“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, – and the supreme Savant! – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die of his bound through the unheard-of and countless things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other has succumbed.”

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker

who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,

Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.

And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.

The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I’ve seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,

in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions

of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone’s inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.

But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.

Have pity on a girl, perdurable, playful,
And delicate as a foal, dutiful, available,
Who is waiting on a bed in a room in the afternoon for God
His Majesty is on his way, who long ago has died.
She is a victim in the kingdom, and is proud.
Have pity on me a thousand years from now when we meet.
Open the mummy case of this text respectfully.
You find no one inside.

– Frederick Seidel, from The Death of the Shah

Open the dust jacket of Frederick Seidel’s latest collection (Poems 1959-2009) and your presented with critic Adam Kirsch’s declaration, “[Frederick Seidel is] the best American poet writing today.” Seidel is what you can call a poet of the contemporary. While he has been writing for an incredibly long time, his popularity is probably at its height. Undergraduates everywhere seem to be picking up his books. In fact, it’s the only  book of contemporary poetry that I have stumbled upon when anxiously going over a new acquaintance’s poetry shelf. This has happened twice. It is astounding.

Historically speaking, Seidel can be linked to Lowell, Eliot and Whitman. And he very much is a traditional poet, a formalist. He cares about detail. He cares about structure.

In talking about the actual poetics of Seidel, there’s a reason I haven’t written about him on LADP. I’ve spent a lot of time writing academically about the man, but colloquially, he’s a tough cookie:

I oink when I fuck but have feelings and wings.
Pigs can fly.

– from Song for Cole Porter

Without a doubt, he is one of my favourite poets. Seidel is a type of dark Whitman; he is political, he is solipsistic, he is charming. But while Whitman’s controversy has worn out, Seidel’s exceeds. Reflecting America, like Whitman, Seidel embraces the role of poet as cultural confluence; Late Capitalist America is Frederick Seidel. He is Whitman without Lincoln; he is the poet, without a hero:

They were our gods working all night
To make Achilles’ beard fall out and prop up
The House of Priam, who by just pointing sent
A shark fin gliding down a corridor,
Almost transparent, like a watermark.

– from Our Gods

When listening to the reading that I have attached, remember one thing: Seidel is not to be written off for his shameless and depraved obscenity. His obscenity is good for poetry. Movies such as Paul Anderson’s There Will Be Blood or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds share Seidel’s approach in their extreme amplification of immoral or traumatic events as means of social commentary. It seems to me to be a characteristically postmodern phenomena that our most shocking and morally bankrupt artistic compositions really are our most compelling and socially progressive.

Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,
Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,
Despairing of art and of life,
Seeking protection from death by seeking it
On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels,

– from The Death of the Shah

Attached is a fantastic reading by the poet himself:
The New York Review of Books, Frederick Seidel Reading

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will i complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

My darling poet Frank O’Hara is, and has been since I encountered him, my favourite poet. His voice rings of subversion, New York intelligence and sophisticated compassion. His poetic style has had the biggest influence on me –  he seems to play with words like one would play with color. Here is one of my favourite recordings, one of the only that I have.

Ode to Joy, To Hell With It – Frank O’Hara

Irving Layton is bombastic, controversial and Canadian.

Irving Layton, OC (March 12, 1912 – January 4, 2006) was a Canadian poet. He was known for his “tell it like it is” style which won him a wide following but also made enemies. As T. Jacobs notes in his biography (2001), Layton fought Puritanism throughout his life:

Layton’s work had provided the bolt of lightning that was needed to split open the thin skin of conservatism and complacency in the poetry scene of the preceding century, allowing modern poetry to expose previously unseen richness and depth.

from Wikipedia

The Fertile Muck

There are the brightest apples on those trees
but until I, fabulist, have spoken
they do not know their significance
or what other legends are hung like garlands
on their black boughs twisting
like a rumour. The wind’s noise is empty.

Nor are the winged insects better off
though they wear my crafty eyes
wherever they alight. Stay here, my love;
you will see how delicately they deposit
me on the leaves of elms
or fold me in the orient dust of summer.

And if in August joiners and bricklayers
are as thick as flies around us
building expensive bungalows for those
who do not need them, unless they release
me roaring from their moth-proofed cupboards
their buyers will have no joy, no ease.

I could extend their rooms for them without cost
and give them crazy sundials
to tell the time with, but I have noticed
how my irregular footprint horrifies them
evenings and Sunday afternoons:
they spray for hours to erase its shadow.

How to dominate reality? Love is one way;
imagination another. Sit here
beside me, sweet; take my hard hand in yours.
We’ll mark the butterflies disappearing over the hedge
with tiny wristwatches on their wings:
our fingers touching the earth, like two Buddhas.

To the Victims of the Holocaust

Your horrible deaths are forgotten;
no one speaks of them anymore.

The novelty of tattooed forearms
wore off quickly; people now say
your deaths are pure invention, a spoof.

More corrosive of human pride
than Copernicus or Darwin, your martyrdoms
must lie entombed in silence.

The devil himself is absolved, polyhistors
naming him the only fascist in Europe
ignorant you were changed into soap and smoke.

That’s how the wind blows. Tomorrow
some goy will observe you never existed
and the Holocaust your just deserts
for starting wars and revolutions.

I live among the blind, the deaf, and the dumb.
I live among amnesiacs.

My murdered kin
let me be your parched and swollen tongue
uttering the maledictions
bullets and gas silenced on your lips.

Fill, fill my ears with your direst curses.
I shall tongue them, unappeasable shades,
till the sun turns black in the sky.

Whatever Else Poetry is Freedom

Whatever else poetry is freedom.
Forget the rhetoric, the trick of lying
All poets pick up sooner or later. From the river,
Rising like the thin voice of grey castratos – the mist;
Poplars and pines grow straight but oaks are gnarled;
Old codgers must speak of death, boys break windows,
Women lie honestly by their men at last.

And I who gave my Kate a blackened eye
Did to its vivid changing colours
Make up an incredible musical scale;
And now I balance on wooden stilts and dance
And thereby sing to the loftiest casements.
See how with polish I bow from the waist.
Space for these stilts! More space or I fail!

And a crown I say for my buffoon’s head.
Yet no more fool am I than King Canute,
Lord of our tribe, who scanned and scorned;
Who half-deceived, believed; and, poet, missed
The first white waves come nuzzling at his feet;
Then damned the courtiers and the foolish trial
With a most bewildering and unkingly jest.

It was the mist. It lies inside one like a destiny.
A real Jonah it lies rotting like a lung.
And I know myself undone who am a clown
And wear a wreath of mist for a crown;
Mist with the scent of dead apples,
Mist swirling from black oily waters at evening,
Mist from the fraternal graves of cemeteries.

It shall drive me to beg my food and at last
Hurl me broken I know and prostrate on the road;
Like a huge toad I saw, entire but dead,
That Time mordantly had blacked; O pressed
To the moist earth it pled for entry.
I shall be I say that stiff toad for sick with mist
And crazed I smell the odour of mortality.

And Time flames like a paraffin stove
And what it burns are the minutes I live.
At certain middays I have watched the cars
Bring me from afar their windshield suns;
What lay to my hand were blue fenders,
The suns extinguished, the drivers wearing sunglasses.
And it made me think I had touched a hearse.

So whatever else poetry is freedom. Let
Far off the impatient cadences reveal
A padding for my breathless stilts. Swivel,
O hero, in the fleshy grooves, skin and glycerine,
And sing of lust, the sun’s accompanying shadow
Like a vampire’s wing, the stillness in dead feet -
Your stave brings resurrection, O aggrieved king.

Be drunken, always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green glass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkeness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that sighs, of all that moves, of all that sings, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: “It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, as you please.”

I’d never heard Kerouac’s voice until recently. A friend of mind, in response to my post of Radiohead’s Idioteque, brought me a DVD of things he deemed brilliant. In addition to a bunch of other Kerouac recordings (where I found out, quite shockingly, that Kerouac has a falsetto laugh), I found Steve Allen’s recordings of Jack reading with a jazz group. Its quickly become one of my favourite things to listen to. Admittedly, the concept is pretty dated – to have poets or authors read over music – but if anyone can pull it off, its Jack Kerouac. I hope this inspires someone to revisit the beats; they’ve become a pop culture cliche, but there really is so much richness there.

Sample: Readings From On The Road And Visions Of Cody

Album: Jack Kerouac & Steve Allen