LUXE ET VERITAS

February 2, 2016 10:05 AM

Frederick Seidel’s poems of age and experience.

There’s something predatory about both the undisclosed allusion and the “life of privilege” it’s made to illustrate. With their deeply literary brand of shock, these lines orchestrate a specious conflict between two inadequate responses. You can take the bait and say, “What a jerk! Wow—that thing about the fingers!” Or you can mount a kind of A.P. English defense of them: the speaker isn’t Seidel at all but a “character named Frederick Seidel,” as the critic Richard Poirier put it, “that has little to do with who he really is.” Robert Browning didn’t kill Porphyria in “Porphyria’s Lover.” T. S. Eliot wasn’t the one “pinned and wriggling on the wall”—that was Prufrock. The louche vampire who sniffs his fingers and spurns the poor isn’t Frederick Seidel—even though, as we learn elsewhere, this “character” who has so little to do with Seidel lives in Seidel’s apartment, socializes with his friends, and shares his tastes in wine, shoes, and motorcycles. In photo shoots, Seidel stands in his Upper West Side living room, dressed up like “Frederick Seidel,” surrounded by décor whose provenance we have come to know from his poems. The troubling power of this work isn’t its distance from its author but its stifling proximity.

Frederick Seidel, poet, who " has won notoriety for a stance of épater-le-bourgeois knowingness: Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves

Plop the live lobster into boiling water and let it scream.
You both turn red.
Of course you have to eat it dead.
There can be unfertilized roe
That will turn red also, maliciously delicious, called coral.
The colder the ocean waters the lobster came from, the sweeter
The meat boiled in the brain of heat.
The lobster at the end is as incontinent as falling leaves and doesn’t know.

The "Phallus-Man Reflects", on the most severe review he's ever received, the "Laureate of the Louche": Two Poems.

From the beginning, Seidel was always a bogeyman, a Bürgerschreck, an épateur—a carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry. He is a purveyor of picong, a Trinidadian term, “from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.”

I Sense Your Disdain, Darling: Frederick Seidel

Glamour-fueled magazines, like New York, do not characteristically devote much ink to poets. Poets tend to be too shabby, don’t own much “stuff,” and typically don’t have much of interest to impart. It is usually the case that a poet must come with a twist, so to speak—some sensational hook, to warrant appearance in the glossy newsstand ranks. Frederick Seidel, a poet revered and perhaps loathed in equal measure, was given lavish treatment in a recent New York article titled, inappropriately, “The Motorcycle Diarist.” The largely misleading title refers not to the revolutionary leanings of a young Ernesto Guevara but to one of Seidel’s chief subjects, his beloved hand-built Italian Ducati motorcycles. The article makes much of Seidel’s luxurious life, what is assumed to be his great wealth, sartorial finery, and globetrotter status. Seidel’s intimate friends include designer Diane Von Furstenberg and Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci. The poetry, almost an afterthought, is assumed to surge spontaneously from the life.

Seidel is therefore a triumphant outsider in American poetry.

The Invaluable Seidel, of St. Louis: The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri

A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack.
Then the zipper got stuck.
An angel flies in the window to unstick it.
A drone was monitoring all this
In real time
And it appears on a monitor on Mars,
Though of course with a relay delay.
One of the monitors at the Mars base drone station
Is carefully considering all your moves for terror output.
But not to worry. Forget about about about it.

The Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful Feelings: Poetry as a Political Response


a poet for our new gilded age.

posted by the man of twists and turns (4 comments total)

Chiasson does a pretty good job of encapsulating how I feel about Seidel's poetry:

Every time I read Seidel, I’m bowled over by the brilliance of individual lines and images, and baffled by the narrow culvert through which he has forced such an enormous and unruly gift.

To that, I would add a soupçon (ok, perhaps a bit more) of "ew gross," but, in general my feeling on Seidel's writing is that I love some of his lines, dislike most of his poems, and despise his body of work as a whole.
posted by dersins at 10:19 AM on February 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Another St. Louis boy born to wealth and given to debauchery in his writing: William Burroughs. Although Burroughs grew up in the leafy suburb of Ladue, and it sounds like Seidel grew up in the Central West End, judging from the houses he describes. Although glancing at his Wikipedia bio, I see he went to the exclusive (Ladue) private boys' school.

Anyway, he sounds like an acquired taste, to say the least. But it's good to dip into the writings of those about whom we have a certain ambivalence. I tend toward writer-worship, which is stupid, because writers are humans.
posted by kozad at 10:29 AM on February 2, 2016

I think that what's more scandalous about Seidel is how honest he is about money. I also think that (and i haven't heard this written) that he resembles Rochester more than anyone else. Lastly, I think the idea of him as a coterie poet is worth pursuring, and reading him against o'hara (as the nyer hints at) is interesting--b/c o'hara doesn't spend as much time thinking about money, and b/c siedel is so forced. (the singsong or doggerel that marks seidel's filithiest work is a dip into the vernacular--its something serious poets do when they are writing pornography--see the aforementioned rochester writing signoir dildo or auden's plantonic blow, for example.
posted by PinkMoose at 11:02 AM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Great assemblage. I've loved him since the early nineties.
He eludes pink chaffon-
Cool overpass/ Cartoon serious.
Estute, a real enfant terrible in some elevator that inhabits 14 floors of chronology, re-arranged notions with deft book clamour

Complains if the neighbors suddenly become so.
Drift with time and sniff fresh letters from the dead.
Party with tipic,
Yearn and watch cold tide.
Old Mann take a looky.
Etc.

You have a ducking preview, some buttons to push, get on with it and bother those that read, ohhhh
now that is frightening, shear
Terror, Mr.
Fred in the standard manual for funeral occasions, 1943. II. All men Need a Pattern to Follow.
A. Any weaver must have a pattern
Evoke Dwarf signal rule 281-c/Then

Stop.
posted by clavdivs at 9:59 PM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]