The Lounge at New York Central
I had a meeting yesterday with a European colleague at the Grand Hyatt in New York. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance from outside the firm for which we both work.
As we met and ascended the stairs to the Lounge at New York Central, I was reminded of a poem I wrote in that bar many years ago, while working for an international publishing agency.
“Drink Meeting at the Grand Hyatt Sun Garden” wasn’t a very good poem, I think, but it well illustrated my discomfort at the time, as an artist in a business setting.
I used this poem in a talk called “Poetry & Business Life,” which was about the long tradition of poet-business people (Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, James Dickey, Dana Gioia, etc.), and which I wrote about previously on this blog.
The name of the bar has changed, as has my comfort level with business life over the years. Here is my poem. “Drink Meeting at the Grand Hyatt Sun Garden”:
Jazz standards fill the atrium,
black and white and one uniform shade of gray
—is this a Woody Allen film?
I’m waiting for Soandso on business,
not my business,
but the people I work for, theirs—
Any moment Woody will walk in
with Mia Farrow or Somebody,
an entourage, paparazzi.
He’ll head straight for my table,
and shake my hand;
the press will want to know
who I am, and I’ll no longer
be “a minor poet, not very conspicuous.”
I fight the urge to bolt
out of the Sun Garden bar
and find some dark, unmonikered pub,
like those my father frequented.
I realize the discomfort he must have felt
when he’d visit the clean, well-lighted
establishments of Tokyo, or LA, or Miami
on business, not his
but the people he worked for, theirs—
This is not my world:
a foreign post for a poet
and accidental businessman.
I suspect they’d throw me out
if not for my Brooks Brothers suit
and American Express card, not mine
but the people I work for, theirs—
Soandso is late, or lost,
or has forgotten…no,
it turns out she’s been waiting
in the lobby, fifteen minutes, twenty,
only just now thought
to check the bar—“Silly me…”
No Woody, no Mia, no Diane Keaton.
(But wait, isn’t that Mr. Shawn by the piano?
And isn’t that Donald Trump on the divan?)
Just a meeting, information shared—
perhaps, one day, we could be friends—
business transacted,
not my business,
but what has become mine—
I light a cigarette after Soandso has gone.
“Are you finished with this one, sir?”
I order another drink
and finish my poem. This
is my business.
The world is my office.
–Scott Edward Anderson
##
On Falling in Love at Middle Age: From Adrienne Rich’s “21 Love Poems”
September 26, 2012
Teatro Greco, Taormina, Sicily. Photo by the author.
I’ve just returned from a trip to London and Sicily with my partner Samantha. It was our first trip overseas together, although we have both traveled extensively and each has lived in Europe at different times in our lives.
While traveling, we shared with each other memories of our past lives on and visits to the continent; some happy, some not so happy.
We couldn’t help wondering what our lives would have been like had we met earlier, say, in our 20s.
Of course, this is folly, we can never reclaim those years – neither would we want to lose the gifts that were given to us by those years, especially our children from previous marriages. We were also very different people then and, perhaps, we weren’t ready for each other.
This line of thinking, however, brought to mind Adrienne Rich’s wonderful “21 Love Poems,” especially poem number three, which is about falling in love at middle age.
As the poet and critic Claire Keyes has written, “When one is middle-aged, falling in love contains a quality of excitement and joy unavailable to the young.”
It is, in many ways, a quality driven by temporal finiteness. Again, Keyes notes, ”No longer young, the lovers must make up for time lost when they were not loving each other. They must not waste time because they do not possess the luxury of unspent decades. Yet this is not a lover’s complaint, but a paean to love at forty-five, a reciprocated love that gives birth to the image of the beloved’s eyes, which are “everlasting.”
Here is poem number three from Adrienne Rich’s “21 Love Poems”:
III.
Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
Did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listened here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
–Adrienne Rich, from “21 Love Poems”
##
“Years are not a life…” and My Poem “Hope Against Hope”
July 22, 2012
The Charter for Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations.
My maternal grandmother, Marjorie Burgess Perry, was a funny woman.
I remember one story she told about her friend Ruthie, who got her hand caught in a meat grinder. I think the lesson there was about paying attention to what you’re doing in the moment.
Another time, she was sitting in her kitchen in East Providence, and had some advice to impart.
“I know I shouldn’t smoke,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “But my doctor said I need to stop drinking. And at my age, I can’t have sex anymore.”
She took a deep drag, exhaled, and quipped, “You have to have one vice.”
After she died, inevitably, at the hands of that one vice of hers, I found a few of her journals and a draft of a letter she wrote to me.
I’m not sure any of us knew the side of her that she poured into her writings. She was passionate, profound, and philosophical.
One of the phrases in her journals that struck me was “Years are not a life.”
A short time later I was working on a long poetic sequence called “Providence,” which attempts to tell the story of the European settling of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, King Philip’s War, the arrival of Portuguese in southern New England, and a bit of my family’s history there, which extends to 1637 in Sandwich, Massachusetts.
I used the phrase in one of the poems from the sequence, which was later published in Terrain.
Here is my poem, “Hope Against Hope”:
My mind is a slate gray sky
about to open up over the capitol. In the distance,
electricity grounds itself to Rhode Island’s terminal moraine,
and Narragansett Bay is alive with activity.
The city is like a tree, grafted to increase yield:
the scion of this hybrid is Freedom and the stock, Hope.
Did Roger Williams have this in mind, on the day
he was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony
and exiled to “Rogue’s Island?”
My mind is bent to the future
like a fly buzzing against a table lamp,
guided by some unknown power to the light.
Spruce-trees freckle Rhode Island’s low hills,
like “Indians” on horseback overlooking a settlement
in some old western. Years are not a life,
trees come down with heavy snow or summer storms,
others are cut to fuel fires in cast-iron stoves,
or are cleared for houses on subdivided acres.
Providence is an article of faith
as much as of divinity. Maybe a life is determined
in the balance of past, present, and future.
Providence, in the immutable language of trees:
Tulip-trees heavy-laden with their “magnolia” blossoms;
post oaks, twisted and stunted, like worried warriors;
ash, hickory, hope; willow, red spruce, blood;
poplar, pine, providence; sandy loam, eelgrass, freedom;
arrow-arum, water weed, Wampanoag; hope against hope.
My Version of Psalm 23, “Shepherd”
July 14, 2012
“David Playing the Harp,” by Jan de Bray, 1670
My partner Samantha and her family are in Jerusalem today, visiting the Tower of David among other significant sites in that city. They’ve been on tour in Israel all week, in advance of her nephew’s bar mitzvah on Monday.
David, the “warrior-poet,” slayer of Goliath, biblical King of Israel, uniter of the Jewish people, and writer of the Psalms.
He was a remarkable poet, and the Psalms are filled with all the complexities of who he was as a man: a fierce warrior, passionate lover, covenanted with God.
Psalms, which is important to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, is my favorite book of the Bible, along with that other great poetic work, the Song of Songs, written by David’s son, Solomon.
Psalm 23 is perhaps one of the most famous pieces of literature the world over. In this psalm, David portrays God as his shepherd. He uses the shepherd as a metaphor for the godly way his people should cope with fear and anxiety in their lives.
Here is my version of Psalm 23, which I’ve called, “Shepherd,” and which appeared in the journal A New Song nearly 20 years ago.
Shepherd
After Psalm 23
You prepare a table for us
in front of our enemies,
picking the sheepfold clean
with your own hands–
raw with the sting of nettle,
stained the color of sheep laurel.
Your back is stiff from bending,
filling your crooked arm
with lupine and false hellebore,
to keep us from having
one-eyed lambs.
From the bluestem foothills
comes the hush of rustling.
You look to the north,
sighting down landscape,
scenting the wind.
Your breath fills air,
pungent as pipe smoke.
Goodness and mercy, friend,
come forth from you as naturally
as clouds darkening this valley.
We would follow you anywhere,
dear shepherd, putting fears aside,
although you often seem foolhardy
in this green land, this restful pool.
—Scott Edward Anderson
Misidentifying Moths and My Poem “Summer Love”
June 23, 2012
Cecropia moth (Hyalophora cecropia)
My old friend and former decompositionalist compatriot, Penny Perkins, posted a gorgeous picture of a moth on Facebook today, which she misidentified as an “Endangered Emperor Moth.”
I recognized her mistake right away. The moth was, in fact, a Luna moth (Actias luna) and not Saturnia pavonia.
I noted this on her post in the comments section and also the fact that neither moth is endangered. She thanked me and then asked if, perchance, I had any poems about moths. I did or do.
(At least, I thought it was about moths. I’m never sure anymore what I was writing about when I wrote a poem!)
Here is my poem “Summer Love”:
The female cecropia moth,
Hyalophora cecropia, emerges
As in a stop-action film: swollen
Abdomen shrinking while wings
Rise, fill, and form. Pheromones
Kick in, attracting a male from miles away.
They couple quickly—how easy love can be.
Linked like this, at terminus,
They are most vulnerable to predators.
They will stay this way, available
To each other, for hours—
Then vanish as memory fades.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Perseverance and my poem “An ‘Unkindness’ of Ravens”
June 9, 2012
Raven Mandala II by Nathalie Parenteau
I lived in Alaska sixteen years ago, when my oldest son Jasper was born.
During his first month he had trouble sleeping, as babies often do, and most nights found me walking with him in my arms trying to get him back to sleep.
While walking I would softly sing to him and recite poems and, occasionally, I would whisper a poem I was working on at the time.
One of these poems was “An ‘Unkindness’ of Ravens,” which was filled with direct observations of ravens — an almost constant presence in town and, along with polar bears, a kind of totem in my life since I first saw them as a boy in Maine.
The poem started forming one night when, after putting my son back in his crib, I couldn’t get back to sleep.
Looking out the window, I noticed ravens gathering in the tall trees behind the house. I was intrigued as their numbers grew and the poem began to unfold in my mind.
Many of the images in the poem came from ravens I observed out my office window in the old Alaska Railroad Depot building by Ship Creek below downtown Anchorage.
I always liked this poem, perhaps because of its association with the birth of my first child and what it said about the strangeness and newness of my life at the time: a new father and new to Alaska; both uncharted territories.
As with many things, my perseverance paid off and, fourteen years after it was written, the poem found a home in a journal called Abyss & Apex.
Here is my poem, “An ‘Unkindness’ of Ravens”:
To fall asleep at night, I count ravens
from my bedroom window.
They gather in the spruce trees
at the edge of the woods,
as snow gathers dusk on its surface.
By midnight, thirty or forty
have gathered there in the oily dark.
As a group, they are called “an unkindness,”
but they are polite
and helpful to each other,
share their successes and failures
pursue joy and embrace their strength
in numbers, which is more than we can say.
Plummeting downhill, they launch into air,
as if snowboarding; flipping and spinning
— hell-bent teenagers on a half-pipe.
In more sober moments, they tell each other
where to look for food, when danger is near,
and where the good garbage is. They discuss
variable wind speeds or compare moose meat
found in the woods with that of roadside kills.
They can be graceful on the wing — Naiads
of the air — or clumsy and indelicate,
half-eaten bagels dangling from black beaks.
Dusk comes later and later these evenings,
and morning arrives sooner, winter almost over.
Come Easter, the ravens will be gone.
Ravens prefer dead things remain dead.
–Scott Edward Anderson
Eastern Redbud Tree (Cercis canadensis) blossoms - photo © Valerie Reneé
on Flickr - noncommercial use permitted with attribution / no derivative works
The Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) is one of my favorite trees. Native to eastern North America from southern Ontario to northern Florida, the redbud is an early harbinger of spring.
Also known as the “Judas tree,” it is among the first to bloom. In my experience, it flowers before the cherries and magnolias in the mid-Atlantic.
The redbud is easily recognizable from its showy, magenta to fuchsia-pink flowers appearing in clusters from March to May. Rather than bursting out of the ends of branches, however, the redbud’s flowers seem to “break out” on bare stems before the leaves and sometimes on the trunk itself.
The flowers are pollinated by long-tongued bees such as blueberry bees, carpenter bees and mining or miner bees.
Calvin, my pitbull, is no stranger to my readers and friends. I’ve written about him before and he had quite a few followers on my Twitter account (@greenskeptic) where I often post pictures of him.
Calvin in the Wissahickon
My poem, “Redbud & Pitbull,” originated from a scene I witnessed sitting on the porch of my former house two years ago. The redbud I had planted there a few years back had still produced no flowers.
I was curious about this fact and about the frenetic activity of the mining bees, which should have been pollinating the redbud, because both seemed to be indicative of my life at the time. I was simultaneously unsettled and not yet ready to flower.
What a difference a few years makes: the redbud flowered for the first time this year — and what glorious flowers have bloomed in my life!
Here is my poem, “Redbud & Pitbull”:
The mining bees are emerging.
Males zipping around
tiny holes in the ground
where females are burrowing
beneath the redbud.
The males have a curious display;
more manic than romantic,
expecting a mate to think crazy
is sexy or superior.
I guess we all
fall prey to a little crazy
love now and again,
do something foolish,
cross a line or two.
But the bees flying too close
to the ground are just frantic,
can’t imagine they’d make
suitable mates.
They course and dive and zip
(yes, that’s the best word for it, zip),
while females wait below the redbud.
My pitbull Calvin watches
the mining bees swirling
above and into the ground
beneath the redbud. He thinks,
Who or what are these (things)
buzzing and drilling in the dirt?
Truth is, the mining bees
–neither food nor friend—
pay him little interest.
Now Calvin grows bored,
slopes over to the sidewalk
flopping down in the sun.
The redbud’s waxy leaves
glisten in the same sun,
green edging into red.
Calvin is mottled, piebald,
brindle and white with a big brown
eye patch that makes people smile.
He’s a lover, not a fighter.
He cares little why the redbud’s shock
of fuchsia flowers, like scales or
a rash running up the limbs hasn’t shown.
He has no word for flowers
and little time for bees.
–Scott Edward Anderson
P.S. This poem, along with “Calvin’s Story,” appeared in Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology, published by Salmon Press. If you love dogs and poetry, you must have this book – it makes a great Mother’s Day gift too!
Alison Hawthorne Deming and raccoon cub.
I love when poetry shows up in unexpected places.
The Poetry Society of America and the MTA recently revived their “Poetry in Motion” program on the New York City subways.
The Clint Eastwood Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler, written by poet Matthew Dickman, is another example.
“The Language of Conservation,” a Poets House project that provides residencies for poets in zoos around the country, is still another.
So I was thrilled when American Scientist magazine published my friend Alison Hawthorne Deming‘s poem “Mosquitoes” in a recent issue.
Alison lives in the Tucson desert and draws inspiration from the natural world there, her native New England, as well as Grand Manan Island, Canada, where she has a family home, the Everglades, Alaska — really, wherever she is.
Her work has long been concerned with the relationship between art and science — her first book was titled Science & Other Poems — and the science of looking at the world. So her appearance in a scientific magazine is not really a surprise, but the fact that the magazine publishes poetry at all is to be celebrated.
Alison’s books include the poetry collection Rope (Penguin, 2009) and the essay collection The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998). She is coeditor of The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, revised edition 2011).
Formerly director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Alison teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona and also serves as chair of the board of directors for Orion magazine. She recently completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit.
Whether writing about individual species (The Monarchs), entire ecosystems, or the human despoilment of nature, Alison trains a scientist’s eye on her subjects. Yet, she’s not afraid to add a little wry humor into the mix.
“Mosquitoes” offers an enlightened victim’s view of this annoying insect, prompting us to appreciate its singleness of purpose and a reciprocity with which most of us would rather not comply.
Here is Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Mosquitoes”:
First came the scouts who felt our sweat in the air
and understood our need to make a sacrifice.
We were so large and burdened with all we had carried,
our blood too rich for our own good. They understood
that we could give what they needed and never miss it.
Then came the throng encircling our heads like acoustic haloes
droning with the me-me-me of appetite. We understood
their pleasure to find such hairless beasts so easy to open and drink.
We understood their female ardor to breed and how little
they had to go on considering the protein required to make
their million-fold eggs. Vibrant, available, and hot,
we gave our flesh in selfless service to their future.
— Alison Hawthorne Deming
National Poetry Month Poem-a-Week 2012: Randall Maggs’s “Different Ways of Telling Time”
April 21, 2012
Bobby Orr flies through the air after scoring the Stanley Cup winning goal in 1970. Photo by Ray Lussier
The Stanley Cup Playoffs have been on my mind this week as my home town Boston Bruins attempt to defend their championship from last year — our first since my childhood.
I started playing hockey the same year I started writing poetry. And hockey legend Bobby Orr had something to do with both pursuits.
Poetry and hockey may seem unlikely bedfellows, but not to me. I was the player in the back of the bus with a stack of library books: the Beats, Transcendalists, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and a slim volume of Stephen (“Red Badge of Courage”) Crane’s poetry I’d love to find today.
To me, hockey is a kind of poetry; perhaps because my earliest memory of the sport is tied to a flying Bobby Orr in black and gold. The game is comprised of all life’s elements: brutality, grace, and fragility; the speed, tenacity, and acumen it takes to succeed in the world. All life’s triumphs and heartbreaks played out on a hard, frozen surface.
Bobby Orr and the Bruins won the Stanley Cup 1970 in a Mother’s Day overtime game captured in my memory by twin images: Orr flying through the air over the collapsing St. Louis goalie Glenn Hall — triumphant, jubilant, having just scored the winning goal; and the trajectory of my father’s beer can that I sent flying in my enthusiasm of the moment.
To this day, I don’t wear socks in my skates because that’s how #4 rolled, and Inever rest a beer can on the arm of a chair.
Orr’s first year in the league — 1966-67 — was the last year of the National Hockey League’s “Original Six”: Boston, New York, Montreal, Detroit, Chicago, and the improbably, poetically named Toronto Maple Leafs. That was also the last time Toronto won the Stanley Cup. The Leaf’s goalie that season, Terry Sawchuk, was one of the best of the golden era of goaltending.
It’s called the golden era because the game was rapidly changing, becoming a “shooters game.” Goaltenders had to develop new techniques and new approaches in response to the goal-scoring, stick-handling legends of the age, guys with names like Howe and Hull and Rocket Richard.
And unlike the heavily armored and padded goalies of today, Sawchuk and Hall and Jacques Plante and Gump Worsley didn’t wear masks; their faces were exposed to screaming pucks and sharpened blades and wooden spears brandished by bruisers careening down the ice at breakneck speeds.
Terry Sawchuk as a Boston Bruin, 1956. Associate Press Photo,
Canadian poet Randall Maggs wrote a book-length poetic tribute to the game and the complicated man who was Terry Sawchuk, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, is some of the best hockey writing I’ve read and it contains some pretty good poetry too.
Here are a few sections from Randall Maggs’ poem “Different Ways of Telling Time,” from Night Work:
(i) last minute of play
Four-faced, the clock sees everywhere.
Dead centre over the ice, it hangs from chains.
The players glance up, exchange a word, a sideward
look – less than a minute to go. They know time’s rough
and tumble. Space and time, that’s where they live,
arcs and angles, a quick move to open ice.
Their flashy physics.
Spectacles shift and glitter behind the glass.
Maybe someone they know but they never look
at the crowd. They’re at the bench to hear the plan –
“Boys, you get a bounce here, things can happen fast.”
Left out on the ice – they might as well be
on the moon – both goalies eye the clock,
one’s for zero, the other likes infinity,
but things can change.
Get going clock.
Slow down slow down.
No one in the building likes time’s pace.
(ii) you could drift out here forever
Jesus, here we go.
Seventh game, and seconds left to overtime.
Talk’s over at the glass, the captains
waved away. The referee holds four fingers up
and folds his arms, four seconds he wants put back
on the clock. Son of a bitch, an old defender
sags against the boards. Still, imagine the power,
to kick time’s arse like that.
(iv) ice time
The guys arrive as if at random intervals,
lay out their gear, lucky shirt, same skate first,
same old jokes about my liniment, Jesus,
Ukey, lose that shit why don’t you?
Roll their eyes and tiptoe by.
Check the clock and tape my own stick,
thank you, heel to toe, no wrinkles, tape the ankles.
Time to go out and get loose, guys in twos and threes
at home on ice, tucking pucks lazily under the crossbar.
Same old talk, someone you got to slow down,
a glance where he’s talking it up
with his own guys.
Here’s the house where I live, I can’t say no.
Howe and Lindsay’s eyes on me. Pronovost, tough
as a bag of batteries, slaps my pads. I see myself as I pass
in the glass, pick up that look from the other side, a nice pair
of knees that edge apart as I go by. I get a whiff of ice
and something in me starts alive. I take
a few shots, catch and flick, feeling
quick, clank behind me,
lucky too.
Then back inside and bedlam now. Adams
flapping but I don’t hear. Holy Mary, don’t let me
fall on my face tonight. I try to loosen a pad, my shaking
hand so bad Jesus Jesus. Tommy Ivan shoves in beside me,
knowing he needs to settle me down. New cufflinks on.
Knocks my stick for luck I’m nodding but Mother of Christ
I’m dying inside, can’t keep still now everybody wants to go,
the clatter, the chatter, rockers, talkers. “Gotta have this one.
Gotta have it guys.” This was where we’d bellow out
some raunchy song when we were young, scare
the bejesus out of everyone. “Nice neighbourhood like this,”
they’d say. “Who let the bloody DPs in?” Tommy drums
a rhythm on my leg – I watch his moving hand
distracted by the veins and lines that make the hand
a miracle, an acrobat, a thief. Gotta have it, guys.
I brace for the roar at the end of the tunnel.
“Give me a hand here, Tommy, tuck that in, that – look,
that bloody strap.” Then bang the door and Jesus here we go,
someone shouts those words I love and dread, I hear
them all my life – “Let the goalie go first.”
##P.S. During the Bruins 2012 Stanley Cup Playoffs, I’m participating in Beardathon, a fundraiser for kids charities, by growing my beard. You can vote for my beard, contribute towards my fundraising goal, and watch my progress at: http://www.beardathon.com/bruins/seabear/profile.aspx
Frederick Seidel at home in New York, 2009. Photo by Antonin Kratochovil/Vii
Poet Michael Hofmann, in his entertaining review of Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009
Hofmann draws comparisons with V.S. Naipaul and quotes from a new biography of that author saying the two are purveyors of “picong, a Trinidadian term, ‘from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.’”
The New York Times called Seidel the “Laureate of the Louche,” which is to say simultaneously rakish and appealing. He is a poet with a penchant for the most expensive hotels, bespoke suits, handmade shoes, and Italian racing bikes – of the motor kind, not pedaling – and a strange, nearly fatal attraction to all that is dark and violent and decadent.
One is never quite sure if Seidel is putting it on – does he really do the things he says in his poems or is it all a persona? Is he playing with the reader the way he plays with form, with lines, with puns, with rhyme? That is to say, masterfully.
“Convinced life is meaningless, / I lack the courage of my conviction,” Seidel wrote in an early poem, “After the Party,” but then opens two poems – “Racer” and “Fog” — with the same line: “I spend most of my time not dying./ That’s what living is for.
Seidel’s poetry burns with a fury matched only by the leatherclad poet hitting 120 MPH on his custom-built Ducati. He takes a perverse pleasure in imagining his own fiery death, which hasn’t come; the poet turned 76 this year.
Take these lines from “A Gallop to Farewell,” quoted by Hoffmann:
The most underrated pleasure in the world is the takeoff
Of the Concorde and putting off the crash
Of the world’s most beautiful old supersonic plane,
with no survivors,
In an explosion of champagne.
Readers and critics either love or hate Seidel. There is no middle ground. But he couldn’t care less. He’s never taught or sought tenure or prizes or even a “career” in poetry, which is kind of an oxymoron anyway. He studied with Robert Lowell, but shook off his teacher’s influence pretty early on and hasn’t been associated with any poetry “movement.”
And while Seidel’s first book came out in 1963, he blossomed late, with 17 years between his first and second collection and 10 books published over the past two decades, culminating in his 500-page, 50 years worth of poems, which is the best of poetry I’ve read in a long time. What I mean by that is Seidel’s POEMS does what William Styron said a good book should: it leaves you slightly exhausted at the end because you lived several lives while reading it.
Here is Frederick Seidel’s “Fog”:
I spend most of my time not dying.
That’s what living is for.
I climb on a motorcycle.
I climb on a cloud and rain.
I climb on a woman I love.
I repeat my themes.
Here I am in Bologna again.
Here I go again.
Here I go again, getting happier and happier.
I climb on a log
Torpedoing toward the falls
Basically, it sticks out of me.
At the factory,
The racer being built for me
Is not ready, but is getting deadly.
I am here to see it being born.
It is snowing in Milan, the TV says.
They close one airport, then both.
The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.
He buzzes me through three layers of security
To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department
Where I will breathe my last.
Trains are delayed.
The Florence sky is falling snow.
Tonight in Bologna is fog.
This afternoon, there it was,
With all the mechanics who are making it around it.
It stood on a sort of altar.
I stood in a sort of fog.
Taking digital photographs of my death.
–Frederick Seidel
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 