Backyard, Hoboken, Summer
The sun beating on his brain
And a cat slouching on the woodpile
And flies nauseous with heat
He holds three eternal parameters
The habit of his eye repeats
The shapes he reifies
Let the silence silence its own ache
There is nothing but the plenum of a small red brain
The flies fall suppurant among the sticks
The cat prepares for life
As though the moveable could move
Even the impossible recedes
As though within the clot of brain
Were space or sun to make a world
****
This week’s poem by Alvin Feinman (1929-2008) is as packed with ideas as images. It’s as if concepts from organic chemistry were compressed into a Dutch genre painting depicting a scuzzy backyard in industrial New Jersey. Feinman’s awareness of the systems underlying observable phenomena is striking: he selects and deploys his images brilliantly, but the poem is often more structuralist than imagist.
It’s one of a batch of 39 previously unpublished poems written during the 1950s and now included in Corrupted into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman. It’s a riveting collection by a poet who deserves to be better known. The problem is that Feinman published very little during his life: there was Preambles and Other Poems (OUP, 1964), which was then published with revisions as Poems by Princeton in 1990. The rest was a pointed silence.
All the newly published poems are those of a young man, but they are in no way beginner’s pieces. Usefully for the new reader, they clarify some of Feinman’s preoccupations and affinities. He was never a Beat or a confessional poet: his early mentors were Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. James Geary, editor of the previously unseen section of the book, and one-time student of Feinman, recalls that the Brooklyn-born college lecturer came from a long line of Litvak Talmudic scholars. When he taught Milton, he approached the work as sacred text.
Regarding his own poetry, Feinman was deeply humble, and even distrustful. The world might have been the problem, rather than the unreliable ways of words. The poem preceding Backyard, Hoboken, Summer is called Lament for the Coming of Spring, and coins the grimly memorable phrase, “helic hate”. Feinman’s “songs” are unconsoling and some seem inconsolable.
This week’s poem begins: “The sun beating on his brain.” This “beating” may be creatively enriching; it’s certainly more benign than helic hate. “Brain” occurs three times in the poem, almost like a form of linguistic punctuation (there’s no conventional punctuation). Sun, cat, woodpile and flies surround this unnervingly exposed brain, the life cycles resembling a Yeatsian gyre.
Yeats was important to Feinman. He’s present not only in the copper-fastened craft but in the way Feinman turns a beggared space into a repository of the more-than-temporal. It’s also possible that Feinman is following up a strand of Yeatsian mysticism with the puzzling assertion, “He holds three eternal parameters”. Could this be a reference to the Hindu concept of the Three Gunas?
The same phrase is used by Dr S S Bhatti, referring to the three architectural principles of the cosmos, Brahma (creation), Vishnu (sustenance) and Mahesh (destruction).
Alvin’s sun, cat, man, woodpile and flies may represent these qualities, or partake of their symbolism to some degree: the human brain embodies (“holds”) them all.
But Feinman moves quickly on from his parameters to matters of perception: “The habit of his eye repeats / The shapes he reifies.” The possessive pronoun here could refer to the cat but more probably refers to the protagonist summoned at the poem’s start. We know that the images we see enter the retina in two dimensions, but are “translated” into three by the brain. If this is what “the habit of his eye” and the “shapes he reifies” allude to, perhaps the “eternal parameters” triplicate foreshadows the three dimensions.
The thought may be structuralist but the sounds are sensuous: we can hear the flies buzzing in the word “nauseous”, though it seems a transferred epithet: flies vomit as part of their digestive process and it’s not very likely that hot weather makes them feel sick. These lines have a dense murmur and dazzle like that of the hot backyard.
The next two lines are isolated and fill the space around them with sombre, or at least fatalistic, portent. There’s a striking contrast between “silence” (a kind of negative image, a whiteness, with the power of salving “its own ache”) and “the plenum of a small red brain”. The blood-suffused brain-colour is significant, connecting intelligence to what is “red in tooth and claw”. Perhaps, too, because the brain is seen as a plenum, the poem is telling us that there’s no way out of our own perception. The brain fits flush to the skull. Consciousness is basically organic structure and scarily inescapable.
Decay is inherent in all this sun-bred life. The woodpile declines to “sticks”, the flies, since they “fall suppurant”, must have succumbed to swat or insecticide or natural death. Meanwhile the cat, stirred from its “slouching” doze, is ready for some action. The sensed distinction between cosmic, perhaps God-like creation using space and time, and the small mammalian attempt, which is the product of illusory mental freedom, and merely reproductive, seems to drag the poem back as it heaves itself towards a positive conclusion. The penultimate stanza (the most difficult two lines in a difficult poem) imagine, I think, free will and limitless action, almost conceive them as possibilities. But the optimism is scarred, and will be deeply qualified by that repeated “as though”. The glittering fact remains: the poem’s sonnet-size contains all the space and sun required for Feinman to shape and “make a world”.
- Backyard, Hoboken, Summer is excerpted from Corrupted Into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman by Alvin Feinman. © 2016 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.