REMEMBERING FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN
Frederick Feirstein (1940-2020)
Earlier this month, I had the great and sad honor of taking part in a panel discussion at the West Chester University Poetry Conference celebrating the life and work of the poet and psychoanalyst Frederick Feirstein. Unlike the other four poets on the panel—Claudia Gary, Emily Grosholz, Molly Peacock, and Frederick Turner—and Fred’s son, attorney David B. Feirstein, who added a warm and vivid reminiscence of his father, I’d only known Fred for a very brief time.
Despite the brevity of our friendship, my reaction to Fred’s sudden death in January 2020 included a sense of deprivation: I had lost someone with whom the possibility of a deep and pleasurable relationship had only just begun. Probably making matters worse were the reverberations of the loss of Fred’s great friend Dick Allen at the same time of year two years before. For me, it was two promising friendships with poets I grew quickly to admire nipped in the bud.
Nevertheless, we have Fred’s vibrant verse, and that should redeem some of the deficit—and revive some of his exuberant spirit. Following is an edited version of my remarks for the panel, beginning with my elegy for Fred.
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Before I begin, I’d like to read a villanelle I wrote a few months after Fred died. It’s called “Little Elegy for FF.”
Little Elegy for FF
Exuberance is beauty.
—William Blake
Begin again! Who is to say we can’t?
Friends die, knees fail, Manhattan’s lost its way.
But Fred Feirstein remains exuberant.
Sometimes irascible, the man could rant
Against the foibles of the current day.
Begin again! Who is to say we can’t
Even if the streets fail to enchant
As they once did? Their glamour fades away.
But note that Fred stays as exuberant
Within his lines as anyone would want,
Alive enough to have his streetwise say.
Begin again! Who is to say I can’t
Revive his East Side cadence in a scant
Elegy? The body will decay,
But a voice like that remains exuberant.
It speaks directly, with a Yiddish slant,
An obscene wit, in Chaucerian array.
Begin again! Who is to say we can’t?
Not Fred Feirstein, who stays exuberant.
The deaths of two formidable American poets, Dick Allen and Fred Feirstein, are linked in my mind as they were linked to each other in life. I met Dick Allen at a holiday party on December 17, 2017. In my 15 or so minutes with him, I found that although Dick was my senior by a decade, we’d been similarly affected by the late 1960s and had gone on to embrace the uses of traditional form without dispensing with those of free verse. In the flurry of emails that flowed between us, I came to feel that this might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Nine days later Dick Allen died. In an attempt to navigate his absence, I began assembling a tribute to Allen's work which was to be held in April 2018 at Suite Bar in New York. As I was searching for potential participants, all vectors pointed to Fred. “You must ask Fred Feirstein,” Dana Gioia wrote me.
At first, I encountered the irascible side of Fred’s nature in his answer to my invitation. “Tell me who you are please and how you were connected to Dick who I am mourning,” Fred responded. (Whenever I pass The Shaking Crab, one of his favorite restaurants on upper Broadway, I think fondly of the name of the place as a decent representation of this side of him.)
But when the time came for the reading, Fred was there in body and soul. At first he spoke of how he and Dick and Fred Turner came together to form the Expansive Poetry movement. Coming from different backgrounds, they were united by their passion to expand the resources of poetry beyond the free verse they were then writing to include traditional narrative and form. Another objective was to focus less on the self and more on the world beyond it.
During the reading, Fred read from a kind of manifesto for the movement by Dick Allen published in Dick’s magazine Crosscurrents, and two of Allen’s poems. Overcome with grief, Fred stopped in the middle of reading the second one, Allen’s immensely moving poem, “The Afterlife.”
“I can’t go on,” Fred said, putting down the book. “Read it.”
In the ensuing two years, Fred and I developed a frequent and affectionate correspondence and found that we had a lot in common even though he was eight years older than I am. We were lantzmen, after all, both of us New York Jewish poets who spent our childhoods about eight blocks from each other on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. We were both hoopsters and perennially depressed New York Knicks fans, and I was particularly touched by a fantasy Fred expressed in one of his emails to me. “Oh, that we could be the Knicks backcourt instead of being involved in Po Biz…”
Although I didn’t think so at first, we had strong poetic affinities. “How did you get to write like me?” Fred demanded in an email as he was reading my book Stanzas on Oz. “How did you know I keep writing that Oz is our central myth?
Indeed, I came to realize only very recently that the title of my most recent book, In Praise of Manhattan, probably owes something to that of Fred’s most well-known book Manhattan Carnival. “You want to write a long poem?” Fred wrote me in answer to a question I hadn’t really asked. “People seem to like Manhattan Carnival the best. I wrote it at 32—after translating Chaucer.”
First excerpted in the Autumn 1980 Kenyon Review, which was then edited by Fred Turner, Manhattan Carnival: A Dramatic Dialogue, was published in 1981 by Countryman. Although one of his later books is called Dark Energy, Manhattan Carnival is a burst of bright energy, replicating the dynamism of our borough in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“Couplets are a driven form,” Fred wrote me, and his Chaucerian couplets—to be distinguished from the stately balance of Alexander Pope’s—drive the reader down the page and through the streets of Manhattan, recording the dazzling, marijuana-enhanced sensual display on offer during those times. For example:
My eye is like a child’s; the smog is pot.
Shining cratefuls of plum, peach apricot
Are flung out of the fruit man’s tiny store.
Behind the supermarket glass next door:
Landslides of grapefruit, orange, tangerine,
Persimmon, boysenberry, nectarine.
The florist tilts his giant crayon box
Of yellow roses, daffodils, and phlox.
Also driving the action of this 36-page poem—actually a group of 21 discrete poems—is the hidden complexity of its structure. On one level, as its subtitle says, it’s a “dramatic dialogue” conveying the turbulent inner workings of its protagonist, Mark Stern, as he dashes through the streets in a quest to reconnect with Marlene, his former wife of ten years, to whom Mark’s words are presumably addressed. In passing, the sights and sounds of the city reflect the wild energy of his desire, as in these lines from “The Windows”:
I need the windows of the Tourist Boards
On Fifth—their beaches, lower Alps, and fjords—
The students playing clarinet duets,
The mime in top silk hat and epaulettes,
The Hari Krishnas spreading incense, joy,
Their flowing peach robes, shoes of corduroy,
The blind man singing hymns, St. Thomas Church,
The scaffolding where whistling workmen perch,
The haughty English manager of Cook’s,
St. Patrick's nave, Rizzoli's picture books,
Tiffany's clock, the pools of Steuben glass,
The pocket park with cobblestones for grass.
By turns violent, phallic, boisterous, desperate, hilarious, and decidedly un-PC, Mark’s streams of association suggest a Modernist side of Feirstein, more Joycean than Chaucerian.
Equally, however, Manhattan Carnival is built on narrative and the close observation of the outside world that the Expansive Poetry movement was to espouse. Indeed, Mark’s flood of thoughts are in response to his encounters with a bevy of characters: A woman he picks up in a bar, a blind man orating on a crowded bus, “[t]hree bankers with the same suit, haircut, face,” a costumed cowgirl selling papaya juice, and many others.
As the years rolled on, Fred observed a different Manhattan with different eyes, a more somber, less colorful place that nevertheless could still elicit a fine old tune from the poet’s lips. Here are the opening lines from “As Time Goes By,” from Fred’s tenth book, Times Refugee.
That was a golden age in which we lived.
Each day was summer, God was everywhere,
In every molecule of New York City air
When we were young and just believed in us.