The Cosmos Trilogy

by Frederick Seidel

"You Can't Like Seidel's Poems--They're Deliberately Virulent; You Can Only Gasp At Their Skill And Daring, Their Sickening Warp, Their Mercilessness."*

Frederick Seidel's highly acclaimed Cosmos Trilogy is a triple thunderclap of darkness from the poet whom Richard Poirier has recently called "the true heir of Walt Whitman" and of whose first book Robert Lowell wrote "[I] suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes." Reversing the course of Dante's Divine Comedy , Seidel's trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems , and descends, passing through the Purgatorio of Life on Earth to arrive in Manhattan in Area Code 212 .

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 24, 2003

Reviews

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very into / impressed by the last third of this book — the first bit reads a bit like a less compelling version of Calvino’s Cosmicomics imo. Mixed bag! Wasn’t in it for the whimsy, was persuaded much more by Seidel’s merciless and virulent poetics (a poetic “I” that seems to be sharply aware of its own death drive; fictive, self-revelatory, dangerous, hyperbolic. All good things if you know how to balance it)

[Taube · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in a used bookstore, aimlessly perusing, in the way that one aimlessly peruses in a used bookstore, when I suddenly remembered that someone had recommended Seidel to me with such gravitas that I MUST CHECK HIM OUT. I dutifully moved to the "S" section and began to search. Nothing. Nada. Oh well. It wasn't until I had given up all hope of finding anything and had moved back to my random looking that I found a stash of Seidel's books-- inexplicably shelved in the "B" section. As if only I were meant to find it. (And, believing in kismet, I was. )

I returned home and began reading Seidel's poetry and immediately started smiling. This wasn't all butterflies and metaphysics-- the tiresome gymnastics of academe--this was someone with a certain deviousness, a twisted sense of humor, the kind of Weltschmerz typical of a New Yorker of a certain age and class. As Jonathan Galassi writes: "The poet’s work has won notoriety for a stance of épater-le-bourgeois knowingness that asserts with a cool rhetorical elegance that Seidel is on speaking terms with the haut monde (which is true enough), and that at the same time he essentially belongs to a society of one. It is the classic antisocial pose of the dandy, ennobled by Baudelaire but notably absent from most of American poetry."

How refreshing, then, to read poems that strain the pillowy soft notions of what poetry is or should be. As Benjamin Kunkel describes in a Harper's review: "The suave tone setting up the shock, the excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite."

I definitely need to read more Seidel. (She says ever so savagely.)

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

As poetry goes, this is a fusion of science and philosophy that is as fascinating as it is eclectic. From Quantum Mechanics to “Venus Wants Jesus”, there is a thread of artistry and insolence the sets this poetry apart from other attempts.

I cannot say, as poetry, you will sit in a sitting and absorb the artistic sense of Shelly or Keats, neither will you get the mechanical treatise of Cummings or Crane, but there is a blending that endears you to the poetry while maintaining an austere appreciation for its composition.

Probably the most interesting volume of poetry I have ever read.

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The marketers of this book touted it as a modern version of Dante's Divine Comedy. That's carnival barker ad copy which is more than a little stretchy. That's a Silly Putty metaphor. That's taffy stretched the length of a football field. The Cosmos Trilogy is a series of three very talky books which do bear superficial resemblances to one another and do share certain tenuous links, enough to warrant calling this a trilogy.

The first volume is the one most invested in the physics. This is the book that dips its toes into cosmogony. It's a smattering of quantum facts which animate the poems, which still want to talk (no great surprise) about the author's emotional life as well. I like when poets attempt to reify scientific concepts in their poetry. The risk is that your poems might get dated fairly quickly if you've relied too much on models or data which are later contradicted by science. So I give Seidel points for that and it added a little interest to the poems. This book was my favorite of the three. I felt there was a consistent diminution of quality from book to book.

Seidel often reminds me of James Tate and it's in these Tate-like poems that I feel he succeeds best. Remember how well Tate pulled off that ukiyo-e float of impossibly irreconcilable facts in his poems? Everything floated and you floated with that everything in the best Tate poems. The best poems in here do that. And Tate was funny. So is Seidel sometimes. Once or twice he actually reminded me of Marianne Moore, a poet who was all about importing information in her poems and reification. That weird, Mandarin tone of hers that she wore as well as she did that tricorne hat. You probably see where I'm pointing with these comparisons; this is a poet of wit. All three poets have visionary moments in their books. But they skate on the powers of their wit. They all seem to stumble into vision. They aren't interested in steeping in the visionary like Stevens or Rilke. None of the three would want to lose the grittiness of the world.

While I would recommend checking this book out and maybe even owning it (if library space is not an issue) there were qualities of the book which un-endeared it to me. The tone was too consistently manic and the deadpan started to wear on me. "I am speaking in Ecstatic," Seidel confesses in one poem and boy, he isn't kidding. It's a pet peeve of mine; if a collection is filled with poems operating in one emotional range or if it recycles rhetorical tricks down to the last drop, then I feel that urge for going. I don't believe most poets are as un-various as their collections are. Seidel does have a handful of spare, quieter poems that shunt the crazy train into a reflective station here and there. But generally the push is on to be the fastest talker, the loudest and the most self-aggrandizing. Warning: there is celebrity-friend name-dropping.

There are zingers all through this book, zingers that come off and zingers that do not. It gives one cautionary thoughts about using zingers in the first place. Maybe it's infradig to mention the author's age, even in a compliment, but I wanted to say the poems do feel contemporary and read as though they could have been written by a younger poet. Maybe that's really just a way of admitting that there hasn't been that much change in the disjunctive mode of poetry (and this is Seidel through and through) for over a century. It keeps getting peddled as contemporary and new. This is probably because it's at variance with the strategies adopted by prose and even challenging, avant-y prose. We don't let prosateurs "get away" with it. But poet-use is sanctioned. Probably because (insert disjunctive Spicer line here that starts with "No one...") But it's as least as old as Apollinaire. Only the content has changed (and slightly). Not the facture.

Here's where I turn back to the book and say to myself that I think I've been overly harsh so far. This book is smart, quite often. I didn't grimace or want to underline anything as memorably objectionable or cringe-worthy. Even though some of the memorable lines float like flotsam and jetsam on blather and lather. Poets pad poems. It's inevitable as the air pocket in your bag of chips. And there were moments when I was mentally cheering the author on as he nailed the way this or that fact out of physics dovetailed with a human emotion hearkening to that part of the universe's subliminal infrastructure. But this is too much me. Let me share some of him, of the book you may or may not want to read. These are random and I won't cite their poems, just share them and let you see if you like the lines.

And they overwhelm you and force
You to stay still till it is over.
Movies do.
I like the speed of light.

*

Into the emptiness that weighs
More than the universe
Another universe begins
Smaller than the last.

*

The yellow sunlight with
The milky moonlight makes
An egg without cholesterol
And I will live.

*

My body in your hands
To live.
The bay is blue
To me means that.

*

The answer is
The friendliness of the body.
There is no answer, but the answer is
The friendliness of the body.

*

You open your head.
You look in the dictionary.
You look it up.
You look at the opposite.

*

Your hand
Starts to thunder,
Starts to rain much
Harder.

*

That someone looking at the page
Could be the everything there is,
Material that shines
Or shined.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry sometimes lends itself to the slippery, ineffable mysteries of time and space, to the expression of the inexpressible and what we understand only dimly. Seidel does all that in these magnificent poems in which the micro is seen in conjunction with the whole of the cosmos as a seamless whole. Seidel's surrealism, most noticeable in the 2d section, "Life on Earth," goes well with the arcane nature of physics and cosmology. I hesitate to definitely state the book's a reversed Divine Comedy. Yet it travels from a heaven of "The Cosmos Poems" through the rather pedestrian "Life on Earth" to the hell of New York in "Area Code 212" with some remarkable and harrowing poems about 9/11, death, fire, ground zero, and the smoking pit of ruin where the Towers stood.

[Lanny]

Seidel is kind of too attached to received word and thought forms for my actual taste, but one has to read poets other than oneself! just kidding! heheh I don't know. A picture of a toilet paper roll on the cover is probably why I actually bought it.. ?? I do like some of the poems I've read in this already. Some of them are pretty strange. He goes into the emotional switchboard area more than is my liking, but as a poet or writer one must always be aware of 'strategies' must'nt one?

[Kid · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite living poet. . .try this on for size: an Upper East Side socialite with a dazzling handle on language, human interaction, love, dumb humor and paralyzing lust. And its easy to read! I feel like this man is a supreme observer of what it means to be alive in New York right now. The monied element of his resume never gets in the way of my enjoyment of this dude. He's a super hero.

[Geoff Wyss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm giving this book four stars only because it's not quite as good as Ooga Booga. But it's darn good and a must for anyone who likes Dante.

[Douglas]

I didn't like it nearly as Ooga Booga, which was full of the usual filth and soil of life. This was solid all the same, it just didn't have the out of control forward momentum I was hoping for.

[Sierra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes clever and creative, but then rampant misogyny and some transphobia.