Lucky Ducky

Ink has been spilled, and things have been said, about Frederick Seidel’s naughtiness, his decadence, his life of “laziness and luxury” made possible by an inherited fortune (his father was a smalltime St. Louis coal baron). Over the last fifty years his poems have fulfilled a simple brief: to write beautifully about the ugliness of modern life and modern wealth, and to do so with remorseless gusto. Yet, with this year’s So What comes a new strain of diminishment, of rage tempered by resignation or despondency – overweening impishness that sometimes forces itself on Seidel’s poems. He admits something to this effect in ‘Long Story Short’: ‘I’m not as old as I used to be. / I’m getting young. / I find myself making child nonsense sounds.’

These ‘child nonsense sounds’ find an advocate in Seidel’s rhymes, which, in careening to great furrows of monorhyme, produce a kind of advertising affect; they can sell you anything, devising a technical solution which begs an emotional or intellectual problem. Thus, in a poem called ‘To Baudelaire’:

... she bends down to touch her toes for you
Because she wants you to enjoy the view
Of her woke flower singing teardrops of dew
Which reheating makes only better, like a stew!
Petals and stamen, clitoris, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew.

This poem, with its images tumbling down the semantic ladder, deposes a hierarchy of both mores and meaning, and herein lies the intellectual problem: ‘woke flower singing teardrops of dew’ is probably as mixed a metaphor as the language allows. This knack for ...