Happy birthday Mr Seidel

From the end of Sunrise (Poems 1959-2009) by Fred Seidel:

I wake beneath my hypnopompic erection,

Forty stanzas, forty Easters of life,

And smile, eyes full of tears, shaking with rage.

That was originally published in 1980, four years after Seidel turned 40. The poem has forty stanzas in it and seems to range around the world, Milan, Perth, New York - all the while counting down, like some kind of doomsday device. It seems like his poems from this time are a bit different too, less morbid I think, often ending on more of an upbeat note - young men's poems? I don't know. Maybe this fortieth birthday poem was his move away from all that?

Like I guess, if you look at the excerpt from The Last Poem in Book (see two posts previous) he is definitely concerned with a sudden conclusion. A scary sort of ending, the kind that might incline you to cry and shake with rage.

Not making a statement

The ending of The Last Poem in the Book by Frederick Seidel (Poems 1959-2009. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 2009).

[...]

I'm coming now.

I can't breathe.

I'm coming now to the conclusion that

Without a God. I'm coming now to the conclusion.

I love it how he never makes his conclusion on one level but does on another. Incredibly clever and sinuous. That age old thing in poetry where something is repeated, in this case in close proximity, and has a completely different meaning the second time. Beautiful and sad and has the truth of no truth.

from HEART ART by Frerderick Seidel

starts...

A man is masturbating his heart out,

Swingin in the hammock of the Internet.

He rocks back and forth, his cursor points

And selects. He swings between repetitive extremes

Among the come-ons in the chat rooms.

But finally he clicks on one

World Wide Web woman who cares.

and then in the middle...

This is the story about humans taking over

The country. New York is outside

His study while he works. Paris is outside.

Outside the window is Bologna.

He logs on. He gets up.

He sits down. A car alarm goes off

Yoi yoi yoi yoi and yips as it suddenly stops.

and then at the end...

[...]

Here in the eastern United States,

A man is masturbating his art out.

An Ice Age that acts hot

Only because of the greenhouse effect

Is the sort of personality.

Beneath the dome of the depleted ozone, they stay cold.

Mastadons are mating on the Internet

Over the bones of dinosaur nuclear arms,

Mating with their hands.

'A man is masturbating his art out' - he certainly is.

Like a hare in pâté

Yes, read more Seidel.

Wrote two things about Bill Nelson, neither of which I am happy with. I am tired. I have a massive bruise running down the inside of my right foot from the toe to the heel and I didn't sleep well because of that I think.

On further defence of Seidel defending himself, the only poem he has ever written titled Frederick Seidel (originally from The Cosmos Trilogy) although he does mention himself in quite a few poems. This poem has two characters, the 'I' and the 'him.' The 'he' is the poet in this poem and finds it both 'impossible to look or not to' and both characters live the same life of 'laziness and luxury'. The 'I' in the poem is the one who 'is seeking more Jerusalem, not less' (answering his anti-semitic critics?) and under torture confesses 'I do love / The sky above.' So it seems he is playing on the idea of the self and the narrator in the poem. Both are Frederik Seidel. One is the poet and one is the persona/narrator, while both are strikingly similar, they are also subtly different which is highlighted by the one direct comparison that differs:

[I]

Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pâté.

[He]

Like a hare still running from a gun in a pâté.

Seems like both hares are kind of forced to live in the pâté, while the persona is more comfortable and the poet is shit scared. I love those metaphors, they are so messy and yet so amazing. There is nothing beautiful or overwhelmingly true about them, but they exactly the kind of thing a hare sleeping in pâté might write. Brilliant. This is certainly a very telling poem and I'm glad he wrote it because it certainly clears up a few things for me although it doesn't go into why he takes on such a brutal persona, but I guess that can be read in a lot of his other stuff. That reminds me. I am planning to track down some kind of interview with him on the the internet. It's fairly likely there isn't one, but it's worth a look I think. I'd love to hear what he has to say himself. Apparently he never reads though. Bummer.

On a side note, my Swiss uncle was one of the first people in New Zealand (in the world?) to perfect seafood pâté. Apparently it's quite hard to get right. This was in the early eighties when I was a baby. It was my Mother's job to deliver boxes of the stuff in her VW Beetle and I would sit in the back in a car seat. This seems all a bit Wonder Years to me (I'm imagining perms, flares and light disco music), but I like the story.

The boogie man

Up to Bill Nelson version number 7 at the moment, I think 10 might be a nice number to reach.
How about either 'Bill Nelson' as a section title? Or 'Not Bill Nelson'? Or something that hints at the thing I am trying to do? Yes I like the something that hints at the thing I am trying to do. If I only I knew what that something was?

Read the rest of Ooga Booga (Seidel's second most recent book contained in Poems 1959-2009). I read a scathing review of it the other day, basically saying that the Seidel's aesthetic that critics had been so praising (apparently Ooga Booga was a bit of a hit) was precisely the thing that made Seidel so bad. Her name is Ange Mlinko writing in The Nation and she said a lot of stuff like this:

Rich white man, American, womanizer: he cops to it all and invites us to scapegoat him. That by doing this he has garnered a large following is not surprising. I'm not a moralist, and it would be fruitless to pillory readers for the pleasure they get from Seidel: it makes perfect sense that a poetry that prizes the same dialectic of exhibitionism and voyeurism that popular culture does would resonate with readers who don't read much other poetry.

That paragraph is almost laughable in it's contradictions, but she probably represents a fairly large number of poets/reviewers out there. Those that think

1. poetry is some kind of higher art form above the common people (read popular culture)
2. poetry should be beautiful and nice and tell us how great the world is, despite everything

Seidel never does that and I love him for it. His aesthetic unease, his crazy, awkward rhyme schemes are yes, not something you would constantly want to read, but are incredibly appropriate for his subject matter and for me are part of the total package of his poetry. The poetry of unease maybe? It seems sometimes, like poetry is the only art form that can't be nasty. Why? Film, music, visual arts, dance, opera whatever all have the dark, immoral sub-genres or whatever. Why not poetry? Seidel's poetry is fresh and he is rare in that he is doing something truly different. I don't read too much of his stuff as autobiographical either. It seems he has created a persona for the purpose of his poetry to me. Maybe he has dones some of the stuff, but I think when it comes down to it the poetry's sensibilities do lie in what is right and wrong. This seems to come through in his political stuff, like in The Bush Administration (from Ooga Booga):

[...]
CENTCOM is drawing up war plans.
They will drop snow on Congo.
It will melt without leaving a trace, at great expense.
America will pay any price to whiten darkness.
My fellow citizen cicadas rise to the tops of the vanished Twin Towers
And float back down white as ashes
To introduce a new Ice Age.
The countless generations rise from the underground this afternoon
And fall like rain.
I never thought that I would live to see the towers fall again.

I mean I guess, it's the same voice in this poem as the others, so it would be difficult to say it is the 'real' Seidel coming through. But maybe highlighting the true injustice of the Bush Administration by taking this stand when he (his narrator) is so highly immoral is what he is trying to do. This character who sleeps with young woman with such relish and does all kind of horrible, hedonistic things still thinks the Bush Administration is immoral - what is that saying? What does it say about all the so called 'moral' elite who supported Bush, championed the war in Iraq? Who is the real Ooga Booga man there?

Shit, getting on a total political rant. Sorry.

It definitely provides food for thought anyway when thinking about what are we actually trying to do with poetry and how can we best go about doing it. There are many ways I guess and everyone has to find their own, but personally I think Seidel's way is damn exciting.

Soft decaying galaxies...of course

Read some more Seidel, wrote a poem and then read some of Vincent O'Sullivan's Further Convictions Pending (VUP, 2009). O'Sullivan is amazing. Beautiful use of language, and engaging little poems, some of them more accessible than others, but always quite surprising like in Being here:

It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for

an emblem at every turn, if you cannot see bees

arcing and mining the soft decaying galaxies

of the laden apricot tree without wanting

symbols - which of course are manifold - symbols

of so much else? [...]

Bees in 'soft decaying galaxies' - holy fuck, talk about blowing our little poetry reading minds out of the water. I think part of it is the manifest intelligence too. His poems don't dumb down language or make it 'relevant' or whatever, they are unashamedly talking about big things. Quite Wallace Stevensey in that regard and also doesn't not remind me of Michael Palmer's intelligence and mystery and beautiful, images, language and enjambment too. So yeah. Very impressed. Weird how I've kind of skipped over him before. How many other great NZ poets have I done that to?

Also, glad to here Sam Sampson won the Best First Book of Poems at the Montanas. I know that was like a week ago, but news is slow 'round here. Anyone of the three finalists (also Charlotte Simmonds and Amy Brown) deserved to win it, but you know, I guess I'm biased towards Sam's obliqueness. So well done him!

Personae and 'The Dark'

Still reading Seidel, still writing stuff I would never want to read out.

I've heard people angst over not wanting to read out their 'dark' stuff which I don't think is that dark at all, not the particular person I'm thinking of anyway, more just a little angsty, as in embarrassing I spose, which for this person is a problem I think in light of her reputation as satirist. But whatever, I think I'm starting to like the idea of personae, as in completely ridiculous personae.

Bad poetry

Going down a bad, bad road. Hopefully Damien can help me out tomorrow as to whether I should turn back or head cross-country for a while or what. It's so hard to write bad poetry that isn't bad, how the fuck does he do it? Maybe like this:

[...]

If you consent to life, as I do, condescendingly,

It seems you get to fuck unendingly.

The woman on my bed plays mozart heartrendingly.

I drank too much last night - as usual - mind-bendingly.

The body on the bed is all eyes as I prepare to mount it.

There's the body's usual hopefulness. The thing is to surmount it.

I'm standing at the window, after, looking out and looking back,

Looking past my floaters, my swimming specks of black.

I'm shitting on the ledge outside, moaning in my awful way.

I rap on the window to make myself fly away.

My body on the bed gets up, smiling at the gorgeous day.

The winter sunlight sparkles diamonds down on Broadway.

From Sunlight. In so many ways that should be, and kind of is, a terrible poem. But for some (disturbed?) reason I like it. I like the humour in it (mainly in the over-the-top rhyme I think), the beauty at the end, the mind bending leaps of point-of-view between him the bird and the body on the bed and the amazing philosophical insight - '...consenting to life, condescendingly.' So it's all those things which individually would not be enough to make the poem work I think, but together somehow do. I wonder if part of it is the freshness of it all too, if I am being a little blinded by the fact that I've never read anything like Seidel before and what I mean by that is, maybe there is a way to do it better or at least different. Like if I can figure out exactly what makes his stuff so fresh and use that in my own way. I guess I need to be weary that for Seidel, bad seems to be a complete package. Bad rhythm, bad metaphors, bad rhyme and of course horrible subject matter/characters.

Interestingly on that note the stuff from his first book Final Solutions is quite different in rhythm and tone I think, he doesn't have that humour and his poems are a bit more mysterious like in After the Party

A window sighs.

The row of houses stipples and sways

As if seen through the windshield after a downpour.

A brownstone tries to say something:

But the chimney is too small,

Is intimidated by the dark,

Its fireplaces never used

[...]

or from The Sickness:

The way a child's hands stare through glass

Under the frost, pining so much

They lag behind the child, they pass

Their two hours, patients and their visitors, and touch

Each other's hands with all their love

The huge scarred Chinaman, a yellow boxing glove

(His neck and head), spreads out his wife's left hand

[...]

So I think, rhythmically, very different and also much more subtle, not as overtly disgraceful or cheeky as the later stuff. Apparently he had a 17 year break between that book and his next and it shows. Long time not to publish anything though. He's making up for it now though by the look of it.

Lots of stuff to think about and potential minefields to avoid I think.

Frederick Seidel has arrived

I wrote a poem about Milan today. Why? Because I had a photo of it from the time I was there of some political graffiti that I had never really considered the meaning of, and now, today, I suddenly realised what they were probably on about and the fact that I took a picture of it is quite ironic. Damn, irony, seems like such a dirty word these days.

And yes, I am reading Frederick Seidel. Good guess. Chris lent me her copy of his Poems 1959-2009 (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NY, 2009). So excited, because I can't afford it right now and Chris hasn't even read it. So I'm incredibly grateful for that.

The poems are in reverse chronological order, so I started with his newest stuff from Evening Man (2008). Some of the end line rhyming ones I just couldn't get into. I guess I still have some of that modernist schooling in me that cringes whenever end rhymes come in. I'm sure he is doing it ironically or super-cleverly in some way. I guess I just have to figure out what that is. Funny how reverence can let you get away with stuff eh? If it was some so called 'lesser' poet, I don't think I'd be quite so favourable. However some of them are gorgeous and all, of course, a brutal and astonishing in almost every way. One of the ones I liked (Ode to Spring) I'd read on the internet somewhere, so I guess I'm not the only one. But here is a few lines from Bipolar Novemember, another that I liked:

I get a phone call from my dog who died,

But I don't really.

I don't hear anything.

Dear Jimmy, it is hard.

Dear dog, you were just a dog.

I am returning your call.

I have nothing to say.

I have nothing to add.

I have nothing to add to that.

I am saying hello to no.

How do you do, no!

I am retutning your call.

[...]

Absolutely fucking nuts. I love it!

And here is an example of a heavy rhyme part that tripped me to start with, but I am sure in time, I will come to love. Haha! The end of Coconut:

[...]

Happy birthday, Doctor Hart.

You stopped my heart.

You made it start.

You supply the Hart part. I'll supply the art part.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I guess that's what he wants.

So yeah, many more polarised opinions to come.

Workers unite!

So wacked out some spaz based on the word agitprop and me following what it means.

Read some more of Seidel, finished the Earth section of the book, which is by and large based more on earth than off it. It is also more brutal: rape, stalking, overt chauvinism. And right at the end the really interesting poem Frederick Seidel which seems to be him answering all the people who call him anti-semitic, chauvinist, racist, red-neck whatever or is it?

I live a life of laziness and luxury,

Like a hare without a bone who sleeps in a pate.

I met a fellow who was so depressed

He never got dressed and never got undressed.

He lived a life of laziness and luxury.

He hid life away in poetry,

Like a hare running still running from a gun in pate.

He didn't talk much about himself because there wasn't much to say.

[...]

There are other examples but

A perfect example in his poetry is the what

Will save you factor.

The Jaws of Life cut the life crushed in the compactor

Out.

My life is a snout

Snuffling toward the truffle, life. Anyway!

It is a life of luxury. Don't put me out of my misery.

I am seeking more Jerusalem, not less.

And in the outtakes, after they pull my fingernails out, I confess:

I do love

The sky above.

So this one is interesting, the stuff in the middle kind of digresses into a scene with a naked woman and how the 'poet' can't but has to look.

Doctor Love

Still working through The Cosmos Trilogy.

I've started on the Life on Earth section which are mostly more brutal and confronting and anchored in the real world (is the universe the real world?). He often has a redeeming ending though. I wouldn't say beautiful, because it is still vicious in many ways, but I guess it opens the poem up to being more than just disturbing, like at the end of Doctor Love that discusses oncology, breast cancer, bad film scripts, the commercialism of gene research, murder and then ends with this stanza:

In a soft East River breeze -- like glowing fireflies of snow.

Dear Hart, it is spring.

Cutting a person open

Is possible without pain.

Again, I don't really know how or why this poem works and maybe on some level it doesn't - I am always uncomfortable and in some ways resenting the poem I think.

His line-breaks and diction and syntax are tight but not neat and are crafted but not beautiful. So I guess if you were glancing over them you might see the harshness of them and not notice the skill behind it. Part of that might also be that there isn't a lot of reference to go by. His style seems quite unique (in my limited reading), like the kind of writer who doesn't really imitate other writers, although I've read elsewhere that early on he almost directly borrowed the aesthetics of Robert Lowell, so maybe it is more of a content thing? Maybe the content is dictating the feeling of aesthetic unease.

For an example there is this opening stanza from the same poem:

It was a treatment called

Doctor Love, after the main character.

One of the producers discovered

To our horror a real

[...]

I would think (one of) the normal ways to line break that out might be:

It was a treatment called Doctor Love,

After the main character.

One of the producers discovered to our horror

A real Dr. Love,

[...]

Now, I know some people might say, but what about free verse! In this day and age we can line break anywhere. This is post-modernism, what Seidel is doing is no different! But I think there is one overriding aesthetic that we still cling to and Seidel doesn't and that is that a poem is supposed to be a thing of beauty or at least a thing of irony, which is a kind of clever beauty I suppose. Seidel doesn't worry about that at all. His poems are uneasy, disquieting, disturbing. I guess like when the first horror movie came along? The early vampire movies? I don't know. But it seems he has figured out a way to do this, without being overly dramatic or judgemental, although his poems are loaded with judegmental language and he uses words like cancer and murder and cutting a person open, but he gets away with it. And maybe there is something in the aesthetics that allows him to do this. Maybe he isn't trying to make it into a thing of beauty which would seem wrong and he is giving the poem over to the content, letting that take control.

The Cosmos Trilogy

So I've been reading the genius of Frederick Seidel (The Cosmos Trilogy. 2003. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-52891-8). His poems are strange, slippery, all the same length, sometimes shallow, sometime incredibly deep, sometimes perplexing, but always interesting. I don't know what he does, but it works. I think it is tone partially - you never know where an image or metaphor will go, he doesn't set up expectations I guess, right from the first stanza we know this work will go places:

The wobbly flesh of an oyster

Out of its shell on the battlefield is the feel

Of spacetime

In the young universe.

[...]

I mean, how could you not want to read on after that first stanza from Black Stovepipe Hat. He has some brilliant metaphors too. Not those nice fluffy, sensitive kind that so many people do so well, you know the beautiful ones - his are harsh, flimsy, funny and ironic and most of all completely and utterly original. No one would have ever used those two things in that way before and to be honest not many people ever will again. One of those writers who makes you want to copy what he does, but not sure how to do it. It's almost like if I tried to copy his poem word for word it wouldn't come out as good (Starlight):

[...]

The universe is a single organism

Made of two

Or more individual,

Or many more than two, individual

Moving parts and blitzkrampf,

Explosive but balletic slow-mo

Of vast organs

Of ecstasy making sounds

The radio telescopes will hear

Billions of light-years from now,

The way whales croon

Whalesong through the ocean microphone

To an audience in the darkness far away.

To live your life

You have to use it up.

A star performs its nuclear core.

[...]

Fucking amazing. That is another thing he does too I think, he has these really long broken up sentences with so many things going on inside them that at first glance it seems like a whole bunch of disjunctive ideas, but when you begin to unravel it and put it all together, there is a method to it and the meaning starts to seep through. I like that and could be a good point for me to remember. He seems to be interested in unusual syntax and line breaks in a similar way to myself too, so maybe I can learn from this guy.

So a successful reading anyway. I haven't been this excited about finding a new poet (to me) in ages.