An Alphabet by Henry Weinfield (review)

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Reviewed by:

• An Alphabet by Henry Weinfield
• David M. Katz (bio)

an alphabet
Henry Weinfield
Dos Madres Press
https://www.dosmadres.com/https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/an-alphabet-by-henry-weinfield/
68 pages; Print, $20.00

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: [End Page 110]

X was once a great king XerxesXerxy,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 versification, however, Weinfield's book deserves a place on the shelf next to more scholarly volumes on the art of poetry.

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: [End Page 111]

the circles convergenot on the battlebut on the dancewhich 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...