On Mount Vision

Plumbing what the poet Michael Palmer calls "the dimension of the Spirit, with that troublesome, rebarbative capital letter," Norman Finkelstein's "On Mount Vision" asks how and why the sacred has remained a basic concern of contemporary experimental poets in our secular age. By charting the wandering, together and apart, of poetry and belief, Finkelstein illustrates the rich tapestry formed by the warp and woof of poetry, and the play of Gnosticism, antinomianism, spiritualism, and shamanism, which have commonly been regarded as heretical and sometimes been outright suppressed.