Selected Poems

by Frederick Seidel

An overview of Frederick Seidel's best and most famous poetry from the past five decades, showing the evolution of a master poet’s craft

Frederick Seidel has been hailed as "the poet of a new contemporary form" (Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books) and "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review ). The poems in Frederick Seidel Selected Poems span more than five decades and provide readers with some of Seidel's most powerful work.

Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today."

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2020

Reviews

[Ken]

As of people, so of books. Saying they're "different" can be a compliment or an insult. In some cases, I like different; in others, I'm being charitable.

So I'm in new territory. I read a sterling review of this book in the NY TIMES and picked it up. Turns out it's...different. Only I'm not sure which way.

On the plus side, I finished! If I don't like a collection of poetry, I bail. In this case, I posted bail and kept reading. Seidel's poems are easy reading. Sometimes they're funny, sometimes just plain weird. As they go on, he seems to strut his rhyming dictionary more. I like rhyming couplets and such more when I don't notice them. If it's a stretch to find a rhyming word, though... CLUNK. I'm stricken by greeting card-itis.

One blurber on the back inner panel says Seidel is "the writer willing to say the unsayable." I'll drink to that. He doesn't much worry about being politically incorrect. Quite confident in that sense.

But enough of this. Here's a sample that shows his witty way with words. It's called "Me" and is about everyone's favorite subject, that person in the mirror.


Me
by Frederick Seidel

The fellow talking to himself is me,
Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see
Him every morning shave and comb his hair
And then lose track of him until he starts to care,
Inflating sex dolls out of thin air
In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair
That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track
Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack
With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat
This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street!
Completely crazy but not at all insane.
He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain.
He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool.
He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul.

But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn
Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on.
He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone.
It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn.
A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die,
Is not in pain so far, and she will try
To palliate her death, is what her life is now.
The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how?
Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to.
The moon and stars rapidly enter you
While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth
Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth.
The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.
The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun.

You keep on writing till you write yourself away,
And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay.
The eggs crack open and out comes everyone.
The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun!
Speaking of someone else for a change, not me,
There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely,
Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird
Circled forever around us and then without a word
Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there
And you burst into tears. I was unaware
That ten years before the same thing had happened just
After your young daughter died and now it must
Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak
And receive the recognition we all seek.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met a man right smack on the page,
Seidel Frederick, or so he says,
But he feels like Humbert Humbert in Seussian rage.
A little lewd, halfheartedly sage...
A three-sheets-to-the wind Ducati-riding Literati.
We actually met back in 2016.
Likely as not we shared something obscene,
There was a library, curvy women... possibly just in from Tartuga.
Mainly I remember the first thing he said to me: Ooga-Booga.
-----------------------------
Self-Sticking Seidel-Sized Stanzas:

From “Sunrise”:
Al is new behind their backs, or ast.
House lots link up like cells and become house,
Shade tree and lawn, the frontier hypoblast
Of capitalism develops streets in minutes
Like a Polaroid. The infinite’s
Sublime indifference to the mile—Mao
On nuclear war. Inches; dust motes; they bo bow wow
At the heels of history. The dust
Imitates the thunder that will bring rain.

Also from “Sunrise”:
The million things that go together one
Will lift away from, everything under the sun,
Everything—dog and doorknob—-combustion to varpor
Lock—scissors cut paper, rock breaks scissors, paper
Covers rock. Everything is looking
For something softer than itself to eat.
From “A Dimpled Cloud”:
And painfully eager to please a sadist so cruel
He wouldn’t even hurt a masochist.

From “Poem Does”:
No civilized state will execute
Someone who is ill
Till it makes the someone well
Enough to kill
In a civilized state,
As a poem does.

From “The Bird on the Crocodile’s Back”:
Musa, mihi causas memora…you know?
You’ve seen a baby lift its foot to suck its toe
And then go back to sleep for several years
And then wake up to find a whole nation in tears…
Multiple assassinations, black and white, white and black,
Chest covered with medals split open by a national heart attack.
Baby has grown up to be an outrage carrying a weapon.
He’s graduated from West Point and found little babies to step on.

From “Man in Slicker”:
Talking, talking, talking, at my desk, in silence,
Putting my head in the open mouth of my MacBook Air.
Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare.
The poem eats anything, doesn't care.
I sing of Obama’s graying second-term hair.


-----------------------------
Frederick Flowing Faves:
- To Robert Lowell and Osip Mandestam
- Burkino Faso
- Midnight
- At Gracie Mansion
- The Black-Eyed Virgins
- Sii Romantico, Seidel, Tanto Per Cambiare
- Evening Man
- London
- Polio Days
- Quand Vous Serez Bien Vieille
-----------------------------
ARE THESE WORDS? ... THEY PROBABLY ARE...
thixotropic | gwandly | obstipation | perdurable | mucilaginous

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why did the great man excuse “Miami in the Arctic Circle,” his masterpiece? No “Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri”—now dangerously un-PC? Where is “Trump for President!”—might someone mistake the irony in the title? Quite a great many goodies are missing; but it is clearly Seidel’s view that his later stuff—let’s say from the 90s on—is the really good shit. Okay; though I always enjoy grabbing FINAL SOLUTIONS off the shelf at Beverly Hills Library. What’s unimpeachable is that Fred is at the forefront of living American writers, right there next to DeLillo and Didion, and, like them—this is never remarked upon!—he is a translator of our moment. Nothing in American letters could explain to a Martian the feeling of our last fifty years like this book.

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually read poetry but I caught a review of this book in the NYTimes and the poet's profile fascinated me. Particularly, I liked what the review said about the poet having a privileged background in St. Louis where I grew up. I also liked that the poet is known to write in beautifully particular ways about his own exceedingly fascinating lifestyle while also mercilessly lampooning it.

So I bought this book and read it and I really liked it. As I said, I'm not experienced reading poetry and that made me miss maybe 80-90% of what he's really trying to say. However, the 10-20% that I did gel with really stuck with me. Particularly, I love the place descriptions of St. Louis locations that I'm familiar with like Forest Park or Broadway downtown. Additionally, although I hate motorcycles personally, I can respect their beauty and one of the poet's fascinations is fast beautifully made mostly red custom Ducati's and he writes wonderfully about them and uses tired cliche's (comparing the machine to a monster/animal) in original ways. Finally, two poems that really got me were: 1) The one where he talks about his mother being lobotomized and 2) The really short one about being in the Ritz in Paris where he catches a reflection of his saggy butt.

I can't necessarily recommend this book because the pleasure I obtained from it was very specific and also very deep. However, maybe this poet's appeal is his ability to write about very small things that happened in his life in a way that can make everyone understand exactly what he means while also recognizing some small notion about the beauty or horribleness that is day to day existence on the earth.

Anyway, I liked it a lot.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A curated collection of poems from the poet's fifty-plus-year career. His poems are challenging in many ways, sometimes weird, sometimes full of hateful, violent, or graphic imagery, but all challenge the status quo of poetry and modern consumerist society. Sometimes poems or parts of them rhyme, as if to challenge the current fashion of free verse. The poet often writes of himself as if he is a character and not a very nice one, eccentric, bourgeois, classist, materialistic. His voice makes him unique and this collection is an excellent place to start with him.

[Charlie Cray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seidel is one of my favorite living poets. He's also probably one of the least "politically correct" poets - so I think a lot of my friends and colleagues would hate his poetry. Too bad.

[Lukas Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Luxury porn poetry.

[Jules · Rating 2 out of 5]

one of those books that really inspires you to get out there and write because if a hack like this can have an illustrious career in poetry, who's gonna stop you?