Background
Finkel was born in New York City on October 21, 1929. He grew up in the Bronx, and aspired to be a sculptor as a youth.
( In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Fink...)
In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence. Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player's hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives. Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1557285020/?tag=2022091-20
Finkel was born in New York City on October 21, 1929. He grew up in the Bronx, and aspired to be a sculptor as a youth.
He attended the University of Chicago, only to be expelled for smoking marijuana. Finkel attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a bachelor"s degree in philosophy in 1952.
He earned a master"s degree in English from Columbia in 1953. He 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 Saint Louis in 1960. He taught at Washington University until 1991, and was poet-in-residence emeritus there until his death.
Mr.
Finkel’s wife, Constance Urdang, a novelist and poet, died in 1996. He translated A Splintered Mirror: Chinese From the Democracy Movement with Carolyn Kizer, which was published in 1991. Before his death, Finkel returned to sculpture, creating pieces from buttons, bottles and other found objects, in a process he called "dreckolage".
He died at age 79 on November 15, 2008 at his home in Saint Louis, Missouri of complications of Alzheimer"s disease.
( In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Fink...)
( In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Fink...)
(Book by Finkel, Donald)
(Book by Finkel, Donald)
Member Cave Research Foundation, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Constance Urdang, August 14, 1956 (deceased 1996). Children: Elizabeth Antonia, Thomas Noah, Amy Mariah.