Rap for the JAP, von Stuck for the Stuck Up, Beardsley for if you went to Brearley, Plath for the Upper Clath — Frederick Seidel’s suddenly much-talked-about poetry offers pilled-up and plastic-surgeoned Americans an insider’s view of their insides. Listen to his comic drawl as he recites tons of his poems here.
Frederick Seidel affords access to Bernard Madoff’s mentality, and we need that. But looked at from the point of view of literature, Seidel’s poems are barely poems. They’re one-offs. William Logan is correct to complain that “Seidel’s jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning get pretty tiresome.”
Sinning itself is of course far from tiresome. UD could sun herself under a sinning sky all day long. But the sky must speak to her; it must have poetry in it.
Seidel finds clever ways to express his hellcats-of-the-gravy world (“I want to date-rape life.”), but these are not poetic ways. His poems are bunches of what Logan calls “blunt phrasings.” He declaims. His recited poetry is riotous because he’s a performer. The poems are performances.
Superficiality is super and – as a take on twenty-first century Manhattan – illuminating; but the poems become tiresome because Seidel refuses depth of any kind, even as a sort of faintly recalled antiphony. There’s no Why am I what I am? There’s only This is what I am. The obsessive childish word pairings throughout Seidel’s work (china vagina), coupled with the crystal-shattering self-presentation, eventually makes you feel you are reading The Cat in the Hat, with Seidel as the Cat, Thing One, and Thing Two.
In an excellent appraisal of Seidel in The Nation, Ange Mlinko compares him to one of UD‘s favorite novelists. “Mostly I’m reminded of Michel Houellebecq, another quiet chap with a virulent literary persona and a thing about sex and Islamic fundamentalism.” I see her point, and yet there’s an important difference: Houellebecq actually does use language to explore the vile bodies and minds of his dissolutes. By the time his best-known novel, The Elementary Particles, is over, its main character, in a gesture toward seriousness, has decided to move to Ireland — a country that attracts him in part because, unlike France, it’s still seriously Catholic.
But hey. How about a poem. Nothing like talking about a poet without giving you a sample. Here goes.
ODE TO SPRING
I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can’t.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.I can’t stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have a meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can’t take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I’ll take a dozen of the lilies.
I’m standing as it were on my knees
Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.
May 24th, 2016 at 7:58AM
i feel like there should be bongos accompanying this, man. Like, it might drown some of it out, at least.