No.46 - November 2020
This month I offer another in my occasional tributes to poets who ought to be better known. In this case it’s a poet who is happily still with us,
still publishing his wonderfully distinctive verse. His Selected Poems has recently appeared from FutureCycle Press, so this seems a convenient
time to recommend his work to those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of exploring it.
I first got hooked on Dennis Finnell’s poems over forty years ago, and I’ve followed his development with keen interest ever since. I am grateful to the author and press for allowing me to publish here the Foreword I wrote for this book. It is my hope, obviously, that others may become Finnell fans along with me. Career summaries are always challenging, and as noted, Finnell’s work is harder to describe than many. What follows is my best effort at that difficult task.
+ + + + + + + +
This welcome collection gathers a substantial and judicious sampling of work from Dennis Finnell’s five books. Like Wallace Stevens he was well into middle age when his first book appeared (Red Cottage, 1991)—so his poetic character was already largely formed. The present volume represents something like four decades’ worth of inventive, surprising, and moving poetry. Re-reading these five collections, which differ from each other in a number of ways, I was nonetheless struck most by how well they all bear the unmistakable signature of their own author, who, also like Stevens, often blends philosophical speculation with linguistic hijinks.
To borrow an assertion from Stevens, “all poetry is experimental poetry.” Dennis Finnell has taken that maxim to heart, demonstrating an ever-restless spirit over a goodly variety of forms and subjects. He favors free verse, though he can write a fine sestina or ballade when he wants to. His books assume a number of distinct incarnations. The earliest lyrics in Red Cottage represent, as is common with first books, many years of work as the poet discovered his voice and reckoned with his origins and obsessions. “Taking Leave of St. Louis” introduced one lifelong theme, his continual returning, in memory as well as real time, to the city of his birth, a place he has never taken leave of. Stylistically, he ranges in Red Cottage from an earthy, mythic tone that can remind you of Charles Simic—
Two ambitious book-length suites, Belovèd Beast (1995) and The Gauguin Answer Sheet (2001), followed Red Cottage, each expanding Finnell’s range considerably. The author described Belovèd Beast as “An American travelogue of sorts,” featuring a loosely Whitmanic journey across an America both mythic and all-too-real, including “encounters along the way with . . . Rip Van Winkle, Humphrey Bogart’s Nick in Knock on Any Door, an ersatz Huck Finn working the tourists in Hannibal,” and more. Finnell summarized the book’s themes as follows: “these poems are about being an ego, an I, America’s most highly mythologized product, and how being this American self increasingly means being isolated, a party of one. I suppose the belovèd beast is me, is us, our country, our selves, and the poems . . . trace out the figures of the beast—lyrical, social, cultural.” As that description suggests, one of Finnell’s trademarks is the permeable membrane he maintains between fictive and real, dream and waking life, past and present, figures from literature and from his own genealogy. Naturally we find him returning to his home place in this book as well. In fact, his cross-country journey commences with “Headless Horseman,” whose opening line is, “I come from St. Louis.”
The Gauguin Answer Sheet constitutes a further expansion of concerns, broadening from matters of national and personal character to universals of the human condition. More about this unusual book shortly.
After Gauguin came the lean, fragmented “erasure” lyrics of Pie 8 (2012). At first blush it would seem that Pie 8, Finnell’s most radical foray into experimentation, might comprise an outlier, a one-off, and in certain ways that seems true. It is a book of salvaged fragments, images and ideas accumulated over many years, then assembled and partially erased, resulting in a disjointed, non-linear sort of lyric very different from the conversational cadences and long flowing lines of his other books.
Some lines from “To return” will give the book’s flavor. It happens to be yet another returning-to-St.-Louis poem, in this case visiting an aged father, who is deaf in one ear. The poem begins—
Such lines may seem baffling—would you have guessed St. Louis? deaf father? had I not told you?—yet when you recite this book’s pieces aloud the recognizable Finnell music rises
through the erasures, along with many of the same themes and obsessions, however obliquely presented.
Finally we find the lively, ever-inventive lyrics of his most recent and probably strongest collection, Ruins Assembling (2014), which manages to incorporate all of his stylistic signatures into a tightly crafted, complex collection spanning a variety of themes. All the poems, different as they are from each other and from those in previous books, sound just like Finnell.
By which I mean, book to book his poetic voice features among other virtues a potent gift for both metaphor and description, a winning rough-hewn music, a Whitman-like exploration of the full register of English diction, from earthy to cerebral, oddball humor popping up at serious moments, and surprises aplenty. A 2018 interview points to what makes his poetry both distinctive and distinctively resistant to summary. Asked what writers have influenced him he replied, “Two writers I do read over and over are Chekhov and Dickinson,” adding that “they may not influence the way I write now, but how I am composed in the world.” Dickinson clearly is no model in terms of poetic form, but is in certain habits of mind— particularly a fondness for tackling large abstractions (selfhood, memory, heritage, and so on) and in telling his truths slantwise, with sharp observation and a healthy respect for the unknown.
Chekhov seems relevant in a couple respects to how Finnell is “composed in the world.” Structurally, one feature is the way Finnell, like the great Russian, avoids spurious or even traditional closure. He also thrives more on questions than answers, another notably Chekhovian habit. Thus the contemporary American anecdotal epiphany poem, delivering its moment of transcendence or wisdom at the end, is relatively rare in Finnell’s oeuvre. His poems tend to wander and circle back, and are seldom “plotted” conventionally though they are full of narrative elements. As such they can be very resistant to summary and hard to fairly excerpt. Their effects play out on a large canvas. And much of the work in completing each poem, as with Chekhov’s tales, is left to the reader. Finnell orchestrates imagery, speculation, description and action— and we readers participate in the performance, entertaining the speaker’s “what-ifs” and “maybes” and coming to our own conclusions, as we will.
We see this sort of structural feature most vividly in his book-length poem The Gauguin Answer Sheet, which “takes as pretext,” Finnell informs us, Paul Gauguin’s massive allegorical canvas titled “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” The book poses each of these primal philosophical questions repeatedly, in different contexts, with various provisional answers supplied, contradicted, modified, and repeated. He talks back to the figures in the painting (including a dog), listens to what they have to say, and ranges far and wide in matters of identity, aesthetics, history, and culture. The history includes his own family history, both autobiographical and imagined. The resultant whole is symphonic rather than narrative.
Early to late, it’s tempting to call many of his poems meditative, for the way they often take a premise or initiating image and let implications and possibilities spool out unpredictably, peering at the subject from various angles, looping back to the starting point and setting forth in a new direction. To be sure his can be an unhurried, often ruminative style, but those terms may suggest something more low-key than is the case, as well as too solemn. But while he routinely tackles large questions, what a word like “meditative” doesn’t capture is how funny his poems can be, at times how zany. True, thinkers like Diogenes and Epictetus make cameo appearances, and allusions to Ovid, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mandlestam, Berryman, and other literary icons thread through the book, but Finnell is just as likely to set a meditation on the national character (“The Generic Manifesto”) in a Burger King, conducting a cheeky and delicious meditation over his Whopper. Or he will recount a family anecdote (real, imagined—who cares?) in which the speaker’s parents separately cook up different sexual pranks to play on each other, with a hilarious payoff that neither they nor the reader sees coming.
Finnell’s great fondness for the what-ifs of an examined life puts me in mind also of a poet probably few would compare him to, Robert Frost. Like Frost, Finnell is not often a poet of unalloyed celebration and joy. His is a highly skeptical intelligence with an ultimately dark view of life. Yet there is joy, and humor, lurking under any sadness, leavening it, and expressed most often in his relish for language and its many shenanigans. Frost in an essay describes “woes flat and final,” but then concludes, “And then to play. The play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if’.”
That is why, though Finnell trades frequently in woes flat and final, I never find his work depressing, because it is simultaneously so light on its feet, so in love with life’s manifold as-ifs. Many of his poems are too long to excerpt effectively, but perhaps a brief glance at a relatively straightforward poem from Ruins Assembling may help illustrate his characteristic moves. “The Fitzsimmons Fund” is a letter addressed to “Uncle Vern,” who, it turns out, has died and named the poet as one of many beneficiaries; he is entitled to an oddly specific inheritance of $714.23. The poem is at once a meditation on the notion of legacy and identity, and a portrait of his Uncle Vern, a high-rolling gambler who
Later it becomes clear that Vern is alive in Finnell’s memory mainly because he’s been told so many vivid stories about this spiky character. In actuality the poet met him just
once, as an infant. Then as the poem progresses it becomes evident that the poet knows almost nothing about Vern beyond speculation. He has conjured up a character quite vividly
only to proceed to cast doubt on every detail he’s imagined. And thus he sidles up to what seems his real intent, illustrating how every “I” is ultimately a mystery and alive mainly
in imagination. Finnell’s little conjuror’s trick makes the real Uncle Vern both appear and vanish in one seamless narrative. The final stanza begins: “You are not at the track
eating rib eye.” The poem is not a portrait of Vern, but of his portraitist, who remains unsure of everything, sprinkling phrases like “I bet,” “might be,” and “my idea, not
yours” throughout. This is a trick Finnell pulls over and over, book to book, speculating on the nature of identity and consciousness, casting doubt on how well we may know each
other even as his imagery and music carry us along, happy to suspend our disbelief.
Once more I am reminded of Stevens, especially his closing tercet in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” “The Fitzsimmons Fund” is far from Finnell’s most complicated or ambitious poem, and it’s not the best example of his wordplay, vaudevillean humor, or knack for phrasemaking. But it does illustrate how true and strange his playfulness can be, how much he relishes, to quote Frost again, “play for mortal stakes.”
—Foreword to Dennis Finnell: Selected Poems. FutureCycle Press, 2020.
I first got hooked on Dennis Finnell’s poems over forty years ago, and I’ve followed his development with keen interest ever since. I am grateful to the author and press for allowing me to publish here the Foreword I wrote for this book. It is my hope, obviously, that others may become Finnell fans along with me. Career summaries are always challenging, and as noted, Finnell’s work is harder to describe than many. What follows is my best effort at that difficult task.
+ + + + + + + +
This welcome collection gathers a substantial and judicious sampling of work from Dennis Finnell’s five books. Like Wallace Stevens he was well into middle age when his first book appeared (Red Cottage, 1991)—so his poetic character was already largely formed. The present volume represents something like four decades’ worth of inventive, surprising, and moving poetry. Re-reading these five collections, which differ from each other in a number of ways, I was nonetheless struck most by how well they all bear the unmistakable signature of their own author, who, also like Stevens, often blends philosophical speculation with linguistic hijinks.
To borrow an assertion from Stevens, “all poetry is experimental poetry.” Dennis Finnell has taken that maxim to heart, demonstrating an ever-restless spirit over a goodly variety of forms and subjects. He favors free verse, though he can write a fine sestina or ballade when he wants to. His books assume a number of distinct incarnations. The earliest lyrics in Red Cottage represent, as is common with first books, many years of work as the poet discovered his voice and reckoned with his origins and obsessions. “Taking Leave of St. Louis” introduced one lifelong theme, his continual returning, in memory as well as real time, to the city of his birth, a place he has never taken leave of. Stylistically, he ranges in Red Cottage from an earthy, mythic tone that can remind you of Charles Simic—
Because she believes in God
I will sneeze three times on Tuesday.
Because he picks his teeth with a matchstick
I will believe in God.
to a more flowing, expansive mode that perhaps shows some influence of Stevens, as in the stanza concluding the book’s opening poem, “The Cloud of Unknowing”—
I will sneeze three times on Tuesday.
Because he picks his teeth with a matchstick
I will believe in God.
Lake Michigan flashes sunlight from its face,
and a long ore boat pulls the widening
V of its wake, floating on nothing
but water, and all of the words for water.
All in all it was a mature and auspicious debut, winning the Juniper Prize at the University of Massachusetts.
and a long ore boat pulls the widening
V of its wake, floating on nothing
but water, and all of the words for water.
Two ambitious book-length suites, Belovèd Beast (1995) and The Gauguin Answer Sheet (2001), followed Red Cottage, each expanding Finnell’s range considerably. The author described Belovèd Beast as “An American travelogue of sorts,” featuring a loosely Whitmanic journey across an America both mythic and all-too-real, including “encounters along the way with . . . Rip Van Winkle, Humphrey Bogart’s Nick in Knock on Any Door, an ersatz Huck Finn working the tourists in Hannibal,” and more. Finnell summarized the book’s themes as follows: “these poems are about being an ego, an I, America’s most highly mythologized product, and how being this American self increasingly means being isolated, a party of one. I suppose the belovèd beast is me, is us, our country, our selves, and the poems . . . trace out the figures of the beast—lyrical, social, cultural.” As that description suggests, one of Finnell’s trademarks is the permeable membrane he maintains between fictive and real, dream and waking life, past and present, figures from literature and from his own genealogy. Naturally we find him returning to his home place in this book as well. In fact, his cross-country journey commences with “Headless Horseman,” whose opening line is, “I come from St. Louis.”
The Gauguin Answer Sheet constitutes a further expansion of concerns, broadening from matters of national and personal character to universals of the human condition. More about this unusual book shortly.
After Gauguin came the lean, fragmented “erasure” lyrics of Pie 8 (2012). At first blush it would seem that Pie 8, Finnell’s most radical foray into experimentation, might comprise an outlier, a one-off, and in certain ways that seems true. It is a book of salvaged fragments, images and ideas accumulated over many years, then assembled and partially erased, resulting in a disjointed, non-linear sort of lyric very different from the conversational cadences and long flowing lines of his other books.
Some lines from “To return” will give the book’s flavor. It happens to be yet another returning-to-St.-Louis poem, in this case visiting an aged father, who is deaf in one ear. The poem begins—
To wake to cicadas again insect palmists To open a door August all over you having missed you —and ends: to suck on a screened porch hidden in sweat your animal To whisper sweet on the deaf side
Finally we find the lively, ever-inventive lyrics of his most recent and probably strongest collection, Ruins Assembling (2014), which manages to incorporate all of his stylistic signatures into a tightly crafted, complex collection spanning a variety of themes. All the poems, different as they are from each other and from those in previous books, sound just like Finnell.
By which I mean, book to book his poetic voice features among other virtues a potent gift for both metaphor and description, a winning rough-hewn music, a Whitman-like exploration of the full register of English diction, from earthy to cerebral, oddball humor popping up at serious moments, and surprises aplenty. A 2018 interview points to what makes his poetry both distinctive and distinctively resistant to summary. Asked what writers have influenced him he replied, “Two writers I do read over and over are Chekhov and Dickinson,” adding that “they may not influence the way I write now, but how I am composed in the world.” Dickinson clearly is no model in terms of poetic form, but is in certain habits of mind— particularly a fondness for tackling large abstractions (selfhood, memory, heritage, and so on) and in telling his truths slantwise, with sharp observation and a healthy respect for the unknown.
Chekhov seems relevant in a couple respects to how Finnell is “composed in the world.” Structurally, one feature is the way Finnell, like the great Russian, avoids spurious or even traditional closure. He also thrives more on questions than answers, another notably Chekhovian habit. Thus the contemporary American anecdotal epiphany poem, delivering its moment of transcendence or wisdom at the end, is relatively rare in Finnell’s oeuvre. His poems tend to wander and circle back, and are seldom “plotted” conventionally though they are full of narrative elements. As such they can be very resistant to summary and hard to fairly excerpt. Their effects play out on a large canvas. And much of the work in completing each poem, as with Chekhov’s tales, is left to the reader. Finnell orchestrates imagery, speculation, description and action— and we readers participate in the performance, entertaining the speaker’s “what-ifs” and “maybes” and coming to our own conclusions, as we will.
We see this sort of structural feature most vividly in his book-length poem The Gauguin Answer Sheet, which “takes as pretext,” Finnell informs us, Paul Gauguin’s massive allegorical canvas titled “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” The book poses each of these primal philosophical questions repeatedly, in different contexts, with various provisional answers supplied, contradicted, modified, and repeated. He talks back to the figures in the painting (including a dog), listens to what they have to say, and ranges far and wide in matters of identity, aesthetics, history, and culture. The history includes his own family history, both autobiographical and imagined. The resultant whole is symphonic rather than narrative.
Early to late, it’s tempting to call many of his poems meditative, for the way they often take a premise or initiating image and let implications and possibilities spool out unpredictably, peering at the subject from various angles, looping back to the starting point and setting forth in a new direction. To be sure his can be an unhurried, often ruminative style, but those terms may suggest something more low-key than is the case, as well as too solemn. But while he routinely tackles large questions, what a word like “meditative” doesn’t capture is how funny his poems can be, at times how zany. True, thinkers like Diogenes and Epictetus make cameo appearances, and allusions to Ovid, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mandlestam, Berryman, and other literary icons thread through the book, but Finnell is just as likely to set a meditation on the national character (“The Generic Manifesto”) in a Burger King, conducting a cheeky and delicious meditation over his Whopper. Or he will recount a family anecdote (real, imagined—who cares?) in which the speaker’s parents separately cook up different sexual pranks to play on each other, with a hilarious payoff that neither they nor the reader sees coming.
Finnell’s great fondness for the what-ifs of an examined life puts me in mind also of a poet probably few would compare him to, Robert Frost. Like Frost, Finnell is not often a poet of unalloyed celebration and joy. His is a highly skeptical intelligence with an ultimately dark view of life. Yet there is joy, and humor, lurking under any sadness, leavening it, and expressed most often in his relish for language and its many shenanigans. Frost in an essay describes “woes flat and final,” but then concludes, “And then to play. The play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if’.”
That is why, though Finnell trades frequently in woes flat and final, I never find his work depressing, because it is simultaneously so light on its feet, so in love with life’s manifold as-ifs. Many of his poems are too long to excerpt effectively, but perhaps a brief glance at a relatively straightforward poem from Ruins Assembling may help illustrate his characteristic moves. “The Fitzsimmons Fund” is a letter addressed to “Uncle Vern,” who, it turns out, has died and named the poet as one of many beneficiaries; he is entitled to an oddly specific inheritance of $714.23. The poem is at once a meditation on the notion of legacy and identity, and a portrait of his Uncle Vern, a high-rolling gambler who
. . . in rolled-up shirtsleeves could eat a rib eye this thick everyday at The Turf Club, keeping an eye on your winners down below crossing the time between uncertainty and fact, not always winning, but never losing. After each race three fingers of the best whiskey all around, on you.
Once more I am reminded of Stevens, especially his closing tercet in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” “The Fitzsimmons Fund” is far from Finnell’s most complicated or ambitious poem, and it’s not the best example of his wordplay, vaudevillean humor, or knack for phrasemaking. But it does illustrate how true and strange his playfulness can be, how much he relishes, to quote Frost again, “play for mortal stakes.”
—Foreword to Dennis Finnell: Selected Poems. FutureCycle Press, 2020.
© 2020 David Graham
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