Where Have You Been? (14 page)

Nor is it just the running order that's a distinctive feature of the book. If
Poems
is a man doing a headstand, then it's a man in a bowler hat, wearing a chalk-striped four-piece suit, with a handkerchief in his top pocket and a natty carnation in his buttonhole, giving you an eyeful of his heliotrope spats. Seidel's way with poetry has always involved terribly high specifications. Try dates. If one takes the title's opening
1959
at face value, then Seidel published just one book of poems in his first twenty years of writing; his second,
Sunrise
, didn't hit the bookstores till 1980. (And how often does that happen in a poetry world characterized by facility and overproduction, by, so to speak, conspicuous production? I certainly can't think of another instance like it.) Conversely—
Greisen-Avantgardismus
again, or at the very least a late flowering—in the last ten years Seidel has published six books, three of them in the form of the three volumes of
The Cosmos Trilogy
, a Dante-based ninety-nine-canto job, with the experimental physicists' metaphor-happy concepts of Big Bang and Deep Space (“A little red / Sea horse is eleven-dimensional / Spacetime. It unicycles / Upright in space // In all directions / At once.”) standing in for paradise, Seidel's familiar fast world of film shoots and Italian bespoke racebikes and tropical lagoons for Purgatorio, and Manhattan for Inferno—each canto written in a specially devised form of eight blocks of four lines that frames his poems of the early millennium in rather the same way that Robert Lowell's unrhymed sonnets or John Berryman's eighteen-line Dream Songs framed their poems of the 1960s and '70s. Very nearly two-thirds of this big book is from the last ten years, and it subsumes an opening section of almost fifty pages,
Evening Man
, that is all new.

Or try resources, style, attack. Probably one wouldn't think of going arsy-versy if one wasn't very convinced of one's newest work—but just as much of one's oldest, which of course becomes, under this dispensation, not a launching pad but a destination. And accordingly a great deal of Seidel is there from the start: the first poem in his first book is the tour de force of adolescent desires and disloyal affiliations called “Wanting to Live in Harlem” (he liked it so much he reprinted it in his second volume, so we get it twice in
Poems
, that's how far the prevailing ethos of the book, and of Seidel, is from prudence, economy, sense, concession: it's all auteurial hauteur, as if Seidel were to say “I repeat myself, very well, I repeat myself”). Later—earlier—“The Walk There” is done over as “Rilke,” with the simple expedient of the protagonist's original name of “Levy” being given as “Rilke” (“You can be needed by someone / Or needy, thinks Rilke”), the poem “The Hour” is the same as “The New Woman,” with one three-word sentence changed, while “Racer” loses four stanzas and a dedication, and turns into “Fog.” The newspaper-fueled “The Beast Is in Chains” has the terrific pun—and there's no shortage of awful ones elsewhere!—“The West has bombed and bombed.” Seidel's aggressively schizophrenic vocabulary, old and new, Classical and Yankee, is already fully present: on the one hand, syncope, galliambic, vaginismus, vespertine, anosognosia, dysprody, pseudocyesis; on the other, loved up, Kotex pads, bluebook-blue, down-easter, fairy bars. Proper nouns and historical and news references stud the texts: the drugs Seconal and Thorazine (Seidel likes his pharmacopoeia), the rotten airplane of those days, the Electra (but no more than he likes the idea of going out in a blaze of glory, as witness the deep pun of his fifth book title,
Going Fast
), the headlines and personalities and atrocities, Kennedy, Gagarin, Oran, Spellman, Hadrian, Mather. There are acrid poem-portraits (“A Widower,” “The Coalman”), monologues articulating the high-octane and emblematic misery (“Thanksgiving Day”) of the decade of Eisenhower, Cheever, and Plath, notes from abroad (“Americans in Rome,” “Spring”). All this Seidel had from the beginning.

What he also had was an incredibly highly developed ability to “do” his teacher, Robert Lowell—including styles Lowell in his own evolution had yet to reach. For instance, this off-kilter couplet, a sort of backward sidestep, at the end of Seidel's “After the Party” (1963), surely would have been perfect for Lowell's last book
Day by Day
(1977): “Convinced life is meaningless, / I lack the courage of my conviction.” In
Final Solutions
and to some extent in
Sunrise
, published a couple of years after Lowell's death, Seidel beautifully, consummately, and mystifyingly “channels” Lowell. It's not a copy, not derivative—there's no strain, and above all no falling-off—but everything sounds as if it were Lowell writing Seidel, or Seidel writing Lowell. I know of nothing quite like it. It's as though Lowell were a fairy tale pen that had fallen into Seidel's hands, or a foreign language or birdsong in which he had attained complete mastery. The midlength female monologues would make a sort of bootleg
Mills of the Kavanaughs
(1951)—with “Thanksgiving Day” to set beside Lowell's “Thanksgiving's Over.” The first “you” addressed here is Seidel's pregnant speaker's unborn child, the second is her husband. The bells and persons and relationships are overlaid in a truly nightmarish way, until in the catastrophic final image the bird, “perfect bird”—utterly Lowell, this, like his skunk with her “column of kittens”—morphs into a different bird (“goosepimpled”), and a cold and nauseating corpse takes its place at the heart of the game of happy families:

I feel you. The oven bell

Dings, and you call—the front door bell;

And in the hall, Papa and your mother

Gabble about our unborn daughter or son.

A perfect bird. Fatty sweat

Gleams on its bursting goosepimpled breast.

There are clumps of typically Lowellishly enjambed and monosyllable-powered lines you can turn one way and they disappear into “Quaker Graveyard,” and another way and they are “Beyond the Alps”:

Holding his breath, he watched the whole wing flex

And flex and saw the bouncing jet pods stream

With condensation as they plowed through clouds.

He saw the stewardess back down the aisle

Smiling at seat belts.
(“A Year Abroad”)

(Lowell I think wouldn't have been sensible enough to understand about the seat belts.) One can go through Seidel poems, ticking off Lowell features: the Saxon genitive (never more startling than in “passersby's eyes”!), the typically stretched Lowell “and,” the long spelling out of names and the shorting of references (like “Jesse Owens's
putsch
”), the gangling constructions, the hyperbolic modifiers, the plangent negatives, the puns that aren't (as in “Powdered bricks had made the ground lip-red”), the short lines with heavy rhymes that do so much of the work in that bleak book
For the Union Dead
(“No violin could thaw / The rickety and raw / Purple window”), the terse, exhausted finishing sentences (“Your girlfriend shrieks with fear” or “He's coming, child, I come”). Almost all the swingeing last lines, in a blind tasting, would be attributed to Lowell, with their typical, fern-in-coal aspect of material crushed into sound and sense pattern: “Absinthe / Is now on Thorazine, the breaker of obsessions,” “The obsolete slow drill that now only polishes,” “Art won't forgive life, no more than life will,” “The eyes of a bachelor waiting for water to boil”—sometimes with an admixture of Montale: “Still waiting! It is too late to be yourself.”

After, as I see it, channeling Lowell, Seidel took to channeling—Seidel. During the 1970s and 1980s, the flavor or aura of his poems switched imperceptibly but completely from one very strong (as the French say) perfume to another, from vanilla to strawberry. Lowell is still there, as a similitude, or a point of reference, but the product itself is now pure Seidel. The difference shows in an element of excess, of taunt, of trash, of (Les Murray's word) “flaunt,” a sort of F. Scott Fitzgerald that is three parts Roy Lichtenstein (“A Gallop to Farewell”):

The most underrated pleasure in the world is the takeoff

Of the Concorde and putting off the crash

Of the world's most beautiful old supersonic plane, with no survivors,

In an explosion of champagne.

It's the world of American attitude—“Give me Everest or give me death. Give me altitude with an attitude,” Seidel says in “Climbing Everest”—from the people that gave you Marilyn and the plastic saxophone and the aluminum baseball bat, and the others that went out and played with them. What's interesting here isn't Seidel “finding his voice” as the benign cliché goes, but the fact that the poems seem to originate from somewhere as far away as ever. As I say, the writing keeps its “channeled” feel. One can't take lines or scenes or sentiments and, by adding them up, arrive at “the poet” in the way one might, with Wordsworth, say, or, for that matter, with Lowell. There is a strange distanciation—a coldness, a deliberateness, a caricatural warp and yawp, a cartoonishness—that always interposes itself, a distanciation that has grown stranger and more confident and more pronounced over the years. In an interview he gave to Wyatt Mason in
The New York Times
in 2009, Seidel acknowledges, “Looking at these poems is sometimes an extremely strange experience, as if … who the hell wrote this?”

Seidel's poems go against most prevailing trends of poetry. There is nothing photographic about them, they don't home in on detail, they don't seek feeling, go in for tolerable introspection, or try to make an unassuming music. One might go so far as to say that the impulse behind their making has nothing lyrical about it. That probably is why reactions to them are so strong, why—apart from a small but persistent minority of supporters and admirers—readers and critics are so often outraged, want their money back, call Seidel all sorts of names. Where's the pissy beauty, the undemanding truth? Conditioned to the sort of poetry where the poet tries hard to be precisely the “bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast,” readers are no longer able to understand what happens when—in the rest of the Yeats tag—a phantasmagoria imposes itself. Lines like these, that come from a catalog of historical and cultural possibilities, from tall tales, from
sprezzatura
, from an exuberant, nettling Byronism, are read dully, literally, confessionally, and of course come out sounding merely obnoxious:

Combine a far-seeing industrialist.

With an Islamic fundamentalist.

With an Italian premier who doesn't take bribes.

With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves to spread disease.

Put them on a 916.

And you get Fred Seidel.

It's important to understand that the poet is not in the lines. We're not talking advanced self-scrutiny and truth telling here. The lines are stuff, material, mortadella, it doesn't greatly matter. The poet is the meat-slicing machine. He is above all the one who insists on supplying the capitals at the beginning and the periods at the end—even though they're not proper sentences—that simpleminded and censorious readers override and disregard at their peril. In the Mason interview, Seidel says, “It's very much to do with the sense you develop, in the writing of a poem, that at a certain moment it has its separate being from you to which you have your obligations. You're you; it's it; and eventually, it really will separate from you and be absolutely not yours anymore—even if you made it. It is, of course. But it isn't. It's a thing out there.” Accordingly, there is a trend in many of Seidel's newer poems of offering disclaimers. It's even less fourth wall/bourgeois theater than ever. “I'll supply the art part, he generously offers.” Alternatively, he claims, “I'm a liar with a lyre,” or, more confoundingly, “I am the crocodile of joy, who never lies”—if a crocodile's tears are false, does that make its smiles more or less worthy of our belief? Where he says, beautifully, “My name is Fred Seidel, / And I paid for this ad,” does that accept or refuse responsibility, or is it really most like the dubious modern conflation of the two? The last two lines of
Ooga-Booga
warn the reader: “Open the mummy case of this text respectfully. / You find no one inside.” And still people queue up to say what a cad Seidel is, what an unpolitically correct bounder.

I said I thought Seidel replaced Lowell's influence with his own, sometime in the '70s or '80s. In point of style, I think that's true, but Lowell continues to assert himself in one crucial way: he supplies Seidel with his structural model or blueprint. To put it another way, whatever poem Seidel is writing, it's more likely than not to be “For the Union Dead”: even stanzas, uneven lines, occasional heavy rhymes, occasional heavy rhythms, coexistence of private and public themes, the poet in the poem in a cramped or slightly histrionic way (“I crouch to my television set”), the juggling of six or eight different tropes or images, like so many plates kept airborne; in “For the Union Dead” it would include, in no particular order: bulbousness, cars and machinery, the color orange, fish and the marine world, the ditch and digging, shaking, etiolation, the role or possibility of change, race relations, animation and disanimation. Seidel has written this sort of longish, ambitious, polygonal poem many times now: the first time was in the earliest poem, “Wanting to Live in Harlem,” in which he makes an
Entwicklungsroman
of his own life: pictures of violins, the “colored” maid, Somerset Maughamish lusts, Jews and Romans, Lutherans and Jews, a Gauguin-like palette, a dying mother. He does it differently, less organically, more mechanically. The themes and images tend not to bleed into each other as they do in Lowell, they are checked, kept apart, the effect or the technique is more that of a collage, the lines it seems really are sliced off. With Seidel, there is something that feels machined about the writing. Even within his poems, he tends to present himself as a sort of centaur, most often an
homme-machine
: on a Ducati, in a hotel, on a Eurostar train, on a plane, on a woman (where he often sounds deliriously mechanical: “Women have a playground slide / That wraps you in monsoon and takes you for a ride”); encased in accoutrements for hunting, or tropics, or formal evening wear; always something crisp and tokenish and apart and
comme il faut
, like an Action Man figure. Lowell—“one life, one writing!”—made a sort of mulch of words, from which he himself was practically inextricable, in which he wallowed as much as worked at, the “crackled amber moonscape” left “to ripen in sunlight”; Seidel followed him neither into the obsessive revising nor the lowercase line beginnings (from
Life Studies
on). The lines are as they are: provocative, sensationalist, injurious, red top, flawed. I often have a dreamy sense of Seidel's poems being produced on a '70s (I think) gadget called a Dymo Tape, mostly used for pricing goods in stores, where letters were pressed out onto a sort of plastic tickertape, like so: “My name is Fred Seidel, / And I paid for this ad.” They are printed, without being written.