HUTU DANCER: It’s in Seidel’s favor that his poems stand so far from the mainstream — far, in fact, from any stream. |
Ooga-Booga is Frederick Seidel’s 12th book of poetry to appear since 1963. A balding, necktied, dark-suited middle-aged man looks out from the book’s cover. His expression is deadpan. This is not a man about to get down and boogie. An edgy sense of humor is among this book’s charms, but it means to keep you at arm’s length. Seidel is cool and not one to give too much away.Seidel’s collections of poetry have been making waves for years (his first was reviewed by James Dickey in the New York Times Book Review), but this is the first I’ve read, and I wonder how I’ve missed him. His poems are certainly an acquired taste — any American poet who begins a book with the lines “Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,/And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.” is an acquired taste. But it’s in his favor that his poems stand so far from the mainstream — far, in fact, from any stream. Their chief virtue is fidelity to a world of travel, money, and privilege, an Upper East Side New York life. Seidel knows who he is and does not try to buddy up to his readers. Ooga-Booga’s first poem, “Kill Poem,” centers on fox hunting. I wager that this is not a sentence you will read in any other review of a new book of American poetry. Fox hunting, yes, but as with all Seidel poems of more than a page and half, “Kill Poem” accumulates much else before it ends. He knows how to give a poem its head. To keep the various materials straight he uses a procession of declarative sentences:
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I spend most of my time not dying
That’s what living is for.
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I stand in the open field on the far side of Wainscott Road
And watch the summer, autumn, winter sky.
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The downpour drumming on my taxi gets the Hutu in me dancing.
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This flat tone, all brass and no strings, allows him to say odd things in a matter-of-fact way: “I saw the moon in the sky at sunset over a river pink as a ham.” His other organizing principle is rhyme, which he wields the way rappers do when his line is long, but in a few instances, like “Love Song,” he wants a pop lyric’s lilt. Seidel’s sound is hard, at times monotonous, and his attack is straight ahead. After 12 books he isn’t looking to experiment with that sound — he is writing the poems that he can write.
His minimal technique works because what he has to say is utterly without subtlety. “Laudatio,” his elegy to the clothes designer John Weitz and for me the most solid poem in this book, presents the facts, withholding feeling until the last line: “He never sighed until the moment after he died.” Seidel’s is a man’s world — unashamedly so — and his poems have a confident masculinity. When he quarrels with the present Bush administration or the late shah of Iran, in two original political poems, he does not lecture or promote his right views. “Here I am, not a practical man,/But clear-eyed in my contact lenses,” begins “The Death of the Shah.” His intent is not cheesy, agreeable self-depreciation. “Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,/Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,” he continues, with a frankness that never congratulates itself.
Finishing Ooga-Booga, I find I like and dislike it in almost equal measure. Perhaps it is the Hutu in Seidel’s poems. But I can report that “Drinking in the Daytime” is a memorable poem, and that I will now look for his other books.
