookie factory in Chinatown, and each one contained one of my own aphorisms.
WVBC
Bethany College, Bethany, WV
May 13, 1983
This is me reading a piece of juvenalia, my poem 'Autopsy', on the radio show I hosted at the time. Guess you can tell I was reading a lot of Dylan Thomas...
This unplugged version of The Existential Hangover Blues, circa 1988, also features me on guitar.
This rendition was recorded in 1986 (or 1987, I can't quite remember) in Berkeley, CA. Philip Price played guitar and bass and programmed the drum machine; that's me singing. The vocals on this recording are a bit rough around the edges and more than a trifle affected, but then so was I at the time.
In July of 1988, e.g. published 17 Reasons Why, which as far as I can remember was also reprinted two or three times. I did my own sales and marketing for the books, selling them mostly at my performances. But one of my favorite things to do was to periodically visit City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach section of the city; they had a small press poetry section in the shop and were always willing to take more copies of my books. That’s Buster Keaton on the cover of 17 Reasons Why, sitting on a keg of dynamite, which he is inadvertently about to ignite with his cigarette. Which is pretty much how I felt at the time. This edition comprises the complete texts of both Words for Refrigerator Doors (1985, 1987) and 17 Reasons Why (1988).
Words for Refrigerator Doors "treats the tragedy of life with headline succinctness and a warm understanding which points up life's sweet ironies."
—The Bay Area Reporter, April, 1986
San Francisco, circa 1988