I'd say "a different kind of courage" is a rather large understatement. People can trash your love poem, but no one is going to get as p/o'd as I see people getting in here. Seidel has had death threats - Wendy Cope, Sharon Olds, Frost, Byron - not so much.

Jeanne

Perhaps, as a white man who was born and raised in St. Louis County, Seidel felt obliged to say, in the poem's most unpoetic line, "I wouldn't want to be a black man in St. Louis County." But so what? KKK members don't need Harvard educations to say the same. I guess I was hoping for a little more insight.

[Edited to say--In retrospect, this remark I made yesterday sounds a lot more snarky and anti-elitist than I'd intended. I don't expect poems to convey "messages" in a didactic way, and of course I was taking into account the possibility that such a line might be doing more than its face value suggests. Poems are supposed to let you arrive at your own answers, rather than spelling everything out--an opening out to meaning, rather than a narrowing down. But I was still hopeful that, after I'd invested a reasonable amount of time and energy to connect the dots presented by the poet, I might arrive at deeper insights from the poem than I've managed to.]

Ian, I liked Seidel's "Boys" poem--which, I suppose, is also about black men in St. Louis County--much better than this one. In "Boys" (as in Browning's "My Last Duchess"), the poet seems fully conscious of the limitations of his narrator's point of view. His carefully-chosen little details add up to an impression of privilege, self-congratulation, power-tripping, etc. In contrast, I'm not sure that the poet is aware that his Ferguson poem is stuck in a particular mid-20th-century point of view.

To me, the unsuccessfully unzipped fly, vulnerability, and reaching through the window bit represent the purported struggle for Darren Wilson's weapon, said to have taken place through the window of the police car--a claim which the physical evidence supports. Fly-equals-holster is a bit less obvious than the stereotypical gun-equals-phallus, but that strikes me to me as a plausible interpretation. The magical intervention of an assisting angel is one way of explaining why the physical evidence and the witness accounts of Michael Brown's non-threatening behavior don't always add up.

However, the easiest explanation for why the two don't always add up--and the one which Seidel's poem seems to endorse, if I'm reading it right--is that Michael Brown's transformation into a symbol makes the actual facts of what happened irrelevant to some parties. This tunnel vision be true in some cases, but I don't think it's representative of what the protestors are actually saying--if one takes the trouble to listen to more than a soundbite here and a soundbite there.

I can't tell if Seidel has failed to listen, or is mocking those who have failed to listen. It's hard not to think of simplistic, chant-like slogans in general, when the poem says:

The invocation of Billie Holiday as proof that light-skinned blacks have also faced prejudice--and therefore what happened in Ferguson couldn't ONLY have been about skin color!--seems so banal that I'm inclined to conclude that Seidel is mocking the protestors. (Seriously, does anyone over five years old think that racial prejudice is only skin deep? Sheesh.)

Today's Ferguson protestors do chant slogans, but few, if any, of them are claiming that we would have a more just and peaceful society if people of all races could freely steal cigarillos from stores, and then brazenly walk down the middle of the street with them, and then defy a police officer's order to move to the sidewalk, and then perhaps grab for the police officer's weapon, etc., etc.

No. The protestors' message is that lapses of character and judgment are more often fatal for young black men than for young white men. THAT's why Michael Brown can still be regarded as a martyr, even though everyone recognizes that he wasn't a saint. (Or angel, any more than Billie Holiday was.)

Saying that the work of King is still unfinished is not the same as a hyperbolic transubstantiation of the body of Brown into the body of King. The body I see most clearly in this poem is that of the straw man Seidel has constructed for the purpose of knocking it down.

It also bothers me somewhat that, even though I am forty-six years old--can I even use the term "middle-aged" anymore, given how few ninety-two-year-olds I know?--I still seem too young to be Seidel's target audience for "Ferguson." He assumes that the reader will instantly recall the FBI's surveillance of, harassment of, and rumored involvement in the demises of Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Hoffa, and others thought to be Communist sympathizers. Throw in Robert Kennedy and Billie Holiday, and the poem feels painfully, painfully dated. It's addressed over my head, to my parents' generation.

Which, unfortunately, makes me think of my dad's dementia when I encounter the poem's use of absurdities and repetition--not, perhaps, the connotations Seidel was going for. I think he probably meant to convey the differing accounts of what happened. For example, the hands of the waiter raised as the man in the flaming clothes (police uniform?) approaches him evokes the version of events in which Michael Brown's hands were raised to show that he was unarmed. (In contrast, the Robert Kennedy video, which Seidel's narrator claims to have seen himself, remains identical in both tellings. See what a reliable witness he is? We can totally trust him. Even if he is well over the proverbial age of thirty.)

Perhaps it's appropriate for the poem to feel stuck in the past, since Seidel suggests that society hasn't progressed very far since then. The mention of time delays in the poem evokes both the months-long delay while the grand jury examined witnesses and evidence, and the decades-long delay between Robert Kennedy's announcement to a largely black audience and this week's press conference to a largely black audience. But my overall impression is that Seidel is more stuck in the past than society is.

(Then again, I get stuck in my own ruts, as well, particularly where experimentalism is concerned, so I've a significant pot/kettle problem when I take issue with Seidel's.)

I do very much like Seidel's line "And brings God a glass of humble water," which hints that a police officer clothed in power and authority expects people of color to treat him as if he's godlike and must be placated at all costs, lest they incur his fiery wrath. When that line is immediately followed by the idea that, if a victim can change from a corpse to a cause, there's also hope for white-dominated police agencies [Edited to say: or other, vaguer, Powers That Be] to change from harassment and occasional brutality "to blessing and being blessed"...i.e., it's too much to expect them to stop thinking they're godlike, but maybe they could do so in a more benevolent manner?...wow. I don't share that sardonic attitude, but I find it very effective in the poem.

Thanks for the conversation, which I hope isn't over, and for introducing me to more of Seidel's work. He may never be my cup of tea, and I may be badly misreading him here, but I do find his approaches interesting. Many of my own narrators are not particularly sympathetic, sometimes quite intentionally, so I would be foolish not to pay attention to what he's doing and why, and how it goes over.

What Orwn said. Both posts.

Thanks, Julie, for your usual incredibly thoughtful piece. I'll read it again in a bit.

Quincy, I do think it's very hard to write a political poem--although you do it often, and very well, of course.

For me, the language doesn't come easily--although I've done my damnedest with my poem in Metrical right now (barely commented on, I have to add.) And that struggle might be true for other American and English poets--maybe for not having lived through really difficult times. I'm not sure... The Irish seem able to do it, and the Eastern Europeans (I love Zbigniev Herbert).

Hmm, but politics does creep into all sorts of American poems, less overtly, perhaps? I've just been reading--or going back to--James Wright's "The Branch Will Not Break," which has plenty of commentary in the midst of all the lyrical stuff.

I suppose there are lots of ways to write a political poem--and some poems are more obviously political than others.

Charlotte

I dunno Jeanne. I got my first anonymous threatening letter in the mail when I was fifteen. It shakes a person up, especially when one is a teenager with no Establishment support. But it's better than being a minion or a tool. Or confusing glibness with bravery. I imagine I was the only member of the New York City rhyme-and-meter contingent who actually went to any of the Ferguson demos. Business as usual.

I definitely wouldn't consider myself establishment, but you have plenty of support here Quincy. I'm sorry to hear that, and can't imagine how that must feel, esp. being so young at the time. Good on you that you are writing about stuff that matters and not being a minion or tool, heh. I'm guessing it wasn't a love poem you got a death threat over though?

Jeanne



p.s. Charlotte, I've read it some 20 times. Stunning. Just haven't had the energy to give it what it deserves.

Jeanne--

Just to note, fifteen came and went almost a quarter-century ago. I suppose my point was that it kind of comes with the territory, though I'd feel more sympathy for Seidel had he not angled for that CIA front group job in the early 1960s.

Quincy,

I did have an idea that you are older now. Death threats aren't much of a thing in Canada, but I don't have a statute of limitations on empathy is all.

I know little of Seidel except what I've been learning lately. Just know I love the poem and his style, and if it's true that this is one of his lesser ones, I look forward to the rest. 50 years is a long time ago, people can do lots of changing. I'm curious about this CIA stuff, but there's a good chance it has no bearing on his belief system now.

Jeanne

I'm a college student — and they're not hated at all (or really known, too much) among my peers. I've found their work more interesting, on a personal level, than most other things I read. That's just me, but it is me.

As for this poem, I have to say I don't "get it" as much as I feel I naturally "get" many of Seidel's poems; the references do feel difficult, but I think you're looking at it simplistically if you can only take away that he doesn't care, or is white, or isn't some great black writer (which seems to be a fair criticism, but come on, it's not the Paris Review's job to promote certain writers. They can do what they want).

Anyways, I don't think you should be so dismissive of this poem. That's all. I haven't put the time into close reading it so I won't say that I disagree with your assessment of it as unworthy of the Review, but I will say that reading Seidel's past work has made me feel that that's probably not the case.

Thanks though,
Ian

Julie --

I also appreciate your ruminations on this poem. I think the theme of transfiguring a man’s death into a symbol is present and important. And I, too, was struck by the lines you quote:

Skin color is the name.
Skin color is the game.
Skin color is to blame for Ferguson, Missouri.

My thought is that these lines are simply false and profoundly true; at the same time, they are simply true and profoundly false. At different levels of meaning. The ‘slipperiness’ Sam Gwynn referred to works intelligently here, I think – though maybe I am the only person who thinks so.

(Which is -- still -- not to say that I understand the whole poem, or I make a claim for its 'greatness'.)