James Longenbach
James Longenbach
For Irving Feldman, from James Longenbach
A few weeks ago my sixteen-year-old daughter asked me, out of the blue, as I was pouring out the cocoa crispies, “who’s Irving Feldman?”
“He’s a great American poet,” I said, “He read here at the University about ten years ago.”
“Oh,” she said, “that explains it.”
When my daughter was five or six, she had a little book of do-it-yourself knock-knock jokes: on each page was a paradigm with the crucial words missing. Recently, when my daughter stumbled on this book, she found a page that looked like this:
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Irving.
Irving who?
Irving _____________
The true answer to the riddle is, of course, Irving Feldman: ten years ago my daughter had penciled in his name with careful block letters.
Together, after the riddle surfaced a few weeks ago, she and I read the great concluding lines to “Terminal Laughs”:
I seem to hear how, guarding the lowest stair,
he mutters in his despondency (his, truly,
having kept his lost promise all these years),
“‘Irving Feldman,’ huh? Just another pretty name.”