R. D. Pohl

NextR.D._Pohl_3.html
PreviousR.D._Pohl.html
ContentsContents.html

BEAUTIFUL FALSE THINGS

By Irving Feldman

Grove Press Poetry Series

95 pages, $13 paper

In "The Recognitions," the opening poem of  Irving Feldman’s new collection "Beautiful False Things," the poet unexpectedly hears his name being called as if he were being summoned like a Greek hero or Old Testament prophet. He wheels around to discover "it was merely you who recognized me,/speaking my name in such a tone/I knew you had been thinking it/a long, long time, and now revealed yourself/in this way."

Far from being disappointed, he understands this secular calling: "Because of this, suddenly/who I was was precious to me."

In the thirty-four poems that comprise this, Feldman's ninth collection, the mature voice that reveals itself is that of the poet as mediator between art and experience, between language and memory. The collection's title poem is a typically Feldmanesque double narrative in which a fictitious Albanian poet named Yusuf Krip listens to radio broadcasts of Dante's "Divine Comedy" as translated into American English (by Robert Pinsky) and laments that his own work will be similarly vulgarized by his American translator, a certain "Feldman" or "Feldminsky."

"Dante's accent/loaded words with chains," writes Feldman, "shoved cadences down/to where the frenzied Unintelligibles/ -- like tongues torn out by the root mid-sentence -- /go on expostulating in their Circle--."

What's at issue is not so much the indeterminacy of translations as the tenuousness of a literary legacy. The poet's words are sure to be corrupted, even in their recitation.

The question of legacy recurs in an ironic context in "Honors! Prizes! Awards! Etc!" where mortality -- that perennial gate crasher -- waits outside a gala "trying to know/what it cannot understand: ungraspable life!" while the celebrants inside aspire to be "more famous than death."

No stranger to honors himself, Feldman was a 1992 MacArthur Fellowship winner and has also received major awards from Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Four of his eight previous collections have been finalists for major literary awards including "The Pripet Marshes" (1965) and "Leaping Clear" (1976), both nominated for the National Book Award, while "All of Us Here" (1986) and "The Life and Letters" (1994) were contenders for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Poets' Prize from the Academy of American Poets, respectively.

Born in Coney Island in 1928 and educated at City College and Columbia University, he has lived in Buffalo since 1964 and taught at the University at Buffalo, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of English. When in "City of Good Neighbors Blues," a contentious colleague derides Buffalo for its provincialism (arguing that adultery is "impossible" here), the narrator deflates him with a well-aimed barb ("Have you been drinking the water here?/You've developed hardening of the adulteries.")

As with Feldman's previous volumes, many of the poems in "Beautiful False Things" are organized into clusters that take up related themes. One such grouping places the poet/narrator back in New York's Lower East Side in the post-War era when he was a student, poet and would-be Bohemian living in a tenement so run-down that the rats showed him mercy. In "Lives of The Poets," an older writer he regards as a mentor turns out to be motivated by baser instincts. In "Sono un poeta. Scrivo," a phone call from a desperate former lover prompts him to recall the summer of their love some 30 years earlier.

Another sequence of three consecutive poems deals with marital disaffection and divorce. "Bust-up," the last of the three, concludes: "After it's over, the half-dead agonists/and their seconds and helpers can't much stand/each other. Their revulsion's impersonal,/as if the rupture can't not go on tearing."

As a stylist, Feldman is known for both short poems that approach almost epigrammatic concision and longer, frequently comic narratives that read like short stories done in verse. Both are well represented here. "Les Grandes Passions Manquees" and "The Parting" are striking poems of five and four lines, respectively.

Even more likely to be included in future collections of Feldman's work are two longer narrative poems "Oedipus Host" and "Funny Bones." In the former, Sophocles' blind and crippled former King of Thebes is reincarnated as a contemporary talk show personality -- the host of The Oedipus Hour. On his syndicated TV gabfest, great comic and tragic heroes of antiquity and modernity appear as regulars on the guest list discussing the usual talk show fodder: incest, revenge and blood sacrifice. "Because anyone's story could be everyone's story," writes Feldman, "Something tremendous is happening tonight./Everybody's coming out to everybody."

"Funny Bones" introduces us to Larry Dawn, "The Borscht Belt Lazarus," a has-been who never was, a minor stand-up comedian who has taken his act from the Catskills to Florida, where he entertains his geriatric audiences with tasteless jokes about aging, infirmity and death. Larry has emphysema, but works it into his act, billing himself as "The Only Comic Who Works With Oxygen."

"Can you take a joke?" he taunts his audiences. "You can? Well, can you take another?"

No less admirable are the poems in which Feldman takes on a voice and his language literally constructs a character. In "Joker" the voice is that of a gambler; in "The Retirement" it's the voice of a compulsive shopper.

Although not generally regarded as a linguistically extravagant poet, in "The Purse of Coy D.," his description of the contents of a cross-dressing hooker's lost purse is itself a kind of lyrical Bacchanalia. In "Words Out Place," a poem about the decay of printed material and signage our culture produces and then discards, he writes: "The fierce maenads of existence keep tearing/The Dictionary into deep, inscrutable/blizzards of Orphic confetti, swirling up,/and down on the stream parading its passage./And, loveliest foam, the syllables, riding, sing/this moving beauty of the moment's novel body."


Source Citation:Pohl, R.D. "POET IS MEDIATOR IN FELDMAN'S NEW COLLECTION." The Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY) (April 16, 2000): F6. New York