[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?