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Feldman and the search for 'a lost language'

Published on December 6, 1992
Author:    By R.D. POHL - News Contributing Writer
© The Buffalo News Inc.

If we were gifted at flight, lyrical, blessed

with clairvoyance, able to see our way past all

this obviousness to the possible impossible,

we'd mind less their (other bright spirits)

collapsed spectrum of the human,

this mirror of literalness (which reflects,

which cannot see) that they hold up to our eyes

-- reminding us too tiresomely of our obtrusive,

too tedious, too obvious, too mortal selves.


These lines from Irving Feldman's poem "Oh, here and there" are indicative of the creative tensions that animate his work, and in some larger sense, his career. In some respects, he is a poet whose verbal facility and dazzling mastery of craft would appear to reflect the formalism of a high modernist sensibility. In other respects, however, there is no denying the moral and emotional dimensions that are the underpinning of his work.


Consider this passage from "The Golden Schlemiel" in his 1976 collection "Leaping Clear:" "I think I prefer this horror/ which tells me it is possible to feel/ if not to believe./ Only horror survives our raging irony/ and we survive by horror."


Feldman's work and career have been a focus of considerable attention of late -- particularly since earlier this year when the MacArthur Foundation selected him to receive one of its prestigious fellowships in literature. Now that Feldman, a modest and intensely private individual, has weathered a brief season of unsought celebrity, he is about to return to the relative anonymity that is the true reward for genuine literary accomplishment in America.


While preparing this column we discovered that -- MacArthur Fellowship notwithstanding -- none of Feldman's eight collections of poetry originally published by Viking (including two which were nominated for the National Book Award) are in print.

The Poetry/Rare Book Collection at the University at Buffalo in conjunction with Bucknell University and The Press of Appletree Alley did undertake a reprint of "All of Us Here" in 1990, but that limited edition is not available at local booksellers either.


Those seeking to familiarize themselves with Feldman's work can still find it in our public and university libraries, of course, but despite the fact that Feldman, a Distinguished Professor of English at UB, has lived in Western New York for the past quarter century and is -- by critical consensus -- a significant voice in contemporary American poetry, you simply can't buy a copy of one of his books here or anywhere.


Critic Denis Donoghue has observed that Feldman "writes mostly about beings and events that in one form or another have already entered into history or into myth. Very few of his poems seem to begin, as it were, at rock bottom and very few begin with nature. They assume that we are already rotten with history, and his poems are interventions upon that condition. . . Feldman moves in upon literature at a relatively late stage when nature is either disabled or transcended or otherwise bracketed, and we are already, perhaps appallingly, in time and space."


For Donoghue, Feldman's interventions with the social construction of history and culture culminate in his search for a "lost language." Feldman's poem of that title begins: "I have eaten all my words,/ And still I am not satisfied!/ Fourteen thousand and twenty blackbirds/ Hushed under my side./ And when I think of what I have written/ Or might have and can and shall write/ -- My life, this appetite,/ But how shall eat the food I've forgotten?"


Fellow poet and critic John Hollander considers Feldman a masterful poetical satirist in an age and culture in which "satire has become virtually impossible," unleashing his post-Holocaust moral indignation (Hollander calls it "moral shuddering") in the forms of parody, irony of tone, carefully crafted rhetorical tropes and nuanced poetical wordplay. "There is a strange way in which Feldman's satirical impulses become internalized and thereby redeemed for another form of parable. One might say that rage at the horrors around one, and at the compounding of those horrors by the inauthenticity of most good social intentions -- or outrage -- has a higher mode we might call inrage."


Noting that Feldman's narrative position is essentially fugitive (always "elsewhere," as in the derivation of the Latin alibi), Hollander points out the dialectical self-reflexiveness of his voice. This distancing effect permits Feldman to employ his moral imagination to evoke tableaus of his Jewish childhood, the collective memory of his ancestors, and even the rhetorical stance of elders and prophets without succumbing to a straitjacket of sentimentality.


Like many commentators, Hollander is impressed by Feldman's "command of ranges of diction" and the "manipulation of tone" that is central to his work. "He moves through all our American dialects and vocabularies with a Catullan vigor, and he can more powerfully and elegantly in his own high idiolect, in which words 'interanimate' each other," Hollander writes.

Certain themes and images recur in Feldman's poetry, often in patterns that suggest a compelling internal logic. One such cluster of references highlighted by Denis Donoghue involves bread, corporality, desire and appetite. Another even more central cluster links light, brightness, vision, clarity, and distance (in Donoghue's terms, "the notion of one's own reality as constituted by the degree to which one is seen") in a continuum that moves from astronomy to metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and linguistic faith.


These two themes are united in Feldman's "Colloquy":


I have questioned myself aloud

at night in a voice I did not

recognize, hurried and disobedient, hardly brighter.

What have I kept? Nothing.

Not bread or the bread-word.

What have I offered? Rebel

in the kingdom, my gift

has wanted a grace. I am crazy

with the brutality of it.

What have I said? I

have not spoken clearly,

not what must be said,

failed in using, in blessing.

I have wanted long to confess

but do not know to whom

I must speak, and cannot

spend a life on my knees.

Nonetheless, I have always

meant to save the world.


Feldman, whose collections not mentioned above include "Lost Originals," "Magic Papers," "The Pripet Marshes," "Works and Days," "New and Selected Poems," and "Teach Me, Dear Sister," will read from his work at 2 p.m. today at the Burchfield Art Center on the Buffalo State College campus, 1300 Elmwood Ave., as sponsored by the Burchfield Poets and Writers series.