On Mount Vision

“Norman Finkelstein offers subtle, synoptic, and learned overviews of some experimental U.S. poets with textual-spiritual vocations. Making richly articulated career overviews of Duncan, Spicer, Palmer, Johnson, Mackey, Schwerner, and Susan Howe, Finkelstein engages with their spiritual projects,
their affiliations, and their intellectual intensities. Its empathy and clarity of understanding make this book an exemplary interpretation of contemporary poetic practices. The cosmic, Gnostic, scriptural, antinomian, spiritualist, heterodox, and shamanic long poems of our time have rarely been so well
understood or so suggestively exfoliated.”—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice

“This is one of the best academic books I’ve read in some time, and one of the very best academic books on poetry that I’ve ever read. Finkelstein is not just a skillful reader, but a superb one. His readings—of everything from individual lines up to entire sequences—have the effect that only the best readings have, of at first glance catching you by surprise, and then, on reconsideration, convincing you of their inevitability.”—Brian McHale, author, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems

“On Mount Vision is an excellent book, one whose value exists on the level of explanation to be sure, but more powerfully, more suggestively, on the levels of persuasion, and of myth and metaphor, where one encounters the archetypes of the poet as priest, prophet, seer, antinomian, heretic, and scholar-translator. Finkelstein provides a lucid model for how to read and understand the often difficult and quarrelsome poetry that is his subject. This book will take its place as the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets.”—Peter O'Leary, author, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness