Irving was one of my professors (poetry writing) at SUNY/Buffalo, a lifetime ago, it seems. He was highly disciplined, a beneficially severe critic, and, by the by, a dedicated bicyclist who would arrive at the seminar table burnished and tan, putting most of us, who were much younger but nowhere near as fit, to shame. The poems he published then were knockouts—“X,” “Seeing Red”—and they led me to read “The Pripet Marshes,” his piercing earlier work. In the years since, I lost track of Irving personally but I kept up with his boundlessly intelligent and restless imagination through his poems, book by brilliant new book. When he published his collected poetry several years ago, I had the privilege of reviewing it for The Forward, where I was able to mention his classroom teaching. Seeing the poetry evolve through time in those pages is a heady experience, indeed, and when one turns to the work of other living poets after doing so, only a handful offer comparably profound and complexly human satisfaction, and nearly all of those poets are natives of other countries. I add my fan’s voice to the celebration of Irving’s 80th birthday and with the hopeful examples of Stanley Kunitz and Dorothea Tanning in mind—poets who wrote or, in the case of Ms Tanning, are still writing serious and exacting poems very far past 80.

     Cheers for Irving Feldman, superb contributor to the best of American culture~

     Mindy Aloff