I asked [the poet Frederick] Seidel if, looking back, he understood what was in the way of his getting back to poetry [during a seventeen-year absence from it]. Seidel didn’t hesitate:
What was there to be afraid of?
“The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.” He added: “Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you [-] that are your subjects. It’s almost as if there’s a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that’s it.”
This is from the New York Times magazine. Here’s a review of his collected poems, also in the New York Times.
August 21st, 2009 at 9:59AM
[…] longtime friend. (Have I posted on Seidel on this blog? I think I have. I’ll check.) (I have. But this reminds me that I’ve meant to write about his poetry. I’ll do that. Maybe […]