United States, (1929-2008)
THE DISMAL SCIENCE
- Like hogs in Iowa sometimes – too much of it now,
- and no one’s buying. Oh it smelt so of promise,
- the great trucks reeked of it, sows bursting with farrow,
- the city clamoring, the prices soaring.
- In the guts of the city a young man hunches over
- a kitchen table, scribbling. His freezer’s crammed
- with bittersweet elegies, low-salt epigrams.
- Poems breed in his larder. He goes on scribbling.
- He could pick up an epic this morning
- from the take-away rack at the local supermarket.
- All over the city young men are scribbling, scribbling,
- and old women, and schoolchildren, and several chimpanzees.
- The young man, persists in his kitchen, parboiling a dithyramb
- while the sows go farrowing on in Iowa.
- Welcome to the eleventh plague: plenty.
- There’s room enough in here for everyone.
About the Poet:
Donald Alexander Finkel, United States, (1929-2008), was a poet, as well as a student of sculpture and philosophy. He is best known for his unorthodox styles and curious juxtapositions of subject matter.
Finkel attended Columbia University and received a BA degree in philosophy in 1952, while also studying sculpture. He earned an MA in English from Columbia in 1953. His interests in philosophy and sculpture left their mark in his work. He became a poet on equally intimate terms with metaphysics and the earthy palpability of shapes and things.
Finkel 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. [DES-01/22]