Analysis
In turn metaphysical, allegorical, satirical, and lyrical, at once emotional and cerebral, indignant and compassionate, Irving Feldman’s verse boldly defies categorization. With a moral earnestness grounded in his generation of Jewish American writers’ profound reaction to the Holocaust, the poems, despite their rich variety, share a significant imperative: to define the value of the soul in a universe appallingly uninterested in such larger implications. What good, Feldman asks, is searching for clarity in a world of crushing brutalities and casual tragedies, a world defined by random death and a Kafkaesque absurdity? Feldman conceived of the Poet, always uppercase, as a troubled (at times caustic) moral visionary, defining the unsettling position of the inquiring eye and curious mind in a dark time.
That Feldman’s poetry refuses easy surrender to the inevitability of pessimism, that it celebrates the value of speculation on the difficult history of the Jews, defines the intellectual satisfaction of his poetry for those readers willing to engage its obvious erudition. Influenced by modernism and by its deep investigations into a wide variety of forms and poetic lines, Feldman’s work reflects a restless experimentation with and a deft mastery of virtually every traditional poetic form from haiku to lyric, from satire to allegory. His verse expands the musical range of language while maintaining a tight structure; he crafts poetic lines that reflect his belief that the work of the poet is to sculpt language into meaningful order. Unlike the Beat poets, who came of age in the same bohemian neighborhoods of 1950’s New York City, Feldman found in the traditional forms of poetry a satisfying assertion of aesthetic privilege.
The Pripet Marshes, and Other Poems
Although Feldman had established his reputation with Works and Days, and Other Poems, that collection, with its cool cerebral interrogation of philosophical issues, did not anticipate Feldman’s follow-up collection, published a scant four years later. Like novelist Philip Roth, to whom Feldman is often compared, Feldman here adopts a more intimate voice, the voice of a Jewish American who came of age during the revelations of the Holocaust, the voice of the generation of witnesses who were distant from the actual events yet very much part of their implications. The empowered poet executes tightly designed lyrical constructs while the larger world defies such logic and exposes the poet’s helplessness.
The prologue celebrates the omnipotence of the poet-creator shaping entire worlds within the rich confines of the imagination, and subsequent poems investigate the artist’s powers and prowess (centering on the figure of Pablo Picasso). In the title poem, among Feldman’s most anthologized, he imagines a poet transporting his friends from Brooklyn to the Ukraine in mid-summer, 1941, to the Jewish settlements along the Pripyat River, then imagines them as residents of the settlements with names and personalities—and then brusquely returns them to Brooklyn just moments before the Nazis arrive to execute more than six thousand Jews on the suspicion that they are harboring Soviet partisans. It is a wrenching poem in which the poet acknowledges that the imagination is ultimately powerless before such hard realities. In the collection’s signature piece, “To the Six Million,” Feldman addresses those who died in the Holocaust and examines the complex feelings of those Jews who bear the guilt of surviving while so many others perished, how every moment they feel the heavy shadow of the six million deceased.
The Lost Originals
Although given the range of Feldman’s formal virtuosity and the scope of his thematic investigations, it is risky to define any one collection as representative, The Lost Originals , published roughly at midcareer, can serve as a...
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measure of Feldman’s confident explorations of a range of themes from deeply personal recollections of growing up in Coney Island and later visiting Europe to broad metaphysical speculations about the worth of the soul itself. In poem after poem, Feldman juxtaposes the dead or the near-dead with the strength and energy of children. The poems recognize the sobering reality of death (the centerpiece is a poignant elegy to Feldman’s longtime friend, the poet Charles Olson) and yet embrace with the carefree joy of a child the pleasures of things such as morning on a balcony in Barcelona, a playground vibrant with children, and the lustrous trill of an operatic tenor. Indeed, in the elegy to Olson, Feldman concludes that the poet, alone among artists, is most likely to be able to explicate the mystery of death as something immediate and, in turn, consoling.
The most profound consolation of Feldman’s poetry is always the energy of language to articulate in its order, music, and exoticism (Feldman relishes startlingly unusual vocabulary) a satisfying counterargument to the chaos and ugliness of life. Formally, the poems reflect Feldman’s virtuosity. The poems use at turns irregular elliptical lines or broad heavily stressed lines, intent rhythms or subtle off-beats.
The Life and Letters
One of Feldman’s most carefully organized collections of verse, The Life and Letters is sectioned into three parts. Part 1 is a series of character studies, stories of relationships, of lovers and adulterers, of parents and children, poems written in accessible colloquialism and often delivered with understated humor. In “Warm Enough,” for example, Feldman teases the clichéd greeting of his apartment building’s elevator operator (Warm enough for you?) into mythic implications. In “Story,” a friendship is shattered when a man babysitting a child is late in returning the child to its mother and she realizes how vulnerable her love of the child has made her. The volume’s most anthologized poem, “The Little Children of Hamelin,” describes the children from the folktale as they follow the piper up into the mountain pass only to be abandoned, their childhoods inexplicably forfeited.
In part 2, Feldman’s vision turns public: The poems are caustic critiques of contemporary American culture, satirizing of its pretense, shallowness, penchant for celebrities, obsession with television, and curious fascination with talk-radio psychiatrists.
In the third part, Feldman celebrates the solution he had tendered across three decades: the poet and the power of language. He gathers poems that address the dynamic of writing, the curious responsibilities of reading, and the implications of being a poet. “How Wonderful,” for example, is a tongue-in-cheek assessment of what it means to be a “difficult” poet whose poems have generated so many well-intentioned misreadings. The volume closes, appropriately, with “Entrances,” a wildly funny lyrical assault of words and phrases without thematic imperative or coherent logic—just the delightful distraction and tireless energy of sounds (read aloud, the poem dazzles).
