Name Caroline Finkelstein Role Poet | Education Goddard College | |
Books Windows facing east, Justice, Germany | ||
Caroline Finkelstein (born New York City, April, 1940, died Atlanta, February, 2016) was an American poet.
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Life
As a girl, Finkelstein led what she calls “a bifurcated life, half American, half some idea of upper bourgeois European society...This upbringing maintains itself in many of my poems as mood, or attitude, or actual subject matter”.
She was married at nineteen to Jack Finkelstein, a pediatric neurologist. They had three children, Adam, Gabriel, and Nicholas. She divorced in 1977 and later married the poet Robert Clinton.
She earned an M.F.A. at Goddard College, where she studied with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Robert Hass, and Michael Ryan. She was at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
In 1999 and 2000, she lived in Florence.
In 1982, 2001, 2003 she lived in Westport, Massachusetts. She visited Jane Kenyon shortly before her death.
She has published her work in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Fence, Paris Review, Seneca Review, New American Writing, and The American Poetry Review.
She last lived in Roswell, Georgia.
Awards
Works
Poetry Books
Ploughshares
Quotes
About the poem, she writes: “I wrote ‘Conjecture Number One Thousand’ while I was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. It’s a rueful comment on my second marriage and an attempt at checking the longing that lives in my memories. The irony and occasional flippancy replicate much of the marriage’s shape. Being at MacDowell, where my former husband and I had once attended, only heightened the senses of loss and comedy within that loss.”