SO WHAT: Poems, by Frederick Seidel
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.
