Q

Early back in 07 (?), a friend sent me a soft copy of Seidel’s Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 298-518. I loved it and kept it for a couple of years until my digital migration in 09. Afterwards i tried desperately to find it online, but couldn’t.

Recently, in an abrupt and consuming lust for nostalgic poetry, i picked up Seidel’s Collected Poems (40 years worth!) and slaked my need for Ovid.

Since then, the first thing each morning would have me browsing through a few of his poems — am finally done today! I wouldn’t ham it up and say he’s stunning, but is definitely a good read. Personal favorite remains Ovid.

People like to think of Seidel’s ‘brutal sexual imagery’ (forgot where i read that) as his signature, along with his self-portrayed hedonism (his love for motorcycles and fucking). Pinning that as the locus of his poetry would be missing the point, though. Seidel does allude rather casually to vaginas and humping, etc., but it’s really nothing new. Also, the materialistic mien seems more of a conscious construction to.. throw us off guard? idk. He just does it for fun or self-referential mockery perhaps.

Surprising to me, and contrary to his commonly regarded persona, is that he is genuinely astute in his socio-political commentary (as opposed to orbiting around his self), and also unusually empathetic.

By empathy, i mean that in its barest definition – less of compassion than the ability to cast himself as the other.

He writes of James Baldwin’s escape to Paris:

‘How lonely to be understood
And have to kill, how lovely.
It does make you want to starve. It makes an animal kill
All the caring-and-sharing in the cage.

Start with the trainer who keeps you alive
In another language,
The breasts of milk
That speak non-leopard. Slaughter them.

What lives below
The surface in a leopard will have to live above
In words. I go to sleep
And dream in meat and wake

In wonder,
And find the poems in
The milk
All over the page.’

Racial themes, again, in ‘Boys’. This time he sheds the use of allegories and goes straight into it with blunt rhymes typical of his poems.

‘So it was a jolt, a jolt of joy,
To hear him cut the shit
And call a black man Boy.
The white-haired old Negro was a shoeshine boy.
One of my sovereign experiences of my life was my joy
Hearing my father in his fury call the man Boy.’

In context of the entire poem you see how complex his ‘joy’ was, a secret thrill that hidden racial prejudices of his usually immaculate father slipped to the surface, that the hypocrisy he may have detected with a child’s instinct was confirmed.

Curiously, he also likes referring to the death of dogs.They make me incredibly sad. Firstly because i have issues with canine suffering (when watching The Artist, Cel and Becks wept away when the protagonist was about to kill himself, but i remained stoic until his pet dog sacrificed his life to save him, where i promptly burst into tears).

In his shorter poems, on the death of a pet dog Spinach:

‘Love is a cup that spilled him.
Spilled all the spin that filled him.’

I loved his narrative pacing and style in Ovid. It starts:

‘A daughter loved her father so much
She accused him of sexual abuse.
But I am getting ahead of my story.’

‘Muse, put your breast in my mouth
If you want me to sing.
(Fuck the muse.)’

‘She had a noose around
Her neck attached to nothing,
Which is a metaphor for love.’

Seidel also writes quite a bit on political stuff, which (being politically apathetic), I skim through without much interest. All i can say about them is that they are varied and genuine.

I like Frederick Seidel’s flexibility and variety. I like that he can vary between detached and distanced to more invested and personal (without coming off as maudlin). I like that he does an entire range of themes – political, social, personal (on age [‘I rot before i ripen’], on love, on sex [and sex, and sex]).

Even his voice is nuanced. Each poem can differ so much in its style I’m not sure if i’d be able to identify each one anonymously as by the same poet. It may require a level of familiarity with Seidel’s work to identity that blunt self-assurance that is the point of convergence in his repertoire.

This is typified, i think, in ‘Snow’:

‘Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We will all get there.’

He cares, but genuinely. His poems stand at a balance – subtly sincere without being cloyingly ardent. And oftentimes rather funny in his whatever-lah-just-say-anything-also-can Seidel style.