The Cosmos Trilogy
by Frederick Seidel
Toward the Truffle
A review by Adam Kirsch
It would be an interesting experiment to give Frederick
Seidel's poems to a dozen different readers and ask them to
describe the author. The result would be something like the
fable in which blindfolded men describe an elephant after
touching its legs or its trunk or its tail: one poet would
fracture into a whole menagerie. Is Seidel the social climber
who cranes his neck to admire "Episcopalians from the Golden
Age/Of schools who loved to lose gracefully and lead?" Or the
bosom friend of "Monsieur le Comte et Madame la Comtesse" de
Gourcuff, his hosts at the Château of Fontenay? The
teacher who rides the Manhattan subway to get to his classes? Or
the jet-setter who takes the Concorde to Paris to buy shoes
faites sur mesure? A violent misogynist, or an elegant
seducer, or both?
As these examples show, the multitudes that Seidel contains
are not exactly the kind that Whitman had in mind. His shifting
identities are more like the disguises a fugitive might use to
evade Interpol. For this reason, it is not a condemnation, as it
would be of many other poets, to say that the major subject and
interest of Frederick Seidel's poetry is Frederick Seidel. His
name does not stand, as with so many confessional poets, for a
cosseted ego or a set of cherished traumas; it is more like an
intersection where anyone could be passing through:
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....
And you get Fred Seidel.
By treating his name as an unstable signifier, Seidel
approaches a kind of writing popular among younger poets today,
many of whom delight in writing poems where the syntax of
narrative persists in the absence of meaning: the poet seems to
be telling you a story about him or herself, but it never makes
sense. Where this is not simply a tic or a fad, it seems to be a
theoretical statement about the way identity is constructed by
discourse. A favorite device for making this point is the "I, I,
I" poem, such as "Ezra's Lament" by Susan Wheeler: "I owed the
baker three dollies with heads./ I owed the singer a way to
recoup./I owed the bookmaker my mother's own sauce." It is
unlikely that Seidel directly influenced this kind of poetry — John Ashbery and C.D. Wright are more popular role models, and
John Berryman wrote the first "I, I, I" poem, in "Dream Song
#22." But such poets could certainly find in Seidel resemblances
to their own concern for identity and incoherence. In fact, the
first poem in Area Code 212 — the third of the three
linked collections now published in a single volume as The
Cosmos Trilogy — is an "I, I, I" poem, called "I Do": "I do
white gloves at the dances,/But I don't dance with the
fascists./I do beat and smash their stupid wishes./I take you to
be my."
Yet Seidel's real strangeness is not so abstract or
academic. He is in fact one of the very rare contemporary poets
who can be transgressive, not in the fashionable way of the
seminar but in the disturbing way of the nightmare. Seidel is
not essentially interested in identity at all, either as a
biographical experience or as a theoretical issue. As he writes
in Life on Earth, the middle book of the trilogy: "He
didn't talk much about himself because there wasn't much to
say." For Seidel, "the self" — that tediously eternal subject — is
only a pencil-thin circumference. He is more interested in what
lies outside (the social and political world) and what lies
inside (the unconscious and the obsessive). In both realms, he
is drawn to everything that is overripe, over-civilized,
luxuriant to the point of putridity: to decadence, as an
experience and an aesthetic. And against the odds, Seidel
manages to transform decadence, that old pose, into the basis
for a genuine and powerful poetry.
Among contemporary poets, it is Seidel's social interest
that is most unusual. This is not simply a question of being up-to-date on current events, though many of his poems can be
precisely dated. This is the mid-1980s, as seen in These
Days (1989):
Unshaved men in suits walk ahead of
others in masks.
It might be the men one sees strolling
Together outside Claridge's in
London followed
At a submissive distance by their
veiled wives,
But in Central America — hostages
and their slaves
By relay satellite.
The poem is concerned not with information but with the
experience of consuming information. This is one of those
experiences so elusive and significant that their conquest for
poetry is a real achievement. Like most members of his class,
Seidel looks down on television: "I never watch TV./But
sometimes late at night" he deadpans in "At Gracie Mansion." But
a poem such as "My Tokyo," the title poem of a collection that
he published in 1993, is inconceivable without the experience of
flipping channels:
New York is an electrical fire.
People are trapped on the top floor,
smoking
With high-rise desire
And becoming Calcutta.
Tokyo is low
And manic as a hive.
For the middle of the night they have
silent jackhammers.
Elizabethan London with the sound
off. Racially pure with no poor.
Those silent jackhammers are just the kind of factoid about
Tokyo that one might take away from a documentary or a
Newsweek article, and even the syntax — "they have" — is
what we use for the bored relation of novelties.
But more interesting, because more surprising, are the
things and the people Seidel seems to know firsthand. And here
we approach one of the most ambiguous elements of Seidel's
decadent poetry: his apparent snobbery. He writes about his
famous, rich, and well-born acquaintances, not with the ironic
distance expected of intellectuals but with a Proustian delight.
What are we to make of "Pressed Duck," his celebration of the
fashionable Manhattan restaurateur Elaine Kaufman:
We were green as grapes,
A cluster of February birthdays,
All "Elaine's" regulars....
Elaine said, "Why do we need
anybody else?
We're the world."
Here Seidel eagerly participates in a complacent Manhattan
provincialism. In his best poems, however, his intimacy with
this world of fashion and privilege is what allows him to be its
effective satirist. If Seidel avidly lists his elegant tailors
and shoemakers, he follows the list with this: "The well-dressed
man.../ Is a sunstream of urine on its way to the toilet bowl."
If he visits "The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal," he is reminded
that "Death is loading in the van/The women and camels of King
Solomon it is repossessing."
Seidel has also written many poems in which the cast of
characters, though rich and aristocratic, are effectively
unknown, and thus avoid the banality of celebrity. There is
"Rackets," which tells of Reginald Fincke, a "dashingly
handsome" racquet-club champion of the 1910s; there is "In
Memoriam," about the "Great-grandson of George Boole as in
Boolean algebra." These sound like footnotes to the Social
Register, but the effect is otherwise, as we can see in "Hugh
Jeremy Chisholm" from Area Code 212:
With Jeremy Chisholm at the Lobster
Inn on our way to Sagaponack,
Eating out on the porch in the heat,
flicking cigarettes into the inlet.
Billy Hitchcock landed his helicopter
at a busy gas station
In Southampton July 4th weekend...
Bessie Cuevas had introduced me to
this fin de race exquisite...
Who was as beautiful as the young
Prince Yusupov
Who had used his wife as bait to kill
Rasputin....
Each of these is doubtless a real person whom Seidel
actually knows. But this catalogue of names — elegant,
deracinated, faintly bizarre — seems to come not out of Town
and Country, but out of "Gerontion" ("By Hakagawa, bowing
among the Titians;/By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark
room/Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp/Who turned in
the hall...."). Here Eliot invokes one of the most dangerous
tropes of decadence: a languid and corrupt cosmopolitanism,
which can so easily provoke a reactive mania for purity. But
Seidel's effect is at once less ethically problematic and more
effectively alienating than Eliot's. We know that Eliot's people
are invented to make his point, and they cannot help seeming
stagy, whereas Seidel's are anonymously, repulsively real.
This effect is greatly increased by the context in which we
read about Jeremy Chisholm and company, for in Seidel's poems
almost every narrative is seen through a glass darkly. The
outer, social world of his poetry is charged by its contact with
an extremely strange inner climate, which Seidel explores with a
boldness that is hard to distinguish from rashness. Almost
uniquely among poets, Seidel does not scheme to make himself
look good in his poems. Even when Berryman's alter ego Henry
wonders if he could "end anyone and hacks her body up/and hide
the pieces," the effect is to make us feel sorry for Berryman
for having such tortured thoughts. But how should we feel about
Seidel for having these thoughts?
The most beautiful power in the
world has buttocks.
It is always a dream come true.
They are big. They are too big.
Kiss them and spank them till they
are scalding.
Till she can't breathe saying oh....
Perhaps the only thing that could make such a poem more
explosive is the title Seidel gives it: "AIDS Days." And the
explosions start in the uncertainties, the information gaps. Who
is the woman — a business executive, or (as appears possible
later in the poem) the president of the United States, or a
figure in a pornographic film, or an actual lover? Does she have
AIDS, or is she an emblem of destructive lust? One has the sense
of something truly private, a dark compulsion — and this sense is
only increased when, in another poem written more than ten years
later, Seidel returns to a similar group of images: "I am going
to go public with this/Beautiful big breasts and a
penis/Military-industrial complex."
Sex is seldom less ambiguous and charged than this in
Seidel's poetry. Lust is a Pavlovian tic: "The old penis smells
food/And salivates." Men are predators: "Every man's a rapist
till he's done." What's more, women secretly want them to be:
"Don't stop when/I say stop" (from a poem titled "Her Song").
The sex act is degrading and violent: "My daughter squeaks and
squeaks/Like a mouse screaming in a trap,/Dangling from the cat
who makes her come/ When he does it to her." These are poems
without internal or external censors, and they give the sense of
a man wholly inside his obsessions; indeed, the obsessions seem
to be writing the poems. This is solipsism, perhaps, but not the
contented solipsism of the egotist. It is more like the
desperate isolation of the madman, or the damned soul: "God is
everywhere you're not,/And you are everywhere."
Images of entrapment and entombment are eerily common in
Seidel's work, so that it is no wonder he would write with
uncanny intimacy (in "Dune Road, Southampton") about the
paralyzed Sunny von Bulow: "Locked-in Syndrome, just about the
worst./Alive, with staring eyes." Perhaps the most
characteristic Seidel poem — in its claustrophobia, its
arbitrariness, its nightmare plot — is "Contents Under Pressure,"
from Going Fast (1998):
His space suit is his respirator
breathing him
From its own limited supply of
oxygen...
Absolutely nothing can be done.
The spacecraft is under orders not
to try and to return and does.
He urinates and defecates
And looks out at the universe.
He is looking out at it through his
helmet mask.
Seidel's mature style had a long incubation. His first
book, published in 1963 when he was twenty-seven, was Final
Solutions, a skillful anthology of effects borrowed from
Robert Lowell: nearly every one of Seidel's poems can be traced
to its Lowellian original. His next book, Sunrise,
appeared in 1980, marking the first appearance of the style and
voice and persona that would be refined over the next two
decades. Perhaps that persona — worldly, depressive, corrupt — could only be the creation of a middle-aged man; as he wrote in
Sunrise, "I took for my own motto/I rot before I
ripen." The savor of that rottenness, like an expensive
cheese, grew richer and more complex over Seidel's next three
books, which represent his best work so far: These Days,
My Tokyo, and Going Fast. For the readers of the
future, no poetry will give a better sense of what it was like
to live in the decadent capital of American empire.
In the last decade Seidel's productivity accelerated
rapidly, and from 2000 to 2002 he published a book a year:
The Cosmos Poems, Life on Earth, and Area Code
212. Now brought together in one volume, they were always a
single unit — an upside-down Divine Comedy, beginning in
Heaven and descending through earthly Purgatory to the Hell of
New York City. The sour wit of that conceit is worthy of Seidel,
and the structure of the poems nods at its original: each book
contains thirty-three poems, like Dante's thirty-three cantos,
and there is a consistent (though very loose) meter, eight
unrhymed quatrains per poem. For The Cosmos Trilogy,
Seidel has added a longer hundredth poem as a capstone to the
whole sequence.
But the poems do not bear out such a grand comparison: it
does them no service to read them in search of a cosmology, a
theology, or even a narrative. Often their quantity and loose
uniformity seem to dilute the poisons that Seidel's earlier
books gave us in concentrated form. Only the middle volume,
Life on Earth, has the same proportion of successful
poems as Seidel's best collections.
The Cosmos Poems is the weakest volume of the trilogy
because its celestial subjects — the Big Bang, black holes,
string theory — are the furthest removed from the sullied
textures Seidel has mastered. He is up on the latest
cosmologies, but usually these are summarized rather than
dramatized: "My friend, the darkness/Into which the seed/Of all
eleven dimensions/Is planted is small." String theory tells us
that there are eleven dimensions, and so does Seidel, but
neither of them manages to make us really feel what this
means.
Most often, Seidel tries to infuse his cosmologies with
feeling by connecting them with the sentimentally human. The
childhood of the universe is equated with the childhood of the
poet, and it is disappointing (though perhaps not surprising) to
find the rotten-ripe Seidel so nostalgic for pristine infancy:
"I hear the mighty organ bellowing heaven through/The bars of my
playpen..." Seidel makes something characteristic and poetically
vital of the heavens only when he treats them in the manner of
apocalyptic science fiction, imagining an encounter with hostile
aliens in "Blue and Pink," or a mission to stop a deadly
asteroid in "Poem."
Life on Earth is, naturally, a much more congenial
theme. The modulation from the previous book occurs in the first
poem, "Bali," which declares "I hear the cosmos" and descends
rapidly:
The generals wanted to replace
Sukarno.
Because of his syphilis he was losing
touch
With the Communist threat and
getting rather crazy.
So they slaughtered the Communists
and the rich Chinese.
The tourist island is decisively tethered to its social and
political reality, its South Pacific aura fumigated with
disease and slaughter. (It is an odd and tragic example of
Seidel's contemporaneity that this poem should have been
published not long before the Bali nightclub bombing that killed
dozens of tourists.)
Since the world is everything that is the case, Life on
Earth is a good umbrella title for the travels,
personalities, news reports, nightmares, and fantasies that have
always been Seidel's subjects. "Goodness" is a kind of Yeatsian
great-house poem, in which an aristocratic French couple are
proposed as ideal human types: "Have faith, give hope, show
charity./This is the Château of Fontenay." The alienation
and irony that Seidel usually brings to this milieu are notably
absent, leaving us surprised by earnestness. But we are through
the Seidelian looking-glass once again in "Doctor Love," in
which the poet claims to tell about a movie treatment he once
wrote, whose heroine, a breast-cancer researcher, turned out to
share the name of a real breast-cancer researcher. Now, there is
a real Dr. Susan Love, author of a popular guide to the disease;
but it remains hard to determine whether Seidel's story is true,
what it means, or whether it matters. As always with Seidel, the
mystery is not just the facts, but why he is telling them to
us.
Still more astringently bizarre is "At New York Hospital,"
in which one of Seidel's oddest obsessions returns: the
"murderous head of state with beautiful big breasts." Here
Seidel encounters her in the operating room, where she appears
to be undergoing radiation therapy for brain cancer. By the
poem's conclusion, when the anesthesiologist "joyously/ Declaims
Gerard Manley Hopkins," it is clear that we are not in the real
world, but the zone of the poet's reiterated fantasy. It has the
disquieting, surreal calm that is one of Seidel's most effective
tones. He is also characteristically sharp in the rancid anti-feminist poems "Sex" and "Song," which pictures that early
feminist Judith "holding/The wide-eyed bearded head
of/Holofernes/Aloft." And Seidel has rarely combined sexual and
political turmoil more effectively than in "Letter to the
Editors of Vogue," an unaccountably disturbing poem. If
anything limits these poems' effectiveness, it is the form. The
sheer number of those quatrains is suspicious: surely they are
not the perfect form for every one of these poems, and often
Seidel seems to be just filling up another set of eight.
Appropriately enough, Life on Earth ends with the
subject that has always been at the center of this poet's world,
in the poem "Frederick Seidel":
My life is a snout
Snuffling toward the truffle, life.
Anyway!
It is a life of luxury. Don't put me out
of my misery...
I do love
The sky above.
But misery moves center stage in Area Code 212, whose
first poem revises that declaration of love: "I do love/The sky
above/Which is black." In the Dantesque conceit of the trilogy,
this volume locates New York in the Inferno; but, in fact, there
is less concrete social observation than the title would
suggest. With a few exceptions, the city appears largely as
background and incidental detail: "the steps in front of the
museum" at the Metropolitan, "the center strip migraine down
Park Avenue," "The Upper West Side midday/Between the Hudson
River and Central Park."
Instead, the most memorable poems in the book are nearly
severed from plausible biographical experience: they are surreal
narratives, full of dimly discerned horrors. "The Bathroom Door"
is emblematic in the way it blocks the crucial events from
sight, giving us only an ominous prelude and a terrible
consequence:
He hears his wife get out of their bed
And lock the bathroom door
That they never lock.
...
She says I am so afraid.
She says I feel cold.
He asks her what she has done.
He makes her stand up and walk.
He calls 911.
Similarly, in "Downtown," someone identified only as "it"
commits a murder in an art gallery; in "Getaway," the speaker is
a fugitive, a kidnapper or bank robber, who warns: "They're
going to check/The trunk and find our bodies." If such poems are
not as vital and unsettling as Seidel's best work, it is because
he is too entirely absent from them; they do not have the
unstable charge that his poems carry when we cannot decide
whether they are invented or real. In the slightest of these
poems, the artificiality seems to be a mere matter of technique,
even simply of manipulating pronouns. "I Do" makes "I" the blank
subject for a random catalogue of predicates; in "March," "he"
refers alternately to Seidel and to Ho Chi Minh.
These are the poems most easily assimilable to current
poetic trends, but they are not the most interesting or
characteristic poems in the book, still less in Seidel's whole
work. We hear his voice more clearly in a poem like "MV Agusta
Rally," where he looks on at a motorcycle race in Italy, or
"Venus," with its fantastic sexual hostility:
Venus is getting
Smaller.
Finally, she is
The size of a mouse.
A fully developed young woman
That size
Makes it difficult
To caress her breasts.
The Cosmos Trilogy concludes with three poems in which the
events of September 11, 2001 make an appearance, both directly
and as metaphor. As one might expect from Seidel, it is the
oblique approach that is more powerful. The direct version, in
"The War of the Worlds," is very sentimental, imagining Seidel
witnessing the events as a child in "Gray flannel little boy
shorts," as though he could summon the requisite emotion only by
supplementing pity with self-pity. The hundredth poem — titled,
with a certain poverty of invention, "One Hundred" — is similarly
uneasy in its blend of journalistic anecdote ("The people on/The
top floors use their cell phones to call out") and egoistic
pathos ("You fling yourself into the arms of art"). In
"December," on the other hand, the image of a plane turned into
a weapon seems almost spontaneous, of a piece with Seidel's
customary psychic violence:
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.
This is only the latest appearance in Seidel's poetry of the
Concorde as an instrument of death. The difference here is that
it has also become an instrument of purgation: "I stab the sword
into the smell." But if Seidel is a moralist, he has never been
the kind that wields a terrible swift sword. He has instead
immersed himself in chaos and decadence, both public and
psychic, in order to give them poetic expression. This ambiguous
courage has made him one of the significant artists of this
decadent time.
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