Norman Finkelstein - "From the Files of Immanent Foundation" - Peter O’Leary
"From the Files of the Immanent Foundation is a beautiful work of hesitant wonder, coaxing stark narration, precept, adage and a strange, winsome yet doleful music out of bureaucratic and documentarian argot and protocol. Its long run of quirks and particulars makes it also a work of rash but strict invention, both an inquiry into invention and its anthem or hymn, its exemplum. Immanence’s openly secret accord with emanation seems to be at issue or at least at work. I read it wishing it would never end." —Nathaniel Mackey, Author of the National Book Award-winning Splay Anthem
Norman Finklestein will discuss From the Files of Immanent Foundation. He will be joined in conversation by Peter O'Leary. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
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About the book: From the Files of the Immanent Foundation, is a collection of poems about a enigmatic organization, which, as critic Graley Herren puts it, “seems in part Kafkaesque allegory of metaphysical bureaucracy, in part a Joycean surreal fantasy of the unconscious, and in part a Freudian myth born out of dream-work and analysis. The Foundation is like a temple reconstructed from shards of modern poetry, horror, science fiction, mysticism, and faery tale, with pointed jabs at technocrats and administrators and hilarious send-ups of pedantic academics.” A fragmented narrative in which various mysterious characters go on strange assignments and quests, deceive and betray each other, and fall in and out of love, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation is an uncanny book from a poet who is, according to Rachel Tzvia Back, “ever reinventing what poetry might, and even must, do.”
About the author: Norman Finkelstein is a poet and literary critic. He is the author of five critical works, including The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New & Selected Poems. Finkelstein has written extensively about modern American poetry and Jewish literature. Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination is forthcoming from Hebrew Union College Press. Born in New York City in 1954, Finkelstein is a Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he has taught since 1980.
About the interlocutor: Peter O’Leary's books of poetry include Watchfulness, Depth Theology, Luminous Epinoia, Phosphorescence of Thought, and The Sampo. As Ronald Johnson’s literary executor, he has edited several volumes of Johnson’s poetry, including The Shrubberies, Radi os, and new editions of ARK and The Book of the Green Man. He has also edited Is Music: Selected Poems by John Taggart. In 2002, his critical study, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, was published. A new study, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, is newly released from Columbia University Press. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and for the Committee on Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. With John Tipton, he directs the small poetry press Verge Books.