Irving Feldman to read at Medaille       

(first appeared in The Buffalo News, ArtsBeat, Feb. 21, 2008)

"We wake to poetry from a deeper dream," begins the second of Irving Feldman's Elegies in his New and Selected Poems (1979).  In a remarkable career that spans over six decades, Feldman--who will celebrate his 80th birthday in September--has plumbed the depths of our collective dreams and his own personal phantasmagoria to fashion a body of work that is dazzling in its range, singular in its mordant wit, and (as fellow poet John Hollander has described it) "amazing in its moral intensity."

Feldman, who will read from his work at 7 p.m. this coming Thursday (February 21st) in Medaille College's Library at Huber Hall, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University at Buffalo, where he joined the faculty in 1964.  A Brooklyn native and recipient of a 1992 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," Feldman is the author of eleven collections of poems including The Pripet Marshes (1965) and Leaping Clear (1976), both finalists for the National Book Award, All of Us Here (1986), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Life and Letters (1994), a finalist for the Poets' Prize. His most recent publication is his Collected Poems, 1954 to 2004 published by Schocken Books.

In a 1988 review, the critic Harold Bloom observed "It is a paradox that poetry rather than prose fiction is the prime achievement of Yiddish literature in America, while poetry in English by American Jews has not matched the prose achievements of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Harold Brodkey and others.  Among 20th century American poets, only Feldman and Hollander "by their relation to the Yiddish poetry they have translated...have in common a profound affinity to the cultural dilemmas, and also some of the cultural resources, of the best Yiddish poets."

Bloom went on to say that all four poems in Feldman's "Family History" have "a measure of greatness," but others will cite his ability to incorporate a darkly comic, ironical voice into what are essentially elegiac or even tragic forms, as in his response to the Frankfort School philosopher Theodor Adorno's famous question "How can on write poetry after Auschwitz?"  In "Outrage is Anointed by Levity" he writes of the inevitable trivialization of the Holocaust into lunchtime small talk:

           And all we shall know of apocalypse

           is not the shattering that follows but

           brittleness before, the high mindlessness, the quips.

Those who've studied with Feldman over the years attest to his being exacting but supportive as a teacher.  In our own community, his influence has served as an important counterpoint to those who favor a more process oriented, "poetics" based approach.   As he suggests in his poem "Fragment":

           The language isn't saved by style

            but by a tale worth telling.

            Not, then, to purify the old words

            but to bring new speech into

            the lexicon of the tribe,

            to tell, for example, how they

            received their names--the gods--

            who die in every generation

            --the world ends--

            and are revived under new vocables

            as yet unknown to us

            and in other, still unguessable shapes

            --that must be the world renewed, the new world.

            Or even to tell--if we can tell

            no more than this--how they came to die

             and lost their names and their allure, were husks

             hardly able to hold our whispers,

             even this allows us a kind

             of communion, a beginning of sorts,

             a way to keep feeling alive.

Even in Buffalo, his adopted hometown, public readings by Feldman are rare.  Consider this an opportunity to reacquaint yourself with the work one of the masters of American poetry and a mentor to generations of Buffalo-based writers.            

    

--R.D. Pohl