Frederick Seidel
 

Frederick Seidel began his career in '59 as an imitator of Robert Lowell, and, though you won't find strictly metrical poems in his first book, his devotion to form is complete: everything proceeds in strictly mapped stanzas.

Since that book, Final Solutions, which caused quite a stir at the time—it was pronounced "anti-semitic" even though Seidel is a Jew—Seidel has gotten progressively weirder, more shocking, and a lot more fun. Indeed, he's not the kind of poet of which one says "I love his work"; more "I am fascinated by his work"; "His work is insane"; and even "I can't turn away."

This is a man on display in the full, absurd, horrific and beautiful force of himself. I'd say.

The reason I bring him up on the Sphere—aside from that I find his work very stimulating—is that he is, in a sense, a formalist. Check this (no doubt not one of his finest pieces, but still) from his 2009 collection, "Evening Man":

Freddy Dew was Portia's younger brother.
Lord Dew was just eighteen.
Last year they lost their father and their mother,
A cousin of the queen.

They had the house in Mayfair on their own,
Right out of Henry James.
A brother/sister strangeness set the tone,
Blondes wrapped in icy flames.

It proceeds like this for several more stanzas, all metrically tight and well-wrought—and deliciously campy, I might add.

Othertimes Seidel is writing triple sonnets that are almost perfectly formal, minus a little metrical irregularity and an odd rhyme-scheme:

The fellow talking to himself is me,
Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see
—Me

Even a poem like "Remembering Elaine's", though not metrical, is quite formal: it's rhymed AABBB in quintets. Observe:

We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.

This is not to say that Seidel is a formalist: many of his poems are pure free verse, many rhyme haphazardly if at all, and others seem to almost mock the idea of form, such as this:

Women have a playground slide
That wraps you in monsoon and takes you for a ride.
The English girl Louise, his latest squeeze, was being side.
Easy to deride
—"Sii romantico, Seidel, tanto per cambiare"

Which proceeds with this monorhyme for nearly a page.

Which is all to say that Seidel is a poet who, if not a formalist, is deeply indebted to form in a way which I feel we on the Sphere can appreciate.

Beside that, he is a poet unlike almost anyone else writing today: in his desire to shock, to be an affront to taste, and in so doing challenge the very conventions that "taste" is based on (more on this in Robbins' essay here). If a morality constructed on "taste" is ultimately false, what are we left with? For Seidel, the answer seems to be an overbearing human instinct that is at once creative and destructive. It's a very interesting answer, to say the least.

Anyways, I'd love to hear if anyone else has thoughts on this poet who I've found very rewarding—he's been the most fun reading poetry I've had in, well, years. Reminded me that reading poetry can and should be fun, in fact. If you do decide to slog through his poems, prepare to be shocked at least every couple pages.

I started reading Seidel about two years ago. I have a mixed reaction to his work: there were lines or stanzas that I liked immediately, but none of his poems strike me as being satisfying as a whole. For example, his poem “Racer” begins with the following:

I spend most of my time not dying.
That’s what living is for.

But then it peters out with this stanza:

Tonight Bologna is fog.
This afternoon, there it was.
With all the mechanics who are making it around it.
It stood on a sort of altar.
I stood in a sort of fog,
Taking digital photographs of my death.

The first five of these lines I find uninspiring, and the last line seems tacked on to grind out a last bit of shock value. Or so it seems to me.

The poems I remember liking best are "Boys" and "December."

I bought Seidel's 1959-2009 collected shortly after it came out, mostly on the strength of reviews that noted his fondness for rhyme and meter. The book sits on my shelves still, but I don't pick it up often.

By contrast with Ian, who finds the poems fun, I sometimes find them--what to say? Challenging is too positive, though it gets at the fact that I sometimes just don't understand them. But usually I do get them; I'm simply put off. The absolutely deadpan, flat affect with which he approaches sordid situations gets to me. And he has a habit of forcing me to look at what I'd rather not. "Lorraine Motel, Memphis" is an example.

Okay, the really surprising rhymes can sometimes make me smile. But if I'm looking for fun and I have to get through the deadpan shock to find it, I'd rather just pick up George Starbuck instead.

I think I keep Seidel on my shelves out of a sense of the duty to face all of poetry. It's the same reason I keep Celan, who is terribly difficult for other reasons.

(This is the reason I don't generally write reviews of books I dislike. All it does is reveal my own limitations.)

I do think Seidel is a poet of strong lines and stanzas. Take the beginning of "Miami in the Arctic Circle":

And the angel of the Lord came to Mary and said:
You have cancer.
She could not think how.
No man had been with her.

The poem continues at this level of hilarity for a little while ("You were in my arms / I still had arms") until it ends in something much stranger:

Fiddles and viols, let me hear your old gold.
Trumpets, the petals of the antique rose unfold.
This is the end.
Testing, one, two, three, this is a test.

I mean, I love that ending, but I have no idea what he's talking about in the first two lines. Often I think Seidel is aiming to parody existing styles.

I don't aim to defend all of Seidel's work—I don't think it needs defending—so all I'd say in response to your observation, Edward, is that I don't need every poem to function perfectly. Yes, there are Seidel poems that fall flat: "Racer" might be one of them. But, as you point out, it has some strong points as well.

I agree that "Boys" is among Seidel's finest poems. It's one where he tones down the shock value and lets the content speak for itself.

Maryann, Starbuck is a poet I should check out. I've read a bit of his work, but not a lot of it. His rhyming is ingenious, of course.

One note on Seidel contra Starbuck: for me, a poet like Starbuck—as I so far understand his work—brings pleasure through demonstration of brilliant style and technical ability; we appreciate the genius behind the forms and rhymes. This is a similar pleasure I get from reading Muldoon. However, with Seidel—and his heirs, like Michael Robbins—the pleasure is only partly technical (indeed these poets are technical inferiors to Muldoon and Starbuck). It's also in their implicit critique of current trends in poetry and perception, the way they try to destabilise and upset cliché. Thus, their content I find fascinating.

Ian: I certainly don’t want to argue you out of enjoying a poet you obviously admire. I agree that Seidel writes some excellent individual lines and stanzas. For me, though, a little bit of what he does goes a long way. I can see why you and others might like him, though.

As far as I can tell, he and Robbins have taken the next logical steps beyond the Modernists. Poets like Pound or Apollinaire tried to build their poems on surprise. Seidel bases his on shock.

One thing I do like about the technique is how he gives each of his lines room to breathe. He knows what his best lines are and tends to gives them space, adapting his lineation to them, and even repeating them within a poem or in another poem. He does use enjambment at times, and the effect is often momentarily disorienting:

I don’t believe in anything, I do
Believe in you.
Down here in hell we do don’t.
I can’t think of anything I won’t. (“December”)

I can now see what you were trying for in a few of your recent poems here. It is hard to do what Seidel does: it takes a good sense of timing and a good handle on what the audience will think.

At any rate, I hope that you’ll post your further thoughts on Seidel here or elsewhere. It’s always enlightening to see what poets have to say about the influences that are most important to them, whether I share that enthusiasm or not.

I haven't read much Seidel, but I'm enjoying this discussion.

Like Edward said, it's very interesting for me to read what a fellow poet admires in another poet, maybe especially one I don't know well.

Hey, thanks for coming back. Don't worry; you're not going to dissuade me—I do enjoy a discussion though. I find the above quote a really interesting way of approaching Seidel's work, but also one I can't entirely agree with. For me, Seidel's success is predicated on a couple things:

1) The injunction "make it new." Whether this means surprise or shock isn't relevant for me; what matters is that Seidel is doing something different. For Pound, it was different to just write "the apparition of the faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough." In 2017, the game has changed; what once was seen as surprising is now the stock-and-trade of poets everywhere. Given that, it's no surprise that poets like Seidel and Robbins have turned to mocking tradition as a way to actually inject some "newness" into it.

2) The death of the author. Seidel doesn't agree with the death of the author, I think, but he playfully mocks the idea by creating a persona so evil, so over the top, so unbelievable, that we are forced to ask: is this really the author or not? Which tacitly proves that, all along, we had been identifying the poet with his/her creation as the mystical "N", whether we wanted to admit it or not. This also pokes a hole in the balloon of the poet as some sort of "good" person—which there is really no need for the poet to be. The poet is not a priest or moralist (at least not necessarily) (though claiming that in itself may be another sort of moralizing).

3) The idea of "play" as an essential component of post-modernism. Where most of us see "play" at work in the ouvre of someone like Ashbery, Seidel is up to a different sort of language-play. Where Ashbery forces us to "play" with his language in attempting to unpick and make meaning from it (should we so choose), Seidel tests the limits of language to shock and disturb—even though, as far as I can tell, not much is really at stake. So I would firmly call Seidel (and Robbins) a postmodernist, though of a much "easier" stock than Ashbery and his followers.

Am I making any sense here?

Ian, you are making perfect sense. I think that you’re really on to something in your point #2. I hadn’t considered Seidel’s persona as a rebuke to the Death of the Author, but it makes plenty of sense to do so.

I must admit that I’ve never thought of Seidel as a particularly postmodern poet: his rhythms and straight-forward declarative sentences seem different from the fragmentation and slipperiness of Ashbery or Armantrout, and his concerns seem to lie outside how much language can convey or the fragmentation of identity that fascinate the postmoderns. Instead, I see him responding to the themes and techniques of Eliot or middle Lowell. That said, you may very well have a better feel for his work than I do.

1) I don't find much shock in his stuff. An appeal, maybe rare poetry but pretty much slathered all over plenty of other places. But then again, I don't have some big deal about make it new as much as make it count.

2) I am one who does on fact figure N as the author and because of that finds certain poetic spells and personas extremely unwise and bad mojo. From that you can imagine why I don't like much of his schtick.

We don't really need a poet to be a good person? Are you sure? I guess it depends on what the poet is actually doing with his anti-goodness. Not what clever bits his reviewers can imagine but what the words most often tend to evoke and conjure in the world they are set loose upon. I think his stuff trades in an ugly magic. I don't find it free from cliche just because the tropes come from violent less lyric-ed quarters. Violence is the king of been there, done that.

3) Not much at stake. Exactly.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to stop you from finding the joy and worth you do in his work. I suspect I am from an extreme distance on this one. Just playing along and sharing my quarter cent.

Hmmm. I see I really dislike his work now that I reread this. Hmmm. Sorry. My own idiosyncrasies prolly.

Hmm, I still can't agree with this. That Seidel's rhythms are straightforward declarative sentences is precisely what makes him post-modern: they're too declarative. Take any of his recent work (past 20 years). Enjambment is so infrequent as to be almost inconsequential. Hell, the guy even uses periods to stop lines that would logically be enjambed. It's a send up on confessional / other modern styles, making it distinctly "post" modern. The sheer hyperbole of the whole thing stretches the limits of language--and you can see this especially in a poem like "Pain Management," where he writes "Art throws the dog a bone. / I am ashamed of my poem" as if finding the limits of what poetry can do to "manage pain." Of course that poetry can do anything might be a pre-postmodern outlook, I guess, and of course I agree with you that he's not PoMo in the same way Ashbery or Armantrout are. But fragmentation of identity--or almost the destruction of it--is very Seidelian (harkening back to the death of the author). The largest questions his work asks if precisely related to it, I'd say: who is this person? Can he be real? If he is, what do we do? What would that mean?

Well, what does 'make it count' mean?

Sure, I can imagine why. But I actually also am not a huge proponent of Death of the A. Seidel himself has said that everything in his poems is true. Obviously not literally, but on some level. And who's to say it isn't? Truth is, I agree with the ideology/outlook in much of his poems. The cynicism, the hopelessness. I think Seidel's poems say that: the world is fucked up, let's not deny it. We are all complicit. Change is largely impossible. Maybe writing, and friendship, can help.

That's sobering, but painful. Absolutely.

See my point immediately above re: this. The world is violent. Poetry should reflect that.

Adorno: to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Seidel: then my poetry will be barbaric. Barbaric poems for a barbarous world.

Or maybe there is something at stake in his work--well, as much as can be at stake in poetry anyway. That's actually how I feel: that Seidel's work acknowledges how little most poetry does and tries to do the best it can.

Just check out "Mr. Delicious" if you want to read a Seidel poem that is absolutely spot on, IMO, in its critique of the way we talk about the Holocaust and suffering in general.