Hell on wheels

• Last Updated: April 03. 2009 9:06PM UAE / April 3. 2009 5:06PM GMT

Frederick Seidel is America’s premier poet of wealth, violence, lust, power, integrity, technology and speed. Christian Lorentzen reads his collected works.


Poems 1959 - 2009
Frederick Seidel
Farrar Straus and Giroux
Dh147


Frederick Seidel’s America is a land of endless delight and unceasing atrocity. A demonic gentleman in a bespoke suit mounted on a cartoon Ducati makes a lightning rampage through a landscape of innocence, pocked by the occasional industrial crater. A mushroom cloud blooms behind him. He pauses to pick up the stray blonde hitchhiker. The poet will make it to Manhattan in time for dinner, though he may have to dodge a suicide bomber. The night will likely end in tears, if not the loss of a body part.

Such, anyway, is the singular persona Seidel has conjured over a 50-year career that has only accelerated – and globalised – in the last decade. He was born the heir to a coal-and-coke fortune on February 13, 1936, in St Louis, Missouri (“My father’s coal yards under a wartime heavy snow. / The big blue truck wearing chains like S/M love.”), attended Harvard University (“just another / Greek nose in street clothes in Harvard Yard”), and moved to Manhattan (“The homeless are blooming like roses / On every corner on Broadway”). In 1962, a committee that included Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz and Louise Bogan awarded him the New York 92nd Steet YMCA’s inaugural poetry prize; the institution refused to fund the publication of his first collection, worried he had libelled his subjects. Final Solutions nonetheless appeared the next year. It would be 17 years until the second, Sunrise; then nine more for These Days, another three for My Tokyo, and half a decade before Going Fast, bringing us to 1998. A rapid late outpouring – the three volumes of The Cosmos Trilogy (2003), Ooga-Booga (2006), and last year’s chapbook Evening Man – has since prompted various critics to call him the finest poet writing in the United States today. And yet Seidel doesn’t tend to figure in discussions of American candidates for the Nobel Prize; such perhaps is the fate of one who opens a poem: “I want to date-rape life.”

Beginning with the newest work and proceeding in reverse chronological order, Poems 1959–2009 opens with Boys, wherein Seidel recalls several black males he knew as an adolescent in Jim Crow–era St Louis. These include a pair of teenagers working at a local garage who “offered to get me a girl”; a chauffeur sobbing over FDR’s death; a possibly homosexual carhop who invites the young Seidel to a party that he skips; “a goody-goody young Christian” orphan whose schooling his father funds; and an elderly man who shines his father’s shoes. The last prompts the poem’s most bracing lines:

My father had beautiful manners
A perfect haughty gentleman
. . .
So it was a jolt, a jolt of joy,
To hear him cut the s***
And call a black man Boy.
The white-haired old Negro was a shoeshine boy.
One of the sovereign experiences of my life was my joy
Hearing my father in a fury call the man Boy.



This frankness about America’s brutal legacy of racism is simply absent from our literature today: not only the unflinching recollection of whites demeaning blacks but also the admission of pleasure-taking at an innocent age. The scene is all the more striking for the formal playfulness of Seidel’s presentation – short lines giving way to long; repetitious but irregular rhyming, formalism mocking its own pretensions. The end of the poem again reverses expectations; the father, kind to the unions and charitable, is beloved by the city’s blacks:

A black woman came up to my father.
All the colored people in this city know who you are.
God sent you to us. Thank God for your daddy, boy.

Alive to the experience of America’s racist legacy and to the contradictions inherent in living through and beyond Jim Crow, Boys is a poem Seidel has been working toward all along. In the second stanza of Wanting to Live in Harlem, the first poem in Final Solutions, we come across a teenage miscegenation fantasy:

The color of the young light-skinned colored girl we had then.
I used to dream about her often,
In sheets she’d have to change the next day.
I was thirteen, had just been bar mitzvah.

It is tempting to read Poems from back to front, the better to observe both the widening of Seidel’s scope and the intensification of his powers. What emerges is a perverse chronicle of the back end of the twentieth century and the tortured hangover decade that came after, now nearing its calamitous, implosive end.

Seidel grows strikingly as a master manipulator of form, but many of his themes were present from his first collection: the preoccupation with old age and death; the sharp awareness of American class stratification, viewed at once from the top and the bottom; the alternating delight and horror in identifying himself in the drama of history, both distant and presently unfolding. Even Seidel’s urge to disgust – as here, in The Coal Man:

I see me and the miners, the drivers,
And some poor nigger customers
Who can’t buy the smokeless fuel
Eating our soft coal whole,
And vomiting and vomiting slick eels
Of blackness. I can see this.

The last sentence suggests a poet stunned by his own perceptions, yet the long gap before Sunrise resulted, in Seidel’s account, from a crisis of confidence. “Though I had written a lot, I had not found how to write a poem,” he told an interviewer. “I simply had nothing to say.” Or, as he wrote of the 1960s in My Tokyo:

Meanwhile, the civil rights movement I completely missed.
I was so busy doing nothing.
I had no time. They lynched and burned.
I played squash drunk.

He also started riding motorcycles. The first of his poems on the subject, Men and Women, comes in Sunrise:

...one shouldn’t mock the innocent machinery
Of life, nor the machines we treasure. For instance,
Motorcycles. What definition of beauty can exclude
The MV Agusta racing 500-3,
From the land of Donatello, with blatting megaphones?

Many more odes on this theme would follow, and they have been derided by some (the Language poet Ron Silliman has called Seidel a “rich boy formalist... principally known as a collector of expensive motorcycles”), but in his enthusiasm for these machines, Seidel is making good on Rimbaud’s dictum: “We must be absolutely modern.” Curiously, the more Seidel writes about Ducatis the more French he sounds.

In Sunrise, published in 1980, Seidel’s palette of settings – St. Louis; Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York; the tourist capitals of Europe; ancient Rome – begins its limitless expansion, and we find him often on planes (“Aloft in a holding pattern as if forever”). The 40-stanza title poem recounts an anxious journey from New York City via India (“The air at the Bombay Airport is edible”) to Perth, Australia, where the poet’s girlfriend’s son has been rendered a quadriplegic. His dreams of the boy’s rebirth are interspersed with nervous contemplation of the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon.

By These Days (1989) Seidel had incorporated the spectacle of terror into his decadence. He assumes an ironically casual attitude toward apocalypse (“I went to see the world destroyed. It was a movie.”) and even eroticises it: “The unshaved glow of her underarms is the sky / of prehistory or after the sun expands.” Yet like many an American male, he can still see through the accumulated vices, indulgences and traumas of middle age to the adolescent we first encountered in Wanting to Live in Harlem; he returns in A Dimpled Cloud:

Cold drool on his chin, warm drool in his lap, a sigh
The bitterness of too many cigarettes
On his breath: portrait of the autist
Asleep in the arms of his armchair, age thirteen,

From the aftermath of another fantasy, the poem proceeds through classrooms, locker rooms and schoolbuses. The “autist” is awkward and self-conscious; his clothes don’t fit, he prefers not to wear his glasses, he is afflicted by pimples (“Depression, aggression, elation—and acne cream— / The ecosystem of a boy his age.”) A Dimpled Cloud concludes with a comment on poetic composition:

The sadistic eye of the autist shapes the world
Into a sort of, call it innocence,
Ready to be wronged, ready to
Be tortured into power and beauty, into
Words his photographic memory
Will store on silence like particles of oil
On water—the rainbow of polarity

Which made this poem. I put my glasses on,
And shut my eyes. O adolescence, sing!
All the bus windows are open because it’s warm.
I blindly face a breeze almost too sweet
To bear. I hear a hazy drone and float–
A dimpled cloud – above the poor white and poorer
Black neighbourhoods around the small airfield.

The artist as “autist” is at once an easy joke and a cunning act of self-presentation. The word “autist” mimics the upper-class accent of the Boston Brahmin, but borrows the mystical air attached in popular culture to the autistic: socially maladapted but possessed of special sensory capacities (“photographic memory”). After flirting a little too closely with cliché – a rainbow in a puddle, a “sweet breeze”, the poet’s daydream of himself as a cloud – his eye pans with a painful melancholy to an aerial view of social and economic inequality. The method outlined and performed – sadism rendering the world innocent, then harming it into a disquieting aesthetic product – reveals Seidel’s project for what we might least expect it to be: sincere. As if A Dimpled Cloud were too idyllic, it is followed by The Blue Eyed Doe, in which he chillingly recalls his mother’s lobotomy.

Going Fast finds the poet fully realised, declaring his identity:

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.

These oft-quoted lines are obviously enough tongue-in-cheek, but they nonetheless set out – with prophetic force – the at times contradictory themes that would propel Seidel through the next decade: wealth, violence, lust, power, integrity, technology, vice, rapacity, speed.

Written over three years, The Cosmos Trilogy comprises one hundred poems of eight quatrains each (except the last, which stretches to twenty-five). Seidel begins musing on the birth of the heavens and the nature of time, and descends, converging with history, to the New York of autumn 2001. In the infamous December, published within two months of the September 11 attacks, his negative capability explodes:

I like the color of the smell. I like the odor of spoiled meat.
I like how gangrene transubstantiates warm firm flesh into rotten sleet.
When the blue blackens and they amputate, I fly.
I am flying a Concorde of modern passengers to gangrene in the sky.

I am flying into area code 212
To stab a Concorde into you,
To plunge a sword into the gangrene.
This is a poem about a sword of kerosene.

These metaphors summon the devastation with an appropriate and accurate horror, whereas so many writers sought to retreat into the placid days that came before. Seidel never seeks comfort or consolation: he knows even that his own pleasures bear the traces of violence: “I’m drinking from the barrel of a crystal pistol / trying to get a bullet to my brain.”

In Ooga-Booga and Evening Man, Seidel is the playboy of the western world, and that world is on fire. These last two volumes contain so many fine, frightening and funny poems as to defy efforts to catalogue them. Global warming, cancer, terrorism, the iniquities of the Bush administration intrude upon Seidel’s revelries, affairs and motorbike rides. We see him in China, Dubai, the Caribbean, Ghana, Italy – everywhere, it seems – and the debonair poet emerges as a reluctant but willful ambassador of American excess.

Gathered with the earlier work, these late volumes display Seidel’s reappropriation and reworking of earlier inventions. Compare, for example, the opening lines of AIDS Days, from These Days – “The most beautiful power in the world has buttocks. / It is always a dream come true.” – to those of Barbados: “Literally the most expensive hotel in the world / is the smell of rain about to fall.” And then look back to Sunrise: “The freshness of rain about to fall is what / It would be like not to have been born.” (The rain image, as the young poet Michael Robbins has suggested, comes from Ezra Pound; that of the unborn from a famous line of Aeschylus.) In Barbados, Seidel repeats the formula twice more:

The most expensive hotel in the world
Is the slave ship carrying Africans to the moon.
. . .
The most expensive hotel in the world ignites
As many virgins as there are in paradise.

Such decadent stuff may not be the thing to win a poet the Nobel Prize. But the committee in Sweden is notorious for favouring those who hold America to account for its sins, and Frederick Seidel does such writers one better – his poetry enacts America’s sins, in all their terrifying sublimity.

Christian Lorentzen is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine.