Nice Weather

by Frederick Seidel

Frederick Seidel - the 'ghoul' (Chicago Review), the 'triumphant outsider' (Contemporary Poetry Review) - returns with a dangerous new collection of poems. Nice Weather presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel - and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, elegiac, this book adds new music and menace to his masterful body of work

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2012

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've liked Seidel's poetry in the past. So I expected to like Nice Weather. But I initially thought the poems disorienting and, worse, much worse, perhaps not serious enough. But gradually, like the steady approach of spring and improving weather, I began to feel more comfortable with him and even to like some of these poems very much. Seidel owes a debt to the surrealists before him, I suppose--Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and is brother to Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery in America. A Seidel poem is a collage of ideas and images which are referred to and then keep recurring over and over. You begin to see how the disparate parts are related. My favorite here is called "Track Bike" in which Seidel unites bicycle races, bicycle messengers, Bach, Apple products, Columbus Circle, the Statue of Liberty, America, and Steve Jobs into a whole. It and some other poems here are impressive. They might be said, in their meshing of rhyme with juxtaposed images, to have a kind of roundabout beauty. Seidel can be difficult, and while I enjoy the edgy ideas and breezy language which make his poems fun to read, I need more time in his weather.

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems have rhythm, they have flow, they give me joy. They even made me laugh, which isn’t bad by a half. They have New York, and spoonfuls of malice, lust, wit, and grace amazing, so what if a few of them are a bit too navel-gazing.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the most provocative political poetry of the post-2001 period, although in many ways it is more provocative now than when it was published. Seidel's surprising affection for Obama has gained another dimension of meaning: what may at the time the poems were written have seemed a relatively earnest optimism (something uncharacteristic for Seidel) now reads as a kind of inadvertent illumination of the fatal vacuousness of "post-racial" discourse. That Seidel, whose poetic persona includes frequent sallies into explicit racism (including in this volume), so unproblematically embraced the Obama phenomenon should have been a kind of red flag that a darker future was ahead.

[Bryan Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second collection of Seidel's that I've read, and it may be time to do a deeper dive. He writes with such wit and whimsy, and with a curiosity and a connectedness to the world that belies his age - many of the pieces in this book feel like they were written by a poet half his age (he was well into his 70s when this collection came out) and some seem almost more suited to a poetry slam than to a reading at the 92nd Street Y. A delicious mix of profound and pornographic, of reasoned and ridiculous, of serious and scatalogical. Difficult to qualify, yet even more difficult to put down.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of the same from America’s grand old man of political incorrect. Seidel has a cohort of obsessions - sex, Ducati motorcycles and winding people up being the main ones - to which he returns endlessly and sometimes almost foppishly. It’s not easy to be foppish about a Ducati so I guess that makes him a poet worth reading.

[Alicia Hilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eclectic collection of poems. Provides a good introduction to Seidel's work and his personality. Snarky humor blended with political commentary, historical anecdotes, and observations on nature and humanity.

[Julian Day · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of heavy-handed end rhymes kill any sense of flow in these poems. The collection drags, and though the opening poem is great, vivid and dark, the rest are just too easily constructed, uninteresting in their subversion.

[Steven Severance · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well not too impressive.... but not too bad either

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up Frederick Seidel's Nice Weather because of a review that linked his words to those of Whitman, Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Ginsberg. The review spoke of the language of the city, of people, of humor and exposure. From the start, the black humor and the violence reuse of "Rosy-fingered Dawn" as a prostitute bites down on her John, through out the remaining poems (I confessed - I didn't read them all. I liked Snow), perhaps vitriolic banality is what Seidel sought to expose in his poems, but I sought more: the Poet to paraphrase Emerson gives life to dead words. The Poet reconnects words to their original meanings, and recreates the words anew. Here in Seidel's poems, the words are tired, perhaps as tired as the poet himself. He drops names from Emerson to McGeorge Bundy, Baudelaire to Susan Sontag via Beckett's grave. He says "Old age is not for sissies but death is just disgusting." He tracks the world from Mandela to Obama; from NYC to Tahrir Square: capturing a period of time = creating the need for the annotated version of his poems and its crucial set of footnotes identifying for his descendant readers who is Mick Jagger and Prince Charles; who is Nassar and King Farouk.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seidel's tenth book takes its cues from his revered Obama, for Seidel the public man has emerged full-blown fifty years post-his dalliance in politics within the candle-length stint of RFK's candidacy. The narrative of the collection, mirroring its title, is the narrative of the Obama presidency. The private, sexual, memorial man is here, too, obsessed with the mortality of his Harvard brethren and his craven appetites, which after all are nothing less virtuous than mouthfuls of "Cunnilingus" (it is indeed a title). Call it mellowing, yet there are brilliant elegies here, like the one for the film-making comrade of Polanski's, Hercules Belleville. There are also poems that drift inexplicably -- large categorical storage departments, like "Oedipal Strivings." Fun to sit with for a morning, but without the sharpness of Seidel's best work.

[William Gortowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something about Seidel I always enjoy.

[Susana Case · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though there are some nice lines in this collection, I confess that when I put it down midway, I had difficulty picking it up again. Though I admire Seidel's subversive tone, his playfulness, I was thrown by the amount of somewhat clumsy end-rhyme, which I believe he meant to be funny, as in "Silvio Berlusconi is not happy. / He feels crappy." ("A History of Modern Italy") This misfired regularly throughout this series of poems.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me. The creepy old man vibes didn't strike me as interesting. There's some really clumsy and heavy handed end-rhyme stuff that I'm sure was intentional of whatever reason, but it just didn't work for me.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will need to read this several more times before making any real comment on it other than that it has done nothing to shake my conviction that he is our best living poet.

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime. The best there is.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fiesty and fun; bad-ass and obnoxious. Seidel is in your face and I like it.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flinty, brutal, surreal.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiendish, uproarious.

[Serhiy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The bicycle messenger who nearly knocked you over Was me trying to."

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

An earthy, gritty delight.

[Hailey Leithauser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seidel continues to be one of, if not THE most exciting poets writing in the English language

[Corin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

"beautiful pointlessness"