Rarely is a poet given the level of coverage devoted two weeks ago to Frederick Seidel in the New York Times. It takes more than merely exquisite poesy to ascend to that particular Parnassus. Seidel has more. As the article explains, he is an independently wealthy, finely suited older white man whose works address wealth and age, exercise his obsessions for motorcycles and airplanes, and explore his taste for sex. What? That’s news?
It’s nice to see Seidel so prominently featured, and I aim to buy the new volume of collected works, even though I have nearly all of his individual books. But the article gets so much wrong. Yes, Seidel’s topics are often unsettling, the images surreal. Consider “Chartres,” from My Tokyo:
The takeoff of the Concorde in a cathedral.
Ninety seconds into it they cut
The afterburners and the deathly silence
Was like a large breast as we banked steeply left.
This is indeed a disturbing little verse. Yet Wyatt Mason, who wrote the Time‘s profile of Seidel–rather, who wrote the profile of Wyatt Mason rubbing elbows with Seidel–seems to have missed the point about “poetry’s power to disturb” with his opening account of the threatening phone message left for Seidel. Clearly, the woman who left the eerie message was disturbed, but not by poetry. The article’s point seems to be to promote the new volume by scandalizing the poet, a fair enough marketing ploy. Ron Silliman gets it right when he refers to it as a “fetish piece.”
Any publicity is good publicity, a cliché Seidel might admire as a topos, but he’ll leave the dirty work to his publisher and the NYT. So, sprinkled among Mason’s inventory of poetic improprieties are blurby superlatives: “the best American poet writing today,” “the most frightening American poet ever.” (For the latter, I would have guessed Edgar Guest.) And then there’s Billy Collins’ petty misreading, “When he mentions East Hampton or the Carlyle or Le Cirque or Ducati, it doesn’t even seem like name-dropping.” No, former poet laureate Collins, it does seem like name-dropping–call it allusion, if you prefer academic jargon–because it is name-dropping. It’s a Seidel trademark, lyric punctuated with trademarks!
Most revealing to me in Mason’s work is the early connection of Seidel with Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I wasn’t aware that Seidel had been so inspired, but with hindsight, of course! As poets go, they both often render lines palpable–compare the gutturals in the first line from “Chartres” with the sibilants in a line like “So-shu churned in the sea” from Pound–to provoke in the reader a physical engagement with the text, in the service of aesthetic qualities such as mimesis, percussive rhythm, or sonic ties from line to line that fall short of rhyme. Notice how the L in “cathedral” appears four times in the last line, where it further brackets a chiasmus of Ls and Bs: “like a large breast” X “banked steeply left”? At this level, it hardly matters that he writes lines that seem uncomplicatedly cruel, whatever that means.
Accidental Blogger 