A dystopian America, biblical allusions and the crippling power women pose in relationships were a few topics presented in Irving Feldman’s poetry reading at City College.
Feldman read in the Fe Bland forum at 7 p.m. Friday Sept. 28, to an audience of creative writing students and interested adults. Accompanying him was his granddaughter, Natasha Feldman.
“I’ve known and admired his work since the late 1980’s when I was a grad student at [Louisiana State University],” said English professor David Starkey said. “He is a really smart poet, a very witty person in his poetry and in himself.”
Feldman read from his latest published work: “Collected Poems, 1954 -2004,” with a tone that emphasized his nostalgia and offered a mournful dissonance to his introspective words.
“Well, that’s the way life was, in pieces,” Feldman read. “Sometimes, his head flashed on something fat and beautiful. He watched it shoot by. Then, he listened for the crash.”
A number of the poems he red had distorted biblical references that confirmed his stance as an atheist. For example, in the poem, “The Life and Letters,” Feldman adopts the voice of Jesus Christ writing letters full of lies home to his mother.
Though many of his poems had somber topics, he was able to weave flashes of brilliant humor into his poetry through vivid descriptions of characters or situations that are relatable by all.
He forced the audience to look at troubling situations a different way, from outside looking in and through the eyes of a man looking back on the more difficult aspects of his life with peace rather than agitation.
“His work is by turns really epigrammatic and engrossingly narrative,” said Starkey.
Feldman was born in 1928, raised on Coney Island, which is one of the settings he conjures repeatedly in his poetry, particularly, “Theme Park America.”
“In theme park America every tree is a museum, every leaf a monument, each flower a flower idea, this slum a garden of garbages, the world a world still swelling with its first inhalations of eternity,” Feldman read.
Feldman attended the City College of New York (now known as the City College of the City University of New York) and graduated from Columbia University with a master’s degree in 1953.
Feldman travelled everywhere from Puerto Rico to France, teaching and writing. In 1964, he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was a distinguished teacher until his retirement.
“You have to read if you want to be good,” Feldman said, “and don’t be discouraged if you get rejected. Let it inspire you to work harder.”
He is the recipient of a National Institute of Arts and Letters award and the Mac Arthur Foundation Genius grant.
