Poems 1959-2009 Book

It's fitting that I have not words that could possibly handle just how important or good these poems are. There's no way to match this man, this master.

Here's something: I hadn't heard of him until the Charlotte Rampling documentary film released late in 2010. Because she seemed to range among many interesting artists, I thought I'd acquaint myself.

This collection arranges itself from the present backwards -- a system I'd only seen in a Richard Wilbur collection.

I was shocked. Knocked out of my socks.

Category? He doesn't seem to fit. Well, his earliest, back in the late 50s, early 60s, do have the trimness of that time, that educated, Robert Lowell style. Lots of density, noticeable internal 'work'.

But later on? I don't know. A smidgeon surreal. Always intelligent. Unlike virtually all current poets of stature, not hugging a political line. Yet not shunning what seems to be a generally liberal orientation. And not embracing a deliberately conservative formalism. Throwing lines off-balance, yet holding onto rhythm.

One encounters stanzas like this, from "A Song for Cole Porter", in Evening Man:

For everyone's a sexual object
Everyone is something to use.
Everyone is something good.
I oink when I fuck but have feelings and wings.
Pigs can fly.

And, differently, from "East Hampton Airport", in Ooga Booga:

East Hampton Airport is my shepherd.
It was smaller when I took lessons.
The shepherd's crook has high-tech runway lights now.
The shack became a terminal.
The private jets drop by to sleep.

The materialism in both those, coarse in one, blase in the other, is nevertheless admitted to be subject to a potential weightlessness or lift from gravity. And in their separate ways, funny.

And when he takes on the creation of matter, the forerunner of matter, the ethereal, abstract nature of . . . nature emerges and eventually wrestles itself into being, one moment of which from "Mirror Full of Stars", in The Cosmos Poems:

A can of shaving cream inflames
A ping pong ball of lather,
Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon
The size of the world . . .

and further down in the same:

Don't play with matches.
The candle flame follows her
With its eyes. The night sky is a mirror
On a wall.


Pick almost anywhere in Cosmos -- at random, from "Forever":

The innocence of the tornado
Of the universe torridly
Twists the universe, the way a clay pot turns
On a potter's wheel languidly

Gaining form, the funnel and the rapturous
Waist swaying slowly
Like a belly dancer at ten million
Miles an hour . . .

The tornado metaphor continues morphing -- "Elephant trunk", "cobra".

Dipping into earlier work, "Stars" in Going Fast:

We fall from stars
In all the color of Brazil,
Of Africa, Iran.
We stir a black hole swirl, star
Figure skaters twirling on the black, galaxies

Unspooling on the surface tension
Of the morning coffee . . .

On and on there's evidence of Seidel's fluid virtuosity.

Oh, he's got plenty of formal control. But he doesn't dine out on it. And even in his poems of recent days (he's in his 70s), there's plenty of surprise wet in the sexuality lying on his sheets next to her lipstick.

His poems praise speed, a tasteful, dangerous high-living, an appreciation for friends whose names likely appear on social register lists and in places of corporate prominence. They smack us with our wants and praise the joys we may only sometimes reach for. And may not ever get to.

The poems from the Cosmos Trilogy may ultimately -- if they're not already thought so -- be considered one of the great works of our time. Seidel's figurations help make intelligible otherwise arcane ideas founded in sophisticated mathematics and astronomy.

I'm not sure whether it's the wealth he was born to or his honesty about human desire and feeling, but he hasn't gotten the fame he deserves. Maybe it's unnecessary.

This has been a lot of words by someone claiming not to be able to handle Seidel. And I haven't.