Donald Finkel in 2003

Longtime St. Louis poet Donald Finkel died Saturday. See the Post-Dispatch obituary for more information, although a memorial service has not yet been set.

In April, dozens of poets, fans and former students gathered to pay tribute to Mr. Finkel. Our A&E section ran a tribute written by one of his former students, Howard Schwartz. I’m posting that tribute here:

By Howard Schwartz/Special to the Post-Disaptch

We’ve all had a memorable teacher or two who inspired us. For an astonishing number of St. Louisans - especially the poets - that teacher was Donald Finkel.

Count me among them.

 Some of us, along with other longtime admirers, will gather for one of the biggest poetry readings ever in St. Louis. As a tribute to the man who taught at Washington University for more than 30 years, more than three dozen poets will read from his work.

 Although the honoree is too frail at age 78 to attend, the readers will include four generations of poets, including a couple of Finkel’s contemporaries, Carter Revard and John Knoepfle.

 I decided to be a writer when I was 16 after reading old stories by J.D. Salinger in the Saturday Evening Post on microfilm at the state library in Jefferson City. As I walked out of the library that day, I made a decision about what to do with my life. I can remember that moment vividly, standing on the stairs outside the library. I didn’t tell anyone about it, but my life was changed forever. Still, I didn’t write anything until 1965, when I was 20.

 One day, after my girlfriend broke up with me, I started banging away on the typewriter and, when I finished, I discovered I had written a poem. In a few months, I had written hundreds of poems, so I signed up for a poetry writing course, feeling like an old pro.

 Sitting in Don Finkel’s undergraduate poetry writing workshop, I felt that I had reached the vortex of the world of poets, and I saw Don as a wry magus who could show us how to cast spells in words.

 He was alert, gentle, funny, pithy and precise. He wove personal anecdotes into class that were often hilarious. He was incredibly well-read and knew exactly what books to recommend to us. In retrospect, the poems I wrote for his class as an undergraduate were awful, but I assumed he thought they were superb.

Of course, he never said they were, but he treated me as an equal, as a colleague worthy of respect. He offered practical advice: a line or two that could be cut here, revisions that would streamline the flow there, some words that might work better than others.

 Like most, I was reluctant to change anything I’d written, as if it had been engraved on stone. It took a few years, but Don taught me to regard my words as if they were written on water.

 No one has ever described Don’s teaching methods better than David Clewell. In 2003, the poet wrote for the Post-Dispatch:

 ”I found in Don a teacher who seemed to know exactly when to coax, wheedle, admonish and applaud - when to stay out of the way and when to get smack into it again. He taught his experience as well as the craft. … He couldn’t help but teach his passion for the art and his compassion for others involved in the same exhilarating, frustrating task: trying to get some small part of the world precisely right - for a moment, at least - in words.”

 It was thrilling to be in Don’s class and, little by little, I came to know him as a friend. He had come to St. Louis from New York, where he was born and reared. He described himself as a hooligan as a teenager. Before he decided to be a poet, he wanted to be a sculptor. After earning degrees at Columbia University, he taught at the University of Iowa, where he met his future wife, poet and novelist Constance Urdang. Before coming to Washington University, he had taught at Bard.

 All along, of course, Don’s students were reading his books. He was very modest about his own poems, but amid a family life that yielded two daughters, Liza and Amy, and a son, Tom, he and Connie both kept to a rigorous writing schedule. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, Don published a dozen books with Atheneum, then the most prominent publisher of American poets with a roster that included W.S. Merwin, Philip Levine, Mona Van Duyn, Mark Strand, Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht and James Merrill.

 Don’s first poetry collection, “The Clothing’s New Emperor,” was published in 1959, to be followed by more than a dozen more. He is perhaps best known for his book-length narrative poems, such as “Adequate Earth” and “Going Under and Endurance.”

 Don’s fascination with themes of isolation abound in these explorations, from the endless caverns under Kentucky, which he prowled with fellow members of the Cave Research Foundation, to the barren wonders of Antarctica, which he was the very first poet ever to visit, to the vast expanse of the Sargasso Sea.

In recent years, before he became uneasily acquainted with the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, Don wrote what I think are some of his best poems, based on biblical stories.

 Others in that first class I took with Don included Eugene Redmond, the longtime poet laureate of East St. Louis; Pamela White (later Hadas), author of several books of poems published by Knopf; L.D. Brodsky, author of many books of poems and publisher of Time Being Books; and Bob Duffy, who wrote on architecture and other subjects for the Post-Dispatch for nearly 30 years.

 Some of Don’s other students include Clewell, now poet-in-residence at Webster University; Marjorie Stelmach, a visiting poet in the master of fine arts program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; and Jane O. Wayne, one of St. Louis’ best-known poets, all recipients of major poetry awards.

 Today, I teach poetry writing to graduates and undergraduates at UMSL. I have modeled my approach after Don’s. Each year, I confess on the first day of class (just as Don did) that I can’t teach them how to write poems. What I can do is offer lots of assistance in revising them.

 And I try my best to obey his No. 1 rule: Never crush a student.

 ”After all,” he would say, “who knows how they will develop in the future? It’s not our job to decide if they have a future as writers or not. Let them find out on their own.”

Donald Finkel bibliography

- “The Clothing’s New Emperor” (1959)

- “Simeon” (1964)

 - “A Joyful Noise” (1966)

 - “Answer Back” (1968)

 - “The Garbage Wars” (1970)

 - “Adequate Earth” (1972)

 - “A Mote in Heaven’s Eye” (1975)

- “Endurance” and “Going

Under” (1978)

- “What Manner of Beast” (1981)

 - “The Detachable Man” (1984)

 - “The Wake of the Electron” (1987)

- “Selected Shorter Poems” (1987)

 - “A Question of Seeing” (1998)

 - “Not So the Chairs: Selected and New Poems” (2003)

 - Co-translated “A Splintered Mirror: Chinese Poetry From the Democracy Movement” (1991)