Frederick Seidel - Amorous icebergs are watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing, the icebergs are lesbians and kissing

Frederick Seidel, Poems 1959-2009 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)

«In late 2006, one became gradually aware of the hype surrounding the publication of Ooga-Booga, a book of poems by Frederick Seidel. Venues not normally given to profiling poets (New York Magazine) or reviewing them (Harper's Magazine) got in on the act; in fact, some of these reviewers and admirers even turned out to be - was it possible? - novelists: Benjamin Kunkel, Norman Rush. Novelists don't usually bother with poetry either. Then again, Seidel is a character. Most novelists like a good character. (Disappointingly for some, lyric poets tend to disappear into their language, shunning the virtues one could easily find in other genres.)
The character Seidel offers is virile, degenerate, nihilistic. A wealthy septuagenarian, he races around on handcrafted Ducati motorcycles, lounges in "the most expensive hotel in the world" and fucks heiresses. He broods existentially on catastrophe, genocide and the politicians that profit from them while jetting to London, Dubai, Tahiti, Lisbon. (Hilariously, one travel poem published in the London Review of Books a few months ago garnered two letters to the editor correcting Seidel's facts.)
New York magazine has reported that, "according to a great many influential people" Seidel is "among the two or three finest poets writing in English." Adam Kirsch, in the now-defunct New York Sun, suggested he "may be" the best American poet alive. Joel Brouwer called his The Cosmos Trilogy, published in 2003, a "fin-de-siècle masterpiece," and reviewing the first two books of the trilogy, The Cosmos Poems (2000) and Life on Earth (2001), in the Boston Review Calvin Bedient announced, "Seidel is the poet the twentieth century deserved. (But why stop there, the poet the millennium deserved.)" Echoing him, in 2007 Michael Robbins in the Chicago Review called Seidel's work "the poetry liberalism deserves."
To which one can only say, Wow. So, I too purchased Ooga-Booga. Was I entertained? Sure. It is a surreal book that conflates the political and the personal in Grand Guignol style. America, JFK, GWB, the Shah of Iran are all masks for the poet, who as "Fred Seidel" mirrors all of us at our worst - obsessed with the name brands of the global jet set, with their restaurants, their hotels, their clothes, their hunting parties, their sex lives. During our bubble, which astoundingly threw Iraq, Afghanistan and ruthless stop-loss into the shadows, a poet might fantasize about nubile Japanese girls on a booby-trapped subway car: "Their new pubic hair is made of light." Obscenity was, at moments, the only response to American life since 9/11, and Ooga-Booga piled on sardonic obscenities, with relish. The work rhymed with its moment.
And now it seizes the day. Make way for the recently published Poems 1959-2009. Already the accolades come from on high: not one, but two Harper's editors were among the fastest out the gate. Wyatt Mason's recent profile in The New York Times Magazine casts Seidel in the role of Samuel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: in a restaurant, chattering women hold a baby shower in a nearby booth as Mason and Seidel converse, evoking the innocent bower at which the Ancient Mariner accosted the wedding-guest. Christian Lorentzen in the Abu Dhabi National calls Seidel a "demonic gentleman": the reader practically hears the chords of "Sympathy for the Devil" swelling in the background. Following Mason's piece, David Orr's review in The New York Times Book Review called him a "sin-eater" from Scottish lore. All this follows from Bedient's declaration in 2001 that Seidel is a "spokesman and scourge of marauding testosterone," "an example of the dangerous Male of the Species."
Seidel's admirers quote the same appetitive lines: "I want to date-rape life." "I make her oink." Ooga-Booga was a hundred pages long; Poems, however, goes on for five hundred, and the reader is treated to poem after poem of obscenity and predation. A son mixes succinylcholine into his elderly mother's insulin shots, giving her "locked-in syndrome" ("Dune Road, Southampton"). A rich man in a Huntsman red velvet smoking jacket picks his way through a plane crash thinking of the cockpit voice recorder and the pilots' screams. A daughter craves incest with her father in the Hamptons ("Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 298-518"). A rich man who studied with George Santayana at Harvard loses his eye playing racquetball. A man watches porn and imagines Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer eating eggs for breakfast on that fateful morning ("Lorraine Motel, Memphis"). Tallulah Bankhead's vagina is compared to the Great Depression. The Big Bang is imagined as a suicide's gunshot ("The Complete Works of Anton Webern"). Ants marching toward a sugar bowl are black slaves on a cane plantation, then at Auschwitz ("To Die For"). A quadriplegic boy's body miraculously restored is figured as the poet's Easter-resurrected penis ("Sunrise").
Mostly I'm reminded of Michel Houellebecq, another quiet chap with a virulent literary persona and a thing about sex and Islamic fundamentalism. Like Houellebecq, Seidel preempts critique by accusing and flagellating himself. Rich white man, American, womanizer: he cops to it all and invites us to scapegoat him. That by doing this he has garnered a large following is not surprising. I'm not a moralist, and it would be fruitless to pillory readers for the pleasure they get from Seidel: it makes perfect sense that a poetry that prizes the same dialectic of exhibitionism and voyeurism that popular culture does would resonate with readers who don't read much other poetry.
It's the critics that puzzle me. Reading them, you'd think that Seidel's Poems was our Flowers of Evil, our Inferno. But the repetitiveness of Seidel's autopilot rhythms is so grating: Seidel achieves a kind of mesmerism, but there's no range. It could only be relished by the sort of person who, when asked in Beginning Poetry Workshop who her favorite poet is, answers Dr. Seuss. From "Italy":

I spent the summer in Bologna.
Bologna is my town.
Bologna is so brown.
I ate shavings
Of tuna roe on buttered toast
Despite the heat,
Brown waxy slices of fishy salt
As strong as ammonia, Bologna.
Bologna, it takes a prince to eat bottarga.
From "Sii Romantico, Seidel, Tanto Per Cambiare":
He filled the women with rodenticide.
He tied
Their wrists behind them, tried
Ball gags in their mouths, and was not satisfied.
The whole room when the dancing started clapped and cried.
The bomber was the bomb, and many died.
The unshod got their feet back on and ran outside.
The wedding party bled around the dying groom and bride.
It's the prosody of atrocity. The stacked rhymes and deadpan singsong rhythms have nothing in common with Ezra Pound's Cantos, for instance, which Seidel cites as a formative influence. Pound's metrical range was matched by his emotional range; Seidel has one rhythmic brand (and I use the word advisedly) for all emotional registers. You simply can't say that of Baudelaire, or Dante. Both Flowers of Evil and the Inferno are exquisitely beautiful works. No matter how bleak or violent, they don't hurt your ears musically. Yet Seidel's champions consistently and disingenuously transform his aesthetic weaknesses into virtues.
Seidel, born in 1936, is a poet of his generation: a confessional poet, who has learned his craft from the contemporaries he has outlived. He started out as an acolyte of Robert Lowell; critics since then have seen the parallels between Seidel and Sylvia Plath, particularly in "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," the original blueprint for Seidel's conflation of history and sexual fantasy. But a more pertinent model yet might be Anne Sexton. Hardly read anymore, it seems, outside feminist literature classes, Sexton's Complete Poems is fatter than Plath's Collected, and it took the violence of Ariel much further with less talent. From "Again and Again and Again":
I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
It is old. It is also a pauper.
I have tried to keep it on a diet.
I give it no unction.

There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Lust has taken plant in it
and I have placed you and your
child at its milk tip.
The poem's singsong, staccato sentences and cartoonish images prefigure Seidel's to a T. I challenge anyone to tell me, without consulting a book or Googling lines or phrases, which stanzas below were written by Sexton and which by Seidel:
The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
("The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator")
I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face.
The Camp we directed?
I have gassed the campers.
("Killing the Love")
Where was I begat?
In what room did
those definitive juices come?
A hotel in Boston
gilt and dim?
Was it a February night
all wrapped in fur
that knew me not?
I ask this.
I sicken.
("The Death of the Fathers")
My penis pants. My penis
Rises, hearing its name, like a dog.

I ought to cut it off
And feed it to itself.
Like the young bride in the Babel story
Forced to eat her husband's penis
("Gethsemane")
If you're a woman turning fifty,
You're a woman who feels cheated.
This message now will be repeated.
...
Every man's a rapist until he's done.
The bitch relieves the dog. The wound, the gun.
The Sermon on the Mount, the Son.
("Hair in a Net")
One must give Sexton her due: she had many fans, once upon a time; she was zeitgeisty, brutal and stylish. And now she is more of interest biographically than poetically. Caveat lector, mes semblables, mes frères: Seidel plows closely in her footsteps.» - Ange Mlinko


«Many poets have been acquainted with the night; some have been intimate with it; and a handful have been so haunted and intoxicated by the darker side of existence that it can be hard to pick them out from the murk that surrounds them. As Poems 1959-2009 demonstrates, Frederick Seidel has spent the last half-century being that darkest and strangest sort of poet. He is, it’s widely agreed, one of poetry’s few truly scary characters. This is a reputation of which he’s plainly aware and by which he’s obviously amused, at least to judge from the nervy title of his 2006 book, Ooga-Booga. This perception also colors the praise his collections typically receive — to pick one example from many, Calvin Bedient admiringly describes him as “the most frightening American poet ever,” which is a bit like calling someone “history’s most bloodthirsty clockmaker.” What is it about Seidel that bothers and excites everyone so much?
The simplest answer is that he’s an exhilarating and unsettling writer who is very good at saying things that can seem rather bad. When a Seidel poem begins, “The most beautiful power in the world has buttocks,” it’s hard to know whether to applaud or shake your head. But that’s not the entire story. There is also the peculiar attraction — and occasional repulsion — of the Seidel persona. Unlike most poets, he’s rich, has known a number of famous and semifamous people, and has spent a fair amount of time whizzing around on expensive Italian motorcycles while obsessing over breasts and violence. Yet nobody really knows him. He doesn’t do readings, he rarely teaches and it’s almost impossible to imagine him showing up at a writers’ conference, unless he was looking for someone who might go well with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
This separation from the poetry world’s institutions doesn’t seem to have troubled Seidel’s career. True, it’s probably kept him out of several anthologies, but on the other hand, it’s made him an attractive subject for reviewers (who enjoy pointing out the follies of anthologists). Seidel is published by a major house and has enjoyed long, smart, immensely positive write-ups in at least three general-interest magazines — a grim fate for which most poets would happily sacrifice their children and possibly even their cats.
Of course, none of this has much to do with Seidel’s actual work, which has only gotten better as he’s gotten older, regardless of who or what has been paying attention to him. He began his career in the shadow of Robert Lowell, and that shadow appears to have been nearly pitch black. Certainly there’s little original in lines like these, from 1963: “Now the green leaves of Irish Boston fly or wither / Into bloodred Hebrew, Cotton Mather’s fall. / When this morning the end-of-it-all / Siren, out of its head, / Turned inside out, hell-red, / Anne, you touched my wrist.” By “These Days” (1989), however, Seidel has largely abandoned the mannered Lowellian angst in favor of an approach that, while still technically accomplished, is considerably more ferocious. Here is “That Fall”:
The body on the bed is made of china,
Shiny china vagina and pubic hair.
The glassy smoothness of a woman’s body!
I stand outside the open door and stare.

I watch the shark glide by . . . it comes and goes —
Must constantly keep moving or it will drown.
The mouth slit in the formless fetal nose
Gives it that empty look — it looks unborn;

It comes into the room up to the bed
Just like a dog. The smell of burning leaves,
Rose bittersweetness rising from the red,
Is what I see. I must be twelve. That fall.
It seems inadequate to call this a poem of adolescent male sexual desire, although that’s exactly what it is. In any case, all the signature Seidel elements are present: the jeweler-exact metaphors (the shark has “a formless fetal nose”), the nightmare, Hieronymus Bosch atmosphere in which images and senses blur (“The smell of burning leaves . . . is what I see”), and the deliberate aural clumsiness (“shiny china vagina”) coupled uneasily with Swinburnian fluidity (“Rose bittersweetness rising from the red”).
This combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel’s most remarkable technical achievements: he’s like a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall. Skipping through his poems from The Cosmos Trilogy (2003), for instance, one finds the carefully judged quatrain that begins “October” (“It is time to lose your life, / Even if it isn’t over. / It is time to say goodbye and try to die. / It is October”) within a few dozen pages of the comic and terrible “Venus,” which includes possibly the most intentionally awful couplet written by anyone whose last name isn’t Geisel or Nash (suffice it to say the end words are “prodigious” and “steatopygous”). When people claim to be “shocked” by Seidel’s work, it’s not the actual content that disturbs them — if you’ve seen “28 Weeks Later,” you’ve seen worse — but rather these strange juxtapositions of artful and dreadful. This is probably the reason he reminds some readers of Philip Larkin, with whom he otherwise has little in common. The anger that often motivates Larkin’s rapid shifts in diction and tone becomes in Seidel a rage that can destabilize the poem entirely.
If anything, Seidel, born in 1936, has become less mellow as he’s aged. A sampling of lines from the new poems gathered here under the title “Evening Man:” “I make her oink” (in reference to sex); “My face had been sliced off / And lay there on the ground like a washcloth”; “And the angel of the Lord came to Mary and said: / You have cancer. / Mary could not think how. / No man had been with her.” This is grim stuff, even when meant to be amusing. But what prevents Seidel’s work from being simply grotesque or decadent — what makes it, in fact, anything but grotesque or decadent — is his connection to the larger political universe. Adam Kirsch has observed that “among contemporary poets, it is Seidel’s social interest that is really unusual.” This is exactly right, and the nature of Seidel’s social interest makes his work interesting in ways that the work of his closest peer, Sylvia Plath, often is not. Seidel and Plath are our most talented devotees of psychic violence, but whereas Plath co-opts the outside world to make her own obsessions burn hotter (“my skin, / Bright as a Nazi lampshade”), Seidel occupies a more ambiguous territory. He’s as likely to be possessed by events as to possess them (“Rank as the odor in urine / Of asparagus from the night before, / This is empire waking drunk, and remembering in the dark”). To be fair, Plath died young; no one knows how her work may have changed. Still, if the Plath we know is Lady Lazarus, the figure Seidel resembles most is the sin-eater, that old, odd and possibly apocryphal participant in folk funerals in Scotland and Wales.
In the late 17th century, the Englishman John Aubrey described sin-eating like so: “When the Corps was brought out of the house, and layd on the Biere, a Loafe of Breade was brought out, and delivered to the Sinne-eater over the Corps... in consideration whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all of the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they were dead.” In Aubrey’s telling, the sin-eaters were poor people at society’s margin, in particular “a long, leane, ugly, lamentable poor raskal” who lived alone, presumably surrounded by the many sins he had spent a lifetime taking on. Frederick Seidel isn’t poor, but it’s not hard to imagine him in that cottage at nightfall, looking half longingly, half contemptuously at the lights of the village while preparing for his lonely supper.» - David Orr


«In September 1968, a wide-ranging New York Times lifestyle piece headlined "Central Park's New Era: Fun for Everyone" took the measure of several New Yorkers, including a college student from the Bronx, two girls riding a tandem bicycle, a fashion executive and the poet Frederick Seidel. While in the zoo, looking at the seals, Seidel says, "I once wrote a poem about a girl I was in love with. I compared her to a seal. . . It was a poetic problem," he explains, "to connect the two - the girl and the seal - because it's really almost preposterous."
This is perhaps the least preposterous comparison to be found in Seidel's work. Long regarded as a kind of elegant cult figure in poetry circles, Seidel has a reputation that precedes him into every room: decadent, name-dropper, sexual dalliant, Ducati enthusiast, son of privilege. This runs counter to the man himself. He doesn't do poetry readings and has, for the most part, shunned interviews. There is no doubt that Seidel is one of the best poets alive today, and now, with the release of "Poems: 1959-2009," his collected works can be taken at their measure: They are haughty, funny and terrifying, with plenty of delicious contention throughout.
"Women have a playground slide / That wraps you in monsoon and takes you for a ride." The couplet has the kind of smug, playful confidence that is apprehended by the poem's following lines: "The English girl Louise, his latest squeeze, was being snide. / Easy to deride / The way he stayed alive to stay inside / His women with his puffed-up pride. / The pharmacy supplied / The rising fire truck ladder that the fire did not provide." The poem is called "Sii, romantico, Seidel, tanto per cambiare," and it is characteristic of much else in his canon that it reads like verse produced over a dinner of 19th century French symbolists hosted by Ogden Nash.
Unlike poets who write in the first person, disguising the "I" as someone - anyone - else, Seidel adheres to a strict regimen of personal disclosures. In "Darkening in the Dark," Seidel, now 73, warns, "No one my age can go on living for long. / No one the color of a turnip." Both poems are from "Evening Man," a new collection that begins the book. "Poems" lines up his collections in reverse chronological order; Seidel has turned the telescope around, forcing us to peer back at the very beginning. In 1963's "Final Solutions," it's startling how already practiced the young poet is at feeling old. Starting with the memories of his childhood bedroom decorations, Seidel moves from the upper-floored apartments of moneyed New York to the wards of Bellevue; he touches down on a black judge, a widower whose bathroom "cradles him like a wife" and an "old man's dream, terminated by a heart attack."
There is a careful weight to the whole business and a fondness for combining rhyme schemes and free verse, and it should come as no surprise that Robert Lowell was one of Seidel's early champions. Seidel interviewed Lowell for a 1961 issue of the Paris Review, and Lowell helped Seidel get "Final Solutions" published after it was turned down at the last minute for the Helen Burlin Memorial Award (sponsors' concerns that the collection may have libeled Mamie Eisenhower came to naught).
His next book, Sunrise, wouldn't appear for another 17 years, but Seidel must have gotten younger in the interim. Following Frank O'Hara's dictum from "Personism" that "if you're going to buy a pair of pants, you want them to be tight enough so that everyone will want to go to bed with you," the poems take their ease more crisply, with a less prefabricated concern about mortality. He recalls the "oyster glow" of a post-Manson Los Angeles. He takes walks through the Arizona desert with Antonioni and pursues a motorcycle-riding paramour "with breasts of Ajanta - big blue-sky clouds." In the nightmarish title poem he envisions a countdown involving "Organizations of gravity and light, / Supremely mass disappears and reappears / In an incomprehensible -1 of might."
From then on, Seidel is gleefully making up for lost time, fashioning a recognizable fingerprint of imagist perversity, first-name associations and tales from the traveled class. "These Days" appeared in 1989, followed by "My Tokyo" and "Going Fast" in the '90s. He inaugurated the 21st century with The Cosmos Poems, a trilogy of 100 poems commissioned for the opening of the Hayden Planetarium. It's a terse set of verses that work in broad strokes. There are winking titles like "Feminists in Space" and the sighting of a baby elephant "running along the ledge across / The front of an apartment building ten stories up." The Frederick Seidel of "Frederick Seidel" is ensconced in pâté; having ". . . lived a life of laziness and luxury. / He hid his life away in poetry." Sympathy too is a recurring mode. Although he comes ". . . in from the whirl / To a room where he does yoga / High above the homeless," his preoccupation with those below travels through a simply curious guilt into a kind of religious identification.
By 2008, Ooga Booga and its companion "Evening Man" are ringing the last bell for dinner. "You have to practice looking like thin air / When you become the way you do not want to be," he writes in "Evening Man." His friends are dying of diseases like lung cancer and Stage 3 multiple myeloma, but the old seducer rages while considering his life and his lovers in "Do You Doha?": "Act your age. / I don't have to. I won't. You can't make me. I'm in an absolute rage."
Finally, there is the wistful, powerfully managed "Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin." Announcing "My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark," he then recollects: "I knew a beauty named Dawn Green. / I used to wake at the crack of Dawn. / I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock, / And had a chance to do it all again, but do it right. / It was dawn green in pre-dawn America. I mean . . ."
If the whole justification of poetry can be broken down into a rhymed scheme of convincing women into bed, then still, with lines like these, he is at his most puckish and persuasive. "Ten-Shin" is the kind of poem one could use to pick up a girl on a bus, or at a bar; but as Seidel himself would affirm, she would have to be just the right kind of girl: the kind that appreciates a preposterous gesture.» - George Ducker


«With credentials like these, it should come as no surprise that Frederick Seidel has garnered little praise from the poetry establishment. But the establishment ought to be more wary of him. For the past 50 years, the reclusive Seidel has been assembling a kind of poetic dirty bomb targeted directly at the establishment’s most sacrosanct virtue: political correctness. Funded by the poet’s outrageous personal wealth and charged with lethal quantities of lust, loathing, arrogance, and gallows humor, Seidel’s bomb—Poems, 1959-2009—will deliver a prodigious payload (assuming there are enough poetry readers out there to register the impact).
By his own account, Seidel has “lived a life of laziness and luxury”, as he writes in the poem, “Frederick Seidel”. Dubbed by recent critics a “luxe, randy celebutante” and “laureate of the louche”, he seems to prefer the self-title “liar with a lyre”. At the same time, his friends all commend his generosity and interviewers often observe a shy, courtly man. Seidel, for his part, insists that what the reader struggles with “is that the man in the poems is the real man, while the man behind the poems just wants his privacy.” That said, it is hard to understand how a man like Seidel—equal parts playboy, hell’s angel, gentleman, and sado-masochist—can expect people to remain uninterested in him after reading his poems.
Frederick Seidel was born in 1936 to a life of privilege. The son of a wealthy coal magnate, he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard. In 1962, his first book, Final Solutions, was selected by Robert Lowell and other distinguished poets for the 92nd Street Y’s inaugural poetry award, featuring a cash prize and a publishing deal with Atheneum Press. But when the 26-year-old poet refused to remove allegedly libelous passages from his manuscript, the awarding body withdrew the prize and the panel of judges resigned in protest. Random House published Final Solutions the following year, though Seidel’s next book, Sunrise, was not to appear for 17 years. Since 1980, Seidel has published eight volumes of verse, including his latest, Poems, 1959-2009, which includes a short collection of new work titled “Evening Man”.
Like the scabrous persona (“Fred Seidel”) whom he tends to project, Frederick Seidel has a short list of hobbies: poetry, sex, dangerous machines (the “916” in the passage above refers to Seidel’s beloved Ducati 916 motorcycle), conspicuous consumption, and the desecration of liberal pieties (he has a poem titled “Feminists in Space”). If the phrase “the need for speed” didn’t already exist, Seidel would have been obliged to coin it. As he writes in “Dante’s Beatrice”, from Going Fast:
I bought the racer
To replace her.
It became my slave and I its.
All it lacked was tits.
All it lacked
Between its wheels was hair.
I don’t care.
We do it anyway.
This passage showcases Seidel’s love of excruciating, drumfire rhymes, other examples of which include “ready to get deady” (also from Going Fast) and “The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude / Made me lewd” (“Bologna”). “The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger”, he writes in “Climbing Everest”,
But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It’s almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

I’m getting young.
I’m totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite
Which will turn me into light.
God is great! I suck her tongue.

I mean—my sunbursts, and there are cloudbursts.
My dynamite penis
Is totally into Venus.
No amount of Viagra could move most 70-year-olds to such a priapic frenzy. And while this might be the versified ramblings of a dirty old man, it is also refreshing satire. The irritating term “metrosexual” deserves to be deflated by a poem like “Climbing Everest”.
Seidel’s earliest work in Final Solutions, while already distinguished and calculated to cause offense, often reads like a racist pastiche of Robert Lowell’s confessional mode, penned by Woody Allen:
The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the day after.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.
—from “Wanting to Live in Harlem”
In addition to his early debt to Robert Lowell (whom he interviewed in 1961 for the Paris Review), Seidel learned much from Ezra Pound, who promoted a poetics of intense compression and admonished poets always to seek the mot juste, the strikingly apt word or phrase. Seidel’s capacity for minting mots justes is off the charts, and his increasingly compressed work has only improved with each volume. In “The Pierre Hotel, New York, 1946”, for instance, he writes what might be mistaken for one of Pound’s short Imagist lyrics: “The bowl of a silver spoon held candlelight, / A glistening oyster of gold.”
Like so many other poets of his generation, Seidel made a pilgrimage to visit Pound at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was imprisoned for treasonous WWII radio broadcasts. Embraced by Pound, as he writes in “Glory”, Seidel stayed in D.C. for a week, discussing poetry and hearing the great poet “fill the alcove with [the] glory” of Provençal and Italian verse. The 17-year-old poet even had the nerve to suggest two small corrections to Pound’s Confucius translations, having very little Chinese under his belt. Surprisingly, Pound adopted the corrections and sent Seidel to an associate at Harvard’s Yenching Institute, a man ominously named Achilles Fang.
“Achilles Fang” would be a perfect name for Seidel’s poetic persona, capturing the ludicrous and terrifying quality of his work. Seidel casts himself as a kind of modern Achilles, a god-like, foredoomed hero racing to a violent death on his Ducati 916, while also cultivating a certain fangs-bared vampiric flair. Both aspects of his voice are on display in “A Vampire in the Age of AIDS”, one of his most unnerving and representative poems:
He moves carefully away from the extremely small pieces
Of human beings spread around for miles, still in his leather seat.
He looks like a hunchback walking in the Concorde chair,
Bent over, strapped in, eyes on the ground
To avoid stepping on the soft.
He will use his influence to get
The cockpit voice recorder when it is recovered copied.
He loves the pilot in the last ninety seconds’
Matter-of-factness turning into weeping screams,
Undead in the double-breasted red velvet smoking jacket Huntsman made.
Is the wealthy vampire who travels by Concorde and wears a Huntsman suit Seidel? Does Seidel identify himself with AIDS? As usual, the pieces do not add up to a real person or to a coherent scenario. This poem might offend us, but the offensive agents remain unknown quantities. Plane crashes and AIDS are terrible, but what have they got to do with vampires? Though callous, this poem is also frighteningly controlled. The phrase “to avoid stepping on the soft” would have been ruined had Seidel finished it. Such is the considered delicacy of even Seidel’s most brutal images.» - Stephen Ross


Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin

This jungle poem is going to be my last.
This space walk is.
Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,
I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.
The stars above my bed at night are vast.
I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.
My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,
And all the dogs begin to bark.
My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,
And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,
And all the foam and fevers shiver.
And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!
Between my legs it’s Baudelaire.
He wrote about her Central Park of hair.

I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,
In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.
I’m on a timer that will give me time
To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.
The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance
A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.
Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.
We’re squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!
It’s like a shout.
It’s what minuterie is all about.
Just getting to the landing through the dark
That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.
And she’s so happy. It is grand!
I put my mobile in her ampersand.

The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.
The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.
I don’t remember poems I write.
I turn around and they are gone.
I do remember poor King Richard Nixon’s madness.
Pierre Leval, we loved those years!
We knocked back shots of single malt all night.
Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—
Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.
A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.
I live flap copy for a children’s book.
He wants to lick. He wants to look.
A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.
Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!
Democracy in Baghdad makes men think
Monstrosity was not so bad.
I followed Gandhi barefoot to
Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.
The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink
The shrunken page size of the New York Times, and yet we had
A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,
But that was when it mattered. Do
I matter? That is true.
I don’t matter but I do. I lust for fame,
And after never finding it I never was the same.
I roared into the heavens and I soared,
And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.
I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.
I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,
And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.
It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean
Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.
I’ve had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”
The right schools taught me how to tock.
I’m tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.
These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.
They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.
That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.
Their arrows entered red meat in the glory
Streaming down from the clerestory.

Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.
I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.
It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.
You were so blond in Rue de l’Université!
The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff was game
For anything. I’m lolling here in Mayfair under bluish
Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.
Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.
One cannot be the way one was back then today.
It went away.
I go from Claridge’s to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back
To Claridge’s, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.
The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.
The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.
Outside the windows is New York.
I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland
Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.
And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some
I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.
The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned
Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.
The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound
That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.
The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.
They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.
The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.
The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.


One Last Kick for Dick

In memory of Richard Poirier (1925–2009)

Old age is not for sissies but death is just disgusting.
It's a dog covering a bitch, looking so serious, looking ridiculous, thrusting.
The EMS team forces a tube down your airway where blood is crusting.
Imagine internal organs full of gravel oozing and rusting.
An ancient vase crossing the street on a walker, trudgingly trusting
The red light won't turn green, falls right at the cut in the curb, bursting, busting.
You're your ass covered with dust that your dust mop was sick of dusting.
The windshield wipers can't keep up. The wind is gusting.
A massive hemorrhagic bleed in the brain stem is Emerson readjusting.

Why did the fucker keep falling?
I'm calling you. Why don't you hear me calling?
Why did his faculties keep failing?
I'm doing my usual shtick with him and ranting and railing.
You finally knocked yourself unconscious and into the next world
Where Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the ballroom of the mind, whirled and twirled.
Fifty-three years ago, at the Ritz in Boston, we tried one tutorial session in the bar.
You got so angry you kicked me under the table. Our martinis turned black as tar.
And all because your tutee told you Shakespeare was overrated. I went too far.


Evening Man

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
Who does the things most people only dream about.
He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
You can't drink that much port and not have gout.

In point of fact, it is arthritis.
His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
To be a candidate for higher office,
You have to practice drastic openness.

You have to practice looking like thin air
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.

Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we're always headed.
Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.

Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless—
Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.


Our Gods

Older than us, but not by that much, men
Just old enough to be uncircumcised,
Episcopalians from the Golden Age
Of schools who loved to lose gracefully and lead—
Always there before us like a mirage,
Until we tried to get closer, when they vanished,
Always there until they disappeared.

They were the last of a race, that was their cover—
The baggy tweeds. Exposed in the Racquet Club
Dressing room, they were invisible,
Present purely in outline like the head
And torso targets at the police firing
Range, hairless bodies and full heads of hair,
Painted neatly combed, of the last WASPs.

They walked like boys, talked like their grandfathers—
Public servants in secret, and the last
Generation of men to prefer baths.
These were the CIA boys with EYES
ONLY clearance and profiles like arrowheads.
A fireside frost bloomed on the silver martini
Shaker the magic evenings they could be home.

They were never home, even when they were there.
Public servants in secret are not servants,
Either. They were our gods working all night
To make Achilles' beard fall out and prop up
The House of Priam, who by just pointing sent
A shark fin gliding down a corridor,
Almost transparent, like a watermark.


Homage to Cicero

Anything and everyone is life when two
Radios tune to the news on different stations while
A bass recorder pulses familiar sequences of sound waves,
An old sad sweet song, live. A computer
On stage listens to it all and does a print-out
Of it in Fortran, after a microsecond lag, and adds its own
Noise. The print-out piles up in folds
On the stage, in a not quite random way.
"Plaisir d'Amour" was the song.

Balls of cement shaped by a Vassar
Person, "majored in art at Vassar,"
Each must weigh a hundred pounds, fill a gallery.
They are enough alike to be perhaps
The look of what? The weight the person was
When she first was no longer a child—
Her planet lifeless after the Bomb—an anorexic image.
The hideous and ridiculous are obsessed
By the beautiful which they replace.

It is an age we may not survive.
The sciences know. We do believe in art
But ask the computer to hear and preserve our cry.
O computer, hear and preserve our cry.
Mortem mihi cur consciscerem
Causa non visa est, cur optarem multae causae.
Vetus est enim, "ubi non sis qui fueris,
Non esse cur velis vivere." Or, in English:
We are no longer what we were.


What One Must Contend With

There was a man without ability.
He talked arrogance, secretly sick at heart.
Imagine law school with his terrible stutter!—
He gagged to be smooth. But he wasn't good.
Hadn't he always planned to move on to writing?
Which of course failed, how would it not? He called
Himself a writer but it didn't work,
He chose middling friends he could rise above
But it made no difference, with no ability.

He talked grand, the terrible endearing stutter.
Batting his eyes as if it felt lovely.
He batted and winced his self-hate, like near a sneeze.
He wrote and wrote, still he could not write,
He even published, but he could not write:
The stories one story of honey and abuse—
Love and the law—he was the boy…De Sade
Scratching his quill raw just once to get it off.
His pen leaked in Redbook the preseminal drool.

He must do something, do something. Boy you can
Reminisce forever about Harvard,
The motorboat won't run on your perfume,
Endless warm anecdotes about past girls
Aren't a wax your cross-country skis will ride on.
He took an office just like Norman Mailer.
He married a writer just like Lizzie Lowell.
He shaved his beard off just like. Yes. Exactly.
It is a problem in America.

You never know who's dreaming about you.
They must do something to try to shift the weight
They wear—painted and smiling like gold the lead!
No wonder he walked staidly. They've time to dream.
Oh hypocrites in hell dying to catch up!
Oh in etterno faticoso manto!
And if you hail one and stop—he's coming—he'll stutter,
"Costui par vivo all'atto della gola,"
"This man seems alive, by the working of his throat."

The dreaming envying third-rate writhe in America.
He sucked his pipe. He skied he fished he published.
He fucked his wife's friends. Touching himself he murmured
He was not fit to touch his wife's hem.
He dreamed of running away with his sister-in-law!
Of doing a screenplay. Him the guest on a talk show—
Wonderful—who has read and vilifies Freud!
How he'd have liked to put Freud in his place,
So really clever Freud was, but he was lies.

It was autumn. It rained. His lies drooped down.
It was a Year of the Pig in Vietnam,
In Vietnam our year the nth, the Nixonth,
Sometimes one wants to cut oneself in two
At the neck. The smell. The gore. To kill! There was
The child batting her head against the wall,
Beating back and forth like a gaffed fish.
There was the wife who suspected they were nothing.
There's the head face-up in the glabrous slop.

You feel for him, the man was miserable.
It's mad t-toohbe so ad hominem!
And avid, when the fellow was in Vermont,
For Southeast Asia. Was he miserable?
Another creative couple in Vermont,
The wife toasts the husband's trip to New York,
The little evening he's planning. In less than a day
He will enter my poem. He picks at her daube.
There's the head face-up in the glabrous slop.

Voilá donc quelqu'un de bien quelconque!
Ah Vermont! The artists aggregate,
A suburb of the Iowa Writers' Workshop
Except no blacks with no ability.
I am looking down at you, at you and yours,
Your stories and friends, your banal ludicrous dreams,
Dear boy, the horror, mouth uncreating,
Horror, horror, I hear it, head chopped off,
The stuttering head face-up in a pile of slop.

Just stay down there dear boy it is your home.
The unsharpened knives stuck to the wall
Magnet-bar dully. The rain let off the hush
Of a kettle that doesn't sing. Each leaf was touched,
Each leaf drooped down, a dry palm and thin wrist.
His beautifully battered sweet schoolboy satchel walked
With him out the door into scrutiny,
The ears for eyes of a bat on the wings of a dove.
Art won't forgive life, no more than life will.