Weinfield’s Alphabet: Pleasure, from A to Z
(The following review appears in the current issue of American Book Review.)
An Alphabet
Henry Weinfield
Dos Madres Press
https://www.dosmadres.com/https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/an-alphabet-by-henry-weinfeld/
68 pages; Print, $20.00
David M. Katz
In 1980, in his book In the Sweetness of the New Time, Henry Weinfield published “Xerxes,” a poem of heroic grandeur in which he incorrectly quotes a line from one of Edward Lear’s nonsense alphabet books. Accompanied by an illustration of an angry-looking little king with an arrow raised in one hand and a scimitar in the other, Lear’s poem correctly reads:
X was once a great king Xerxes
Xerxy,
Perxy,
Turxy,
Xerxy,
Linxy, lurxy,
Great King Xerxes!
Understandably, considering the regal ferocity of Lear’s drawing, the young poet misquoted Lear’s first line as “X is for Xerxes, / the mad king.” Acknowledging his error a half century later, Weinfield nevertheless uses the misquotation as the epigraph to his highly enjoyable new book of poems, An Alphabet, suggesting the personal evolution of poetic creativity as it may play out over a poet’s lifetime. Indeed, there’s a delightful feeling of completeness, of a road followed to its very end, radiating from the form Weinfield has chosen for this sequence of poems. Like a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or a how-to manual, an alphabet book also aspires to comprehensiveness. Yet, as the title suggests, this volume is “an” alphabet, not “the” alphabet—that is, one poet’s take on written language. Because of the originality of its attack and the exemplary excellence of its versifcation, however, Weinfield’s book deserves a place on the shelf next to more scholarly volumes on the art of poetry.
Henry Weinfield,
Author of An Alphabet
In addition to surveying the alphabet as a whole, Weinfield unearths, through puns and rhymes, hidden meanings associated with the individual letters. Graphically spare, each letter of the alphabet carries with it a vast web of verbal associations, and his poems act as grids across which such meanings can meet and correspond or collide. While any letter can resonate in this way, the letter X seems an apt symbol for all the letters in Weinfield’s personal alphabet. Rare and strange and beautiful, X represents the magic of written language as it first may be encountered by a child in a speller. But in more universal terms, X may mark the spot where language itself begins.
In “Xerxes,” Weinfield envisioned a Romantic version of the Persian king: a young man kneeling before a rose. It is “Xerxes the tenor / in Handel’s Largo” in a place of music and peace and solitude, rather than Xerxes the Great, the invader of Greece, on a battlefield. The young poet placed his mark on the spirit of love rather than that of war:
the circles converge
not on the battle
but on the dance
which is Xerxes
By the time An Alphabet appeared in 2022, however, new meanings of X had accrued for Weinfield: the X one solves for in mathematical formulas; the unknown; that which crosses words out; and a translation of the homographic Greek letter chi (X “is the chi of chaos and chimera”).
But wait, there’s more. X is also “the preserve of Ex,” of everything that is former, especially one’s exes. As the third-from-last letter of the alphabet, it also suggests proximity to the end of things—and, hence, mortality. Like the famous lament of Shakespeare’s melancholy Jacques, Weinfield’s ABC surveys the stages of a life from beginning to end. The beauty of An Alphabet, however, is that it does so with a mere modicum of melancholy. Taking a cue from Edward Lear, Weinfield balances the seriousness of purpose buttressing these twenty-eight poems (two each for G and Z) with an intensely pleasurable lightness and wit. His extraordinary command of meter and rhyme enables him to range with seeming effortlessness between the high and low, the didactic and the bawdy, the philosophical and the quotidian, Immanuel Kant and Donald Trump.
Weinfield’s verse has matured and flourished through at least five collections of poetry and sterling translations of Mallarmé, Ronsard, Nerval, Hesiod, and others, and An Alphabet displays a fluid mastery that can only be the result of a lifetime’s work. (Full disclosure: Weinfield and I have been friends for fifty years, and in the book’s afterword he acknowledges me as one of a number of those who encouraged him while he was composing these poems.) The ease with which Weinfield is able to navigate among contrasting moods and modes and languages is on full display in “L.” Deploying a rhetorical device found in the Rig Veda and other spiritual texts, the poet begins by defining something in terms of what it isn’t. “Elle—” it begins, with the French word for “her” and a homonym for the letter L, and goes on with “Not El, the jealous god of Israel.”
Proceeding through five more end rhymes on the sound of L in the opening stanza, the speaker launches a comically over-the-top rant against the god of the Hebrew Bible, who “made us want so much and made us small.” The argument proceeds on theological grounds, with the poet excoriating the very concept of monotheism for imposing “a fraudulent unicity” on the authentic “multiplicity” of polytheism. That’s left Abrahamic religionists with a hellish dilemma:
The choice before us now was all or none—
Either transcendence or the dark abyss
of nothingness, eternal pain or bliss
Thundering like a preacher, the speaker in the poem sermonizes against the teachings any minister might preach: “Morality bred arrogance and strife. / It made us hate our bodies and hate life.”
On its own, the extremity of the speaker’s anti-religious stance is humorous. But the deflation of rhetoric that happens in the last stanza is even more so. The letter L must not be represented by the hypermasculine god El, but by Elle, whom the poet now elevates from a mere pronoun to the transcendent heights of das Ewig-Weibliche, Goethe’s eternal feminine principle. Then in the very next line, the poem’s focus drops precipitously from Faust to the mundane world of an elevated New York train (which, of course, is known as “the El.”) All of this is quite funny, and becomes even funnier when the speaker’s version of everlasting Beauty descends, bawdily, to the object of a schoolboy crush
With whom I rode the Bronx-bound Broadway El
That morning when we both were seventeen.
Those were my salad days when I was green.
And when at last she finally let me in,
I knew her for the eternal feminine.
In contrast, a number of the letters provide the poet with an occasion for lyricism rather than wit. The words and phrases he associates with V trace a tragic downward spiral from the French word for life (la vie); to “Venus”; to the lovely word “velleity” (“the lowest of the powers of volition”); and finally to “ventilators,” “vanities,” and—chillingly—“the verities the virus swept away.” By the time he composed “V,” as Weinfield explains in his afterword, it was the early spring of 2020, and New York City had begun its descent into the darkest days of the pandemic. And yet, he adds, “I cannot remember a more beautiful spring; the flowers of the Heather Garden of Fort Tryon Park, near where I live, were especially radiant and abundant.” The clash between beauty and terror evident in that moment seems to have inspired one of the loveliest stanzas in the volume:
V is for Venus, loving mother of every living thing.
On earth, the many-colored springtime flowers are blossoming.
High in the sky the happy-hearted birds are taking wing.
Foster us, goddess, lift our spirits, in this troubled spring.
By the end of the sequence, the span of Weinfield’s poetic alphabet becomes clear. Z, by dint of its position as the last letter, “looks back on the past/ Having no letters to look forward to.” Dark though that future might seem, it provides us with “A limit we defend / Lest chaos and nothingness ensue.” But language is an ever-shifting thing. Looking backward and forward across time, the poems of An Alphabet are charged with the dynamism of language itself.
David M. Katz, a poet and journalist based in New York City, is the author of The Biographer, a recently published collection of poetry, as well as four previous collections.
He posts frequently on The David M. Katz Poetry Blog (https://davidmkatzpoet.com/).