Poetic Throwback

The various poetry books collected in Frederick Seidel's blockbuster Poems 1959–2009 (2009) have won extravagant praise from important poet-critics like Michael Hofmann ("Life on Earth is an exemplary book…[o]ne of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years") and Lawrence Joseph, who declares in The Nation that Seidel is "one of the most vital and important poets we have." What the critics (almost all male, I should note) seem to like about Seidel is his candor—his willingness, in casual, chatty (but occasionally rhyming) free verse, to let it all hang out, to talk about the messes he's gotten into, especially with the women he's gone to bed with—women who have absurd foibles and hang-ups.

"Cloclo," from Ooga-Booga (2006), for example, is an elegy of sorts for "The golden person curled up on my doormat, / Using her mink coat as a blanket" who had lost the key to the apartment and was found by the poet "Luxuriously asleep in front of the front door like a dog." What fun for the man who finds her there! Seidel proceeds to recall her life of artsy vacuousness, the poem ending with the phone call from Florence, informing him

that she has died quietly a minute ago,Like a tear falling in a field of snow,Climbing up the ladder to the bells out of Alzheimer's total whiteout,Heavenly Clotilde Peploe called by us all Cloclo.

How cleverly condescending can one get? A tear falling in a field of snow! Poor old Cloclo: she never had a chance, at least not in Seidel's poem. And this poet is also given to writing political poems like "The Bush Administration," which relates the poet's own suicidal thoughts ("so sui-Seidel") to the events leading up to 9/11 ("The United States of America preemptively eats the world"), responding to the radio news of an American being beheaded in the Congo with the words "The downpour drumming on my taxi gets the Hutu in me dancing," and soon he is imagining himself "on all fours eating grass / So I can throw up because I like the feeling. / I crouch over a carcass and practice my eating." Is this a daring revelation of one's inner demons? I suppose so, but when we note that the poet who has these fleeting thoughts is comfortably inside his taxi, most often on the Upper East Side where he lives so well, the admission seems merely tasteless. If you like the tell-all nastiness encountered here, you may well chuckle along with these images of Seidel's frayed nerve ends. To me, these oh-so-witty and painful psychodramas feel like a throwback to the worst of John Berryman and Robert Lowell in the 1950s. In 2010, who needs it?