[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.