Frederick Seidel’s best poems balance on a razor’s edge between diagnosing what’s wrong and being in the wrong. Like his previous 18 volumes, “So What” concerns aesthetic pursuits and bodily trouble, deeply felt personal losses and the jangle of harm and horror in the world. At nearly 140 pages, the book includes poems that feel like rehashes of past techniques and touch points, with a depleted sense of urgency. But Seidel is among our best contemporary poets, and has continued writing, well into his ninth decade, handsomely and in parody of handsome writing.
Much of “So What” is as vigorous, insightful, moving and disturbing as his work has ever been: lots of politics, noise, luxury, literature, disease, war and strife. Lots of cancer, now, and the very aged body. Seidel has always written from and beyond his own predicaments, never attempting to disentangle his speakers from complicity, so that the world of his poetry remains healthily sick and appallingly delightful.
We need poets’ blessings, but Seidel’s work has never been the place to find them. Instead, he offers something else we also need: poems that won’t let us look away.
Take ships, which make compelling lyric symbols. Think Whitman (“worn and old/… torn by many a fight …/I only saw, at last, the beauty of the Ship”) or Lucille Clifton (“may you in your innocence/sail through this to that”) or Leonard Cohen: “sail on,/O mighty Ship of State!/To the Shores of Need,/Past the Reefs of Greed,/Through the Squalls of Hate”). Seidel’s political vessel, in a sonnet that’s Shakespearean in structure if not in rhyme or prosodic scheme, arrives in this weirdly gorgeous, singsong retort:
The ship of state has split in half
The cargo has spilled out
Dogs and cats and you and me
Have spilled into the deep blue sea
“Blue sea” becomes designed reality (“the bountiful/The beautiful the CGI”), then becomes party politics (“Huge waves of red America the blue boats can’t live through”). To submit to a Seidel poem is to encounter constantly shifting attentions and visionary leaps, even if they don’t always stick the landing.
Consider “A Matched Pair of Purdeys,” where a couplet poses notions of female purity against one iteration of traditional masculinity (a Purdey is a shotgun):
I syng of a mayden that is makeles.
I sing of a shotgun that is matchless.
Translating the word “makeles” (from an anonymous medieval lyric about the Virgin Mary) as “matchless,” and replacing Jesus’ mother with a tool of the hunt, or conflict, while changing little else about syntax or sound, Seidel delivers an epigram about gender roles. He does so too japingly to suppose he’s endorsing traditional norms. By placing an unfired gun (that latent phallic symbol) where the Virgin Mother previously was, he may be thinking about — or having his speaker think like — incels, those self-appointed emasculated misogynists.
Male resentment resurfaces a little later in the poem, when Seidel writes about male poets praising beautiful women: “Women don’t want that and will tear your tongue out. … It’s a new generation/Of girls who generate Soviet-style show trials/To condemn/The pathetic older power generation of White Man.”
A poet of Seidel’s sophistication and attentiveness to current affairs surely understands what’s behind women’s anger over sexually abusive power plays. So why set up straw women exacting vengeance for compliments? His “White Man” speaker is indeed “pathetic” in his gaudy love for guns and his odes to shattered ideals of purity. This is self-caricaturing performance. However, in six-plus pages that cruise past harms and irritations, the poem never quite coheres, and thus risks seeming gratuitous.
By contrast, the book’s title poem — similar in its jounce from focus to focus — contains a lacerating vision, of what the author sees as his vocation’s futility. “Birdsong is serious./Poetry is meaningless,” he declares, and elsewhere, brutally:
Poetry doesn’t matter in the least.
Mariupol, Bucha, Odesa — Putin’s nightmare feast.
The poem brings large-scale events into communion with private experience, the present into relation with the past, shifting and blurting through descriptions of “satin” Manhattan moonlight, Pompeii before Vesuvius, a man collecting pigeons to sell to gun clubs, and finally an island off Maine where white rabbits “multiply and eat the innocent island bare.” It ends:
You grabbed your gun for some grim fun
And a million rabbits — not knowing they were white —
Hid stock-still in plain sight.
So what.
In that passage: damage, negligence, ignorance, an upside-down world and, perhaps, a racial analogy. The apathy in the final utterance is sincere, but there’s goad and valediction too. Nothing does matter, so what’s to be done, a question lacking a question mark addressed to self and reader — to all of us in our separate identities, hungers and angers, all of us also together, hunter and rabbit, innocent and guilty, unavoidably, inextricably.
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