A Natural Poet
Works and Days and other Poems.
by Irving Feldman.
Atlantic-Little Brown. 121 pp. $3.95.
Irving Feldman belongs neither to the camp of academic poets—though he is on a college faculty—nor to the clamoring throngs who propose hysteria and free association as ingredients of art. Yet, curiously enough, he is what the beatnik writers so often claim to be, and so seldom are—a natural poet. I don’t intend to suggest by this term that Feldman is uniquely chosen by the muse or that his work is composed in a lightning flash; but I do think poetry comes to him as the most natural sort of activity, as if nothing else would do but such expression. This is a guess, of course, yet I believe it is supported both by the ease with which Mr. Feldman handles himself poetically and by the surprising breadth of this first collection from a man still in his early thirties.
The range of Works and Days is its immediately striking quality. It extends from the lyric and meditative poems with which the book opens, to the title sequence of autobiographical poems, and then on to mockery and satire, finally finishing with a series of philosophical poems. These parts range also in quality, but all of them possess the outstanding characteristic of Mr. Feldman’s style—his insistence upon a dramatic and rhetorical voice as his chief mode of expression. The stanza which begins “The Prophet” is a good example:
I am your stone. I seek the center.
Lean back, bend over, I know one way.
You cannot move. I weigh. I weigh.
1 am your doom. Your city shall not burn.
The flood has gone by, the fever passed.
Get home. Empty the square
As your hearts are empty. Only I am
there.
Everywhere. I bring all things down.
The reader has to accept this rhetoric, this adoption of a role, if he is going to appreciate Mr. Feldman’s poems at all. But at times this reader wants to resist because Feldman’s monologues can stiffen into empty formality, go flat and false. The poet then looks like nothing so much as a ventriloquist suddenly exposed. When Feldman is truly at home in his dramatic masks we have the uncanny sensation of listening to two voices, his own within that of his imagined speaker, so that the language uttered is the speech of both in strange and moving unison. In “The Saint,” the first and one of the best poems in the book, the speaker tells God how a life dedicated to goodness and holiness draws one farther from Him since it compels a man to lose himself in sympathy for human misery and suffering in the world. The last stanza puts the saint’s predicament with great force:
But this goodness gives me away from you,
For love has scattered my soul through
Fields and towns. I rise like grass
Against myself, so thick I cannot pass
To you till I wither in every part.
O God, I would have been your hollow
gulf!
Why did you put your dam across my
heart
To overwhelm me with myself!
Though we enter the circumstances created by the speaker and the implications of what he says, there is an underlying sense of the poet’s own urgency that gives the poem the force of a personal act. That personal element is to be found in almost every successful poem in the book. Mr. Feldman derives much of his strength as a writer from his complex and intense struggle to define himself. His somber vision of existence—formed from painful emotion and corrosive wit—is that of a man who is at once religious and skeptical: the tormented Jew who is resigned to his inheritance and yet critical of it. But though the same deeply felt and conflicting attitudes undoubtedly stand behind Feldman’s meditations about Prometheus and others as they do in poems about himself, the former hold up least well of any in the collection: they sound forced and are too close to the standard—and now trite—poetic idiom of the day for comfort. The best poems are those in which Mr. Feldman discards any notion of mythic figures chained to lonely crags through a thousand autumns and speaks directly to the reader from his own experience of life. Take the beginning stanzas of “Works and Days,” an obviously autobiographical series of poems:
Ghetto-born, depression-bred,
Squeezed between the finger and
thumb
Of Famine and traditional Dread,
I learned all history’s a pogrom.Scared tutelage of the dead.
The hand that strokes the silken shawl,
I learned, may not strike red.
A Jew’s defense, the Wailing Wall.Learned to be patient under blows,
Suspect the world, yet ready to be
Wiped across my neighbor’s nose,
Chided then for being filthy.Learned the cost of life in cents,
To measure every ring and rag.
Saw Israel’s shining tents
Fold up like a doctor’s bag.Learned the little-bourgeois ruse;
To save the day against the night,
And night for day, then lose
Them both, worrying if I were right.Free of the flood, our ghetto tied
Smugly to the rope of His wrath,
We thought to put the world aside
Like the dirty ring after a bath.
The ragged, almost careless energy of this passage, along with its harsh and yet moving irony, represent what seems to me the most distinctive and winning feature of Feldman’s poetry to date. Certainly, some of the monologues and reflective poems come off well enough, but the author’s greatest weaknesses also lie in this same direction. Compare the following two passages. The first one is taken from a group of philosophical reveries that conclude the book; it is entitled “Breath (A phantom dialogue)” and falls under the larger title of “Dying”; the speaker is Prometheus:
Where will I find the space, the breath,
the breathing?
Where? But where is the cup? Here,
Dead center of the wide world,
The instants are a breath apart,
Specks of light scattered through a stone;
And freezing wind comes and goes,
Shaking the grizzled twilight
Till the granite leaves are shaken down;
Their voices cry aloud with mine, “Who
are you
Beside me, calling? What echo of myself?”
And so forth. I can only see Feldman teasing himself with words here into a semblance of profundity; it is a rhetoric from which all substance has flown, a scarecrow rhetoric. One might be more annoyed if it were not for that other genuine, outspoken, and unconventional Irving Feldman whose accurate right hand has little acquaintance with the left hand which wrote the passage above and a number of others much like it. Here is the other Irving Feldman, in a poem called “Reading Rousset’s ‘L’Univers Concentrationnaire’”:
Who holds my book and turns the page?
Thinking of my brother Jews
have crossed over the edge
And as one dead walk among the dead.
Who is it sits to read?—
Now that I wander like a shade
Bitter and free. Yet I who am ash
Fear they’ll purge smoke as they did flesh
As even I forgot our death.
Who heaves my chest? who would draw
my breath?
So it is that Works and Days divides itself three ways: into the solid reflective and dramatic poems such as “Saint and Leper,” “Adam,” or “The Prophet”; the philosophical poems, which show Feldman giving in to a hollow if sincere oratory that obscures the singularity of his own voice; the direct or personal poems, which are this writer’s finest achievement. The work done in this last category reveals to me the essential poet breaking through the various conventions and mannerisms that any young writer must test in order to discover what will ultimately be for him the right order of language, the poetic speech that is nearest to that inner self whose final truth can never be spoken in words. His future poetry one hopes will develop from the direct and frequently autobiographical poems he has written so far, which demonstrate Yeats’s conviction that “there’s more enterprise/In walking naked.” These poems are rooted in Feldman’s commitment to a perspective which is peculiarly Jewish; one which is personal but is at the same time ancient and general.
At his best, Irving Feldman exhibits a forcefulness and honesty, an ability to introduce both the self and the reality of its experience into poetry that brings him close to several of the very good young poets, including Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov. Though he differs from the latter in his choice of literary ancestry and technique, he shares with them a compulsion to write unhesitatingly out of the heart of his life, his experience as a particular person; and the truest poetry has always had those origins.
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