He’s Building a House

A strange turn occurs toward the middle of Frederick Seidel’s 2009 Paris Review interview. The poet, whom Adam Kirsch once deemed the best in the United States, describes himself as coming late to an appreciation of New York School poets James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Until this point in the conversation, Seidel’s distinctive sensibility snapped into place commensurate with his biography. His patrician vocabulary and profoundly conservative sense of rhyme and meter gestured toward his Harvard education and his Sorbonne classes at midcentury. Visits to Ezra Pound in 1953 (who at the time was institutionalized and warding off a treason charge for his radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Italian fascism during World War II) and T.S. Eliot (a fellow St. Louis native who, through talent and a penchant for self-invention, acted out an Anglophile’s version of what a poet should be) taught Seidel that achievement didn’t lie solely in a moralist’s idea of virtue and that the age in which one lives can prove fertile ground for cultivating a sense of grandeur. But Seidel’s acknowledgement of O’Hara and Schuyler in the context of “wri[ting] grand and plain” leads Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who conducts the interview, to ask Seidel what he thinks about John Ashbery, Seidel’s polar opposite by several metrics.

“I very much admire his work,” Seidel says, and continues

He’s looking for freedom, and finds it. I guess I am too, though my work is completely different. What’s usually going on in mine is an extreme effort not to censor the flow of information, the flow of images and thoughts, while at the same time holding the poem accountable to a standard of performance. You get something paradoxical—an effort to be utterly free while censoring the results of the freedom with a supervisory, unrelenting discipline.

Deploying form as a set of guardrails is common, but the conflation of supervision, discipline, and accountability with performance—i.e., acting out a role—seems exclusive to Seidel. An outsized dramaturgy cutting against the other definition of performance (the capabilities of a machine, product, or vehicle) is the hill the poet has chosen to die on. And it’s a steep one.

For a poet as revered as Seidel, there are scant mentions of turns of phrase being Seidelian, few poetic narratives or structures construed as Seidelesque. Chalk it up to the oddity of a formalist disassociating form from content; Seidel uses form like a hypnotist to mesmerize readers so that they are sedated, or at the very least put at ease, in spite of his content. Scores of poets have attempted to mimic Ashbery’s associative style for the air of freedom it conjures, despite it arguably being easier to write in forms rather than frequently invent them. Yet Seidel’s images—dog anuses sewn shut so homeless people don’t encounter their waste, mass shootings at weddings, women’s labia described as “jellyfish folds of floating fire,” to name three at random—often resist a strict relationship to the poem’s structure. For readers, the impulse is to either put the book down in disgust or anger or keep reading to see what Seidel will come up with next.

The Paris Review interview coincided with the launch of Seidel’s collected poems, and the implied comparison with Ashbery, who until his death in 2017 had achieved critical consensus as the greatest living American poet, couldn’t have been clearer. A postmodern practitioner whose eclectic vocabulary felt like a whispered secret met his match in a formalist whose clipped lines read like a sucker punch after a handshake.

***

What a difference 12 years makes. Ashbery’s reputation is secure, but Seidel’s appears destined for relativity treatment. He’s great but in the context of what? Irony exists to consider the preeminence of Robert Lowell (whom Seidel idolized) eventually neutralized in light of the achievements of John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop or to consider the stature of some of Seidel’s contemporaries rising in tandem with a changed set of social circumstances. Is Seidel better than Amiri Baraka? Susan Howe? Rita Dove? Nathaniel Mackey? Louise Glück? One could argue each case but never definitively. (In yet another irony, Berryman’s use of Black dialect has gotten the “examination at length” that Kevin Young encouraged in an essay he wrote for the Poetry Society of America. For many readers, Berryman flunked the test.)

Meanwhile, several of Seidel’s dementedly witty lines read entirely differently from a 2021 vantage. Consider, for example, these, from “Kill Poem”

I am in Paris being introduced at Billy’s,
1960, avenue Paul-Valery.
One of her beautiful imported English Lillys or Millys
Is walking around on her knees.
[...]
We are ministers of state and there is me chez Billy.
Deer garter-belt across our field of vision
And stand there waiting for our decision.
 
Our only decision was how to cook the venison.
 

Or these, from “Wanting to Live in Harlem,” in which “pictures of violins in the Wurlitzer collection” are

Colored like a calabash-and-meerschaum pipe bowl’s
Warmed, matured body—
 
The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she had to change the day after.

One recalls the climactic scene from the 1992 western Unforgiven, in which the sheriff, wounded and sprawled on a saloon floor, looks up at his soon-to-be assassin and says, “I don’t deserve this. I was building a house.” Which is to say that, when discerning whether it’s prudent to judge Seidel—or any writer—based solely on content, deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it. The real question is whether one’s oeuvre can withstand multiple readings amid the waxes and wanes of literary fashion. Into this atmosphere comes a new edition of Seidel’s Selected Poems (FSG, 2020).

It’s almost impossible to assess selected volumes without digressing into semantics. William Logan’s New Criterion review of Wallace Stevens’s Selected Poems noted that the book’s generous margins were more pleasurable than those in the Library of America’s complete edition. Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems drew backlash for being too comprehensive, with Larkin’s published volumes taking up roughly one-seventh of the space and the rest consisting of unpublished material. For Seidel, the fault line is prioritizing mature over earlier work. Poems: 1959–2009 counted backward from Evening Man (2008), at that point his most current collection, to Final Solutions (1963), his debut. The latter book makes for a curious origin story for Seidel’s career. In his telling, the 92nd Street Y wanted to award a poetry prize, and the judges unanimously voted to honor his collection. However, the national organization took issue with the contents of the book, which some members perceived as obscene, anti-Catholic, potentially libelous, and anti-Semitic. (There was that title, for starters.) Atheneum, the publisher that had agreed to put out the winning collection, asked Seidel to delete or change poems, which he refused, along with the prize itself. The judges resigned in protest. Final Solutions wound up being published by Random House at the behest of editor Jason Epstein. “It created a stir, including vehemently negative reviews,” Seidel told the Paris Review,” carving out Seidel’s idiosyncratic niche “to write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.”

It’s curious for Seidel to exclude this history from Selected Poems. One wishes he, or his publisher, had had the wherewithal to release a new version of his collected poems every few years or so, as J.H. Prynne does in England. On the other hand, it isn’t hard to make the case for the later poems from a technical standpoint: Seidel, by his own admission, believes the specter of Lowell’s influence over his early work is too great. A quasi-autobiographical poem, such as “The Coalman”—Seidel’s family owned a coal company in St. Louis—comes to mind, as does the general diaristic tone of the book. There is also the establishment of Seidel’s willing-but-reluctant poetic speakers who eventually crystallized into a voice that, for all intents and purposes, may as well be Seidel’s own. This is not to suggest that he is an exclusively autobiographical poet but that he developed his sensibility early. The Seine “itching from Kotex pads” and “green, polluted perch” (“Spring”) and New York City’s Upper West Side personified as “a girl...nude in her stockings and black garter belt / On the Persian carpet” underneath a canopy of “gold bees...which rise and join / The millions and millions of them on the ceiling / That you thought were highly overwrought / Gold work” waiting to pounce on a man “selected / For his weakness to come and gorge” (“The Sickness”) are as distinctive as anything in his career—as is the image in “A Widower” of said widower masturbating to his deceased wife’s photography while his granddaughter is visiting:

On its back, opened up, his billfold sweats on the damp tiles,
As if helpless, where it was dropped. His wife’s snapshot smiles
Up from the floor—he opens the door. Turning gold-
Rimmed silver cartwheels on the hall rug, the blond child…
Shocked by the static in his kisses, she starts to scold.

Despite the arm’s-length vantage point, the early poems are also more sober and lack the playfulness that imbues Seidel’s later work. One imagines that is why the bulk of The Cosmos Poems (2000) and Life on Earth (2001), and the entirety of Area Code 212 (2002), were excluded from this most-recent volume. The former-most instance was compiled from poems that the American Museum of Natural History commissioned to commemorate the opening of its new planetarium building; the latter two were the result of the Wall Street Journal arts section’s commissioning a poem a month. (Together, the books constitute what Seidel calls the Cosmos Trilogy.) As is always the case with Seidel, the line breaks are perfect—or perfectly imperfect, if that’s what he is going for—and the rhyme schemes carry an expectant musicality that revels in combating cloyingness. Consider “I Do,” for example:

I do white gloves at the dances,
But I don’t dance with the fascists.
I do beat and smash their stupid wishes.
I take you to be my.
 
The river is turning into
A place to drown.
The road lay down
In front of the car.
 
Everything in hell was
Talking English long ago.
I mean English.
I mean fruit bowl. I mean upper crust. I mean, really!

A more precise self-consciousness surfaces around Ooga-Booga (2006). The poems don’t wink at readers, exactly, but their subjects often behave as if they know they are being judged and, as a result, reward a more active reading experience, as in “Fog,” where repeating one’s themes winnows down to repeating one’s own words with anxious glee:

Here I am in Bologna again.
Here I go again.
Here I go again, getting happier and happier.
I climb on a log,
Torpedoing toward the falls.
Basically, it sticks out of me.
 
At the factory,
The racer being made for me
Is not ready, but it’s getting deadly.

The poem ends with Seidel “in a sort of fog” behind a glass window “taking digital photographs of [his] death” while mechanics work on his next motorcycle purchase.

***

One strong argument in favor of Seidel’s recent volumes is how elegiac much of Selected Poems is. Sometimes this is deliberate—remembrances of friends and acquaintances long gone, as in “Arnold Toynbee, Mac Bundy, Hercules Bellville” or “Charlie,” written for Charles P. Sifton, a district judge in New York. “One Last Kick for Dick,” written to honor the Rutgers professor and literary critic Richard Poirier, notes that the one time Seidel was his student, he got kicked under the table after calling Shakespeare overrated. A poem in honor of New York Review of Books co-founder and longtime editor Barbara Epstein presents memories of Seidel driving drunk on highways in the Midwest as a way of “bringing flowers to her shrine.” (That is to say that people from all walks of life came to revere her.) Her frequently canceled lunch dates shoot the angel out of the sky, bringing her eminence down to Seidel’s level: “This is what happens when you think of someone no longer alive you love.” 

At other times Seidel eulogizes places, such as Elaine’s, a now-shuttered bar in New York City where the poet was a regular, along with other luminaries, such as George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and William Styron. “Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around / Till dawn turned into day?” Seidel asks, the last-round calls deftly floating throughout the poem as a remembrance of the electric heyday, the bar “vanished into dawn,” and Elaine Kaufman, the bar’s owner and namesake, who died in 2010. Even the rarefied residents of the Upper West Side can’t escape the eternal verities: disillusionment, death, and the changing fortunes of New York real estate.

So what a wondrous surprise, in a body of work brimming with surprises, to encounter “Near the New Whitney,” from Seidel’s most recent standalone collection, Peaches Goes It Alone (2018). Somewhere in the Meatpacking District, near Renzo Piano’s glistening new shrine to American art that “used to be risky...used to be frisky” except now all the raging drunks find themselves in this “splendid new Whitney, dead / Instead,” Seidel writes

I wished I had a sled dog’s beautiful eyes,
One blue, one brown,
To mush across the blizzard whiteout
Of sexy chirping chicks and well-trimmed
Bearded white young men.
You see how blue my old eyes aren’t.

Better longing than entombed, though. Seidel never clears up whether the complimentary whisky that the maître d’ of the “charming restaurant” sent him is out of pity or respect, but she smiles at him nonetheless.