[Ian Hoffman]

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.

[Edward Zuk]

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."

[Maryann Corbett]

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.)

[Ian Hoffman]

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.

[Edward Zuk]

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.

[Michael F]

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.

[Ian Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Edward Zuk

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.

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?

[R. S. Gwynn]

I reviewed My Tokyo back in 1993. I really disliked the ethos of the poet--jet-setting, club-hopping, Bugatti-riding--work that gave "privilege" a whole new meaning. The technique, with all those loose lines and end-stopped rhymes, wasn't impressive either. Later, he had a poem each month, titled with the name of the month, in the WSJ. A friend, an established editor, would clip them and send them. They seemed pretty vacant to me. I'll admit that he presented a type of persona--the poet as well-heeled flaneur--that was original in American poetry: the poet as Richie Rich. Nevertheless, he has managed to stick around, so maybe I'll order the selected ($2.93+shipping at Amazon) and give him another look. Maybe his brief chronicles and abstracts of the times will strike me differently this time. After all, we're pretty obsessed with the lives of the idle rich, so there's one good reason to explore the poetry further.

[Ian Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

His poetry does not reflect violence in the world. It is cropped. It reflects only the violent.

I'll need you to unpack that a bit more in order for me to understand what you mean.

Celan responded to Adorno: ‘No poem after Auschwitz: what sort of an idea of a “Poem” is being implied here? The arrogance of the man who hypothetically and speculatively has the audacity to observe or report on Auschwitz from the perspective of nightingales and song thrushes.’ It is interesting that *Adorno never cornered the barbarism of philosophy into quiet the same pause.

Absolutely agree with Celan's analysis of what Adorno meant; disagree with your interpretation of what Seidel is doing. I'd say, by contrast, that Celan's poetry (not to knock him--I'm not well-versed enough in it for a full-on analysis) is more "nightingales and song thrushes" to me—dense, obfuscating, and difficult. The sort of poetry that is non-relatable, that is irrelevant, that is old. To make Auschwitz (my grandpa was in Auschwitz, by the way) something so holy that we cannot even poke a little fun at it, as Seidel does in "Mr. Delicious", is to a do a disservice to the reality of the spectacle. For me, the lines about the sex sounds Germans make in "Mr. Delicious" ring more viscerally true than all the strange compound words Celan makes up in his works (or those I've read).

It is the instrumentality of violence that says what poetry does is very little. Of course it would say that. I imagine writers who have died for it like Mandelstam would be surprised to find out how sleight a thing they held after all. But I can't speak for the dead. All I can do is compare the fruit of the trees. And maybe the trees themselves.

It's fascinating then that Seidel is a devotee of Mandelstam; read his earlier work and references and dedications abound. I don't say poetry doesn't "do" anything; I just say that the world is violent and brutal and a poetry that acknowledges that, that even revels in it at times and doesn't hide behind obscurity or conventions of "beauty" is valuable for the way it exposes the dark & light of human nature.

His poetry isn't saying anything about friendship and complicity, at least not in the way expressed here. You are saying that for him. At least that is how it seems to me. I have seen the Jew as marshmallow poem. We are way apart here. I have been working all week through some various commentaries and dialogues about the Armenian genocide. I didn't recognize any use or relevance for Mr. Delicious. The universal complicity was palpable in the distance our words and questions were drowning in. But I don't see anything courageous in Siedel's laying down in it and rolling about.

I disagree that Seidel's poetry isn't about friendship and complicity: if you read his works and not just scattered poems, you'll find that the only time he melts into something like "sentiment" is when discussing his actual friends, his "real life", and not the obscure, politicised world of public opinion and "atrocity". That's why a poem like "Pain Management" melts into the lines "Art throws the dog a bone / I am ashamed of my poem" or a poem like "Me" ends with the realisation that

There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely,
Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird
Circled forever around us and then without a word
Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there
And you burst into tears. I was unaware
That ten years before the same thing had happened just
After your young daughter died and now it must
Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak
And receive the recognition we all seek.

It's why even "Miami in the Arctic Circle," which I mentioned above, is a sort of sick paean for a lost world (it ends "This is the end./ Testing, one two three, this is a test") of "The Hollow Men" when the world might actually end instead of drag painfully and meaninglessly on. (That's my interpretation, at least.)

Sure, these are not happy or pretty poems. But I find them moving and important, on the whole (there are some duds, of course).

Originally Posted by R. S. Gwynn

After all, we're pretty obsessed with the lives of the idle rich, so there's one good reason to explore the poetry further.

I think that sells Seidel's verse drastically short: sure, he's rich, and he writes from his perspective, as he said in an interview with NYTMag, "unapologetically" (or something like that); but the themes are, of course, much broader, as with all good writing.

If you do order it, I hope you like it.

[R. S. Gwynn]

a tiny bird
Circled forever around us and then without a word
Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there

This is sloppy, rhyme-forced writing. Birds don't talk unless they're ravens or parrots.

But I have ordered the book.