The Naked Emperor: A Review of Frederick Seidel and Rachel Hadas: Frederick Seidel, Selected Poems; Rachel Hadas, Love and Dread
book review
The Naked Emperor:
A Review of Frederick Seidel and Rachel Hadas
Frederick Seidel, Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (December 7, 2021)
ISBN 978-0374603250, 288 pp., USA $18.00, paperback
Rachel Hadas, Love and Dread
Measure Press Inc. (July 5, 2021)
ISBN 978-1939574329, 70 pp., USA $25.00, hardcover
Rachel Hadas, Piece by Piece
Paul Dry Books (June 15, 2021)
ISBN 978-1589881556, 221 pp., USA $18.99, paperback
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When it comes to the poetry of Frederick Seidel, less truly is more. In this sense alone, his new Selected Poems marks a significant advance over Poems 1959–2009—the more-or-less collected he published a little over a decade ago—and may do more to burnish his reputation than that doorstop volume simply by containing less of his work.
A selected volume is an opportunity for an author to shape their reputation, and some rethinking has gone into Seidel’s Selected since he published Poems. The most obvious is the complete disappearance of Final Solutions (1963), Seidel’s first book, which is not represented here at all. This is an interesting, and perhaps understandable, choice. Final Solutions was very heavily, and very obviously, influenced by Robert Lowell—sometimes to the point of sounding like pastiche. It wasn’t until his second book, Sunrise (1980), that Seidel truly began to sound like himself, and so it’s fitting that his Selected kicks off (if you’ll pardon the proleptic pun) with “1968,” which begins:
Of dawn dope and fog in L.A.’s
Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot
That punted it is absolutely stoned.
Four hundred
At the fundraiser,
Robert Kennedy for President, the remnants, lie
Exposed as snails around the swimming pool, stretched
Out on the paths, and in the gardens, and the drive.
Many dreams their famous bodies have filled.
And a bit further on:
Backlit
And diffuse, the murdered
Voityeck Frokowski, Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate
Sit together without faces.
This is the future.
Their future is the future.
After Sunrise, the Selected marches through his collections in the expected chronological order (Poems 1959–2009 was, for reasons I still can’t fathom, organized in reverse chronological order). Once you get a feel for his style, though, nothing much changes; this Selected Poems shows not development, but stasis.
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Talking about the self is the starting point for almost all contemporary poetry, but it remains traditional to make a distinction between the author and the “speaker” or “persona” of the poems. I can’t say with certainty how closely the details of Seidel’s poems mirror those of his life, but my feeling from reading his work is that there isn’t much difference. (I admit I reached this conclusion partly out of a sense that Seidel would revolt at the effort required to make things up.) If we take Seidel’s work as a guide to his life, then he is an inheritor of great wealth—originally from St. Louis, now living in New York, but making frequent jaunts to London, Paris, Milan, Bologna, and elsewhere. Seidel himself seems to take pains to dispel any notion that the person speaking in his poems is not himself; one poem is titled “Frederick Seidel,” and begins, “I live a life of laziness and luxury.” This sort of opening is standard for Seidel; “Widening Income Inequality” (great title) begins:
I live a life of privilege in New York,
Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. (223)
Seidel admires this self-portrait so much that he restates it, with some elaboration, about fifty lines later in the same poem:
One lives a life of appetite and, yes,
Lives a life of privilege in New York.
So many wretched refuse with their hands out.
Help me please get something to eat.
I’m a pope in a pulpit of air-conditioned humility
And widening income inequality, eating mostly pussy. (225)
Of tuna roe on buttered toast
Despite the heat,
Brown waxy slices of fishy salt
As strong as ammonia. . . . (163)
On streets not far apart make custom suits for men.
They are the best. (82)
But this woman is young. We kiss.
It’s almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger. (142)
Give me an altitude with an attitude.
But I am naked and nude.
I am constantly out of breath.
A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,
But right now one is coming through the door
With a mop, to mop up the cow flops on the floor.
She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair. (143)
The changed shape of the calf;
A place the thigh curves in
Where it didn’t used to; and when he turns
A mirror catches him by surprise
With an old man’s buttocks.
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.
I’d rather talk about which airlines I prefer.
I’d rather talk about my periodontist and my Macbook Air.
Don’t try to talk to me about Guillaume Apollinaire.
Laugh at me if you like, but actually it’s sad.
You people who know, know love is brief and being old is bad.
Know tribal wars devour the world, and little children are starving.
Five million orphans in Ethiopia aren’t riding
Beautiful Italian racing motorcycles to outrun their problem.
Chemotherapy is as brutal as the cancer it doesn’t cure.
Starving children get that look.
I’d rather talk about my London tailor.
I’d rather talk about who makes the lightest luggage with wheels.
The best luggage these days glides along on grease. (211)
Which brings us to the last two, slant-rhymed lines of the passage, with their rather obvious invocation of Lowell’s great lines at the end of “For the Union Dead,” “A savage servility / slides by on grease”. (Earlier in the same poem Seidel apparently parodies Whitman with the lines “I sing of noise. / I sing in praise.”) It’s significant that at the end of this statement of his poetic method, Seidel chooses to invoke Lowell, the master he has tried to banish by cutting all his early, Lowell-imitating poetry from the Selected. (One might see a Bloomian “agon” here.) The message seems to be that we should not expect the serious engagement of Lowell’s work from Seidel—he’s not interested in that. Or perhaps we should say he’s given up on it, as some engagement with the world can be seen in a poem like “1968.” But the last line also has an almost ugly, parodic quality, as though Seidel is mocking Lowell by replacing the high abstraction of his “savage servility” with the bathetic “the best luggage,” turning poetry into ad copy. Whatever Seidel’s intention, the inevitable comparison these lines raise in the reader’s mind does him no favors.
The most striking aspect of the self Seidel presents in his poetry is its lack of interiority. Most lyric poets write reflectively and create a sense of “a mind speaking to itself,” as Graham Greene said of the narrative voice of Great Expectations. There is very little of this in Seidel: his is an exterior, social self that doesn’t spend much time thinking or feeling, but rather is always going and doing—racing motorcycles, eating out, spanking much younger women. The emotional and intellectual life of the poet, so central to most contemporary lyric, is completely absent here. Instead we get a poetry of status markers, littered with the names of London tailors and Paris hotels. This gives the poetry a weirdly emaciated quality—it is like an expensive suit worn by a cheap plastic mannequin. I’ve often found myself complaining that too many contemporary poets write what sound like diary entries with line breaks; Seidel’s poetry sounds like a collection of shopping receipts and restaurant checks.
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The overall impression of reading through the Selected Poems is one of the author’s dwindling interest matched by his dwindling effort. Seidel becomes an exemplar of the kind of lifestyle poetry quoted above—the way he lives is almost the entire content of his work. At times even he sounds unsure of why he is writing. This is the fifth stanza of “Poem Does,” from the longer poem “Going Fast”:
Line 26. We pray for peace.
Line 27. The warrior and peacemaker Rabin is in heaven.
28. We don’t accept his fate. (104)
Signs of Seidel’s utter contempt, not only for his reader but for his own work, abound in the Selected Poems: terrible puns like “Another sunny Sunni day in the UAE!” (167); bizarre pleonasms like “Italy, your women are Italian!” or “Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene / Were likely to become alcoholics” (198); infantile diction like “Ready not to get deady” (103). The poem “Evening Man” ends, “It ends like this” (169), as though Seidel were simply giving up with a shrug after going nowhere for six stanzas.
Another marker of Seidel’s lack of interest in his own work is his tendency to repeat himself. I quoted the line “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” from “Climbing Everest” above; the poem immediately after that one is “Broadway Melody,” which begins—can you guess?—like this:
A woman my age naked is a nightmare.
There is a man named Pericles Belleville,
Half American.
At a very formal dinner party,
At which I met the woman I have loved the most
In my life, Belleville
Pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver
And waved it around, pointing it at people, who smiled.
One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.
That is the poem. (31)
In a poem of mine called “Fucking” thirty-one years ago, only
I called him Pericles in my poem.
At the end of “Fucking,” as he had in life,
Hercules pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver
At a dinner party in London,
And pointed it at people, who smiled.
I had fallen in love at first sight
With a woman I was about to meet.
One didn’t know if the thing could be fired.
That was the poem. (188)
I climb on a cloud and rain.
I climb on a woman I love.
I repeat my themes.
Here I am in Bologna again.
Here I go again. (125)
If repetition is one of the marks of the laziness of Seidel’s approach to writing, then the sheer badness of much of the poetry contained in this volume is another. His subject matter is decadence, but his artistic approach is carelessness. Given that this is a selected poems, you would think the author or editor might have been a little more . . . selective, let’s say, than to include some of what I quoted above. And yet it’s all here, and many other examples as bad or worse. The most noticeable aspect of Seidel’s verse is its dashed off, unfinished quality; if he ever revises, there’s no sign of it. The impression the reader gets is not of the apparent effortlessness of great poetry, but rather of a complete lack of effort. It’s hard to imagine a writer not wanting to take another shot at lines like these, from “Spin”:
In her arms he died away.
Injected with what killed him.
But soon the day will go away.
Sunlight preoccupies the cross street.
It and night soon will meet.
Meanwhile, there is Central Park.
Now the park is getting dark.
“Nice Weather” also points us toward a strange development in Seidel’s career: his increasing fondness for formalism. Seidel’s free verse is dull and flaccid, little more than prosy jottings broken into lines, but at least it doesn’t tax his technical abilities. As his career and the book go on, though, he turns more and more toward rhyme—or attempts to turn, perhaps I should say: in one poem he exclaims, “I can’t stop rhyming! I can’t! It’s my domain!” though the poem itself, built entirely of rhymes on the “-ain” sound, demonstrates it isn’t his forte.
As is the case throughout this book, there are moments that work. In “Remembering Elaine’s,” he starts off handling his five-line AABBB stanza rather well:
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.
A bit past the midway point of the poem, we run aground on this:
Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean
That way, because others who drank as much or more didn’t
Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn’t
Do cocaine, and didn’t get fucked up, and just didn’t!
He strolls down Broadway in the rain.
He’s hidden in a slicker, so he’s yellow, obvious.
A rainy day on Broadway looks like Auschwitz, more or less.
He has a fancy accent so he isn’t Jewish, is he?
Savile Row astride a red Ducati racer
For a fashion magazine, a fancy joke
Done morbidly, my tongue sticking out like I’m dead.
What if they remove my tongue from my head?
Talking, talking, talking, at my desk, in silence.
Putting my head in the open mouth of my Macbook Air.
Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare.
The poem eats anything, doesn’t care.
I sing of Obama’s graying second-term hair.
“Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare” is exactly the impression we get from reading his verse: he just types whatever details of his life occur to him straight into his Macbook, and they are “raw or rare” in the sense that no, or very little, artistic effort has been expended to shape or alter them. The line “The poem eats anything, doesn’t care” is his excuse for this carefree approach, and the non sequitur about Obama’s hair is an obvious joke on that idea. But behind Seidel’s vision of the poem eating anything seems to lie his attitude to his readers—he clearly thinks his audience is so lacking in discernment that he can serve them anything and they will take it for poetry. His contempt for his work is surpassed only by his contempt for his audience.
The strangest thing about Seidel’s poetry is that it exists at all. Has any poet ever written so much while evincing so little apparent interest in writing well? No doubt there are other demands on his time: As he is constantly reminding us, he has tailors to visit, Ducatis to ride, and pussy to eat. One could almost imagine that Seidel’s whole career is a joke at the expense of the poetry world, and like an emperor freezing in the cold as he waits for someone to tell him he’s naked, Seidel turns out increasingly infantile doggerel in the hope of finally prodding someone into telling him it’s bad. No doubt some will say this is “the point”—that Seidel is writing a form of anti-poetry, or parodying poetry itself. That is the most charitable interpretation: that Seidel’s work expresses an “end of history” ennui, where everyone is aware that everything meaningful has already been said, and everything worthwhile has already been done. Contemporary life, on this view, is empty and purposeless, and Seidel’s poetry reflects this state back at us. But if that is his intention, I don’t see what useful purpose is served by it.
The Selected’s main virtue is that its brevity de-emphasizes how dull his work is, but reading it right through remains an enervating experience. As he himself writes, “I have nothing to say.” It’s true—but for some reason he can’t stop saying it.
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In a brief “Foreword,” the poet, translator, and critic A.E. Stallings suggests that Rachel Hadas’s new book, Love and Dread, can be understood in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hard to know for certain how many of these poems were actually written during the pandemic or in response to its conditions, but this does seem like a profitable way to approach the collection, which has resonances with a world in lockdown, and it’s tempting to read the book as a sort of poetic “journal of the plague year.” One poem even mentions “the empty streets subdued and strange.” (52)
One of the main themes that runs through the poems is a concern with the domestic as opposed to the external, social world. For all of us who have been spending so much more time in our homes lately, the connections to pandemic life will be obvious. The opening of “Rose-Scented Lotion” is a good example:
lower in its bottle. And because
we are not attempting to fill it,
time slows to a standstill.
The room brims with silence.
Afternoon nap? Not yet afternoon.
Sun neither out nor in.
March takes a breath.
This focus on the domestic is reinforced by what must be the most common image in the collection, that of a couple in bed: “I wake / each morning to the blessing of your presence” (“The Dance”); “You stir in your light sleep / and reach toward me” (“Hotel Bella Venezia”); “Fast in the hold of sleep, my love, you lay. / I turned to you and clutched you anyway” (“Horns”). The bed is the centre of the home, the place where the couple (and many of these poems seem to speak of or to the state of coupledom) lie down together each night and awake each morning. It is a place of safety and refuge, as is the home that the bed symbolizes:
They have to take you in,
wrote Frost. Presumably a place where strangers
cannot penetrate to do you harm. (37)
shut the world’s door.
Out of the noise, the chaos, and the heat,
this retreat.
Out of the windswept plain of loneliness,
a sheltered place.
When it becomes too much to understand,
take my hand.
When it hurts too much to live in time,
come home.
This uncertainty plays out through the book as a whole. Love and Dread is a carefully structured collection, where different poems are in conversation with one another, sometimes reinforcing, but more often questioning or even undermining the ideas of other poems. The image of home as an unequivocal place of safety and comfort is not allowed to stand unquestioned; the first two stanzas of “Marble Cake” present one of the book’s clearest challenges to it:
into golden batter,
the streaks and whorls curlicue
to a submerged design.
Fear: less the other side of bliss’s coin
than thin lines hidden deep within the sweet
mixture, a secret pattern
coded in dark and light.
It can hardly be a coincidence that the poem on the next page, “Fire Pit,” reinforces the idea. In this poem a typical group activity, roasting marshmallows around a fire, is suddenly transformed. These are the concluding lines of the poem:
about confection or nourishment.
An ember leapt the circle
and caught, and hillsides, grass, and trees caught fire.
The circle opened out and came apart.
We all were running.
But where was there to run to?
And even the bed, which at first appears like the ultimate symbol of sanctuary, becomes complicated, as the collection goes on, by the idea of dreams. Again, it’s hard to know how much of this was planned and how much is just coincidence, but the idea of spending more time in bed, and of therefore remembering and paying more attention to dreams, is particularly resonant with the lockdown conditions imposed in many places in response to the pandemic. The poem “Sleeping Late” begins:
Alone in bed
I’m drifting uncommitted, out of time.
No one is waiting for me to wake up,
so I burrow deeper into neutral light.
Volleyball on the beach in Tel Aviv.
Solemn symposiasts. Contractors from the city
make their presentation. They would like to bury
a rusty Cadillac nose down
under the hill among our maple trees.
I say no no no. . . .
“Sleeping Late,” as can be seen in the quote above, moves into a description of a dream, one of those mysterious, slightly unnerving dreams in which we’re trying to stop people from doing something but can’t make them listen; the other figures in such dreams always have a mysterious power that we can’t find a way to counteract. Given the overall mood of anxiety, it’s fitting that the reader turns the page and finds the next poem is titled “In the Anxiety Hotel”:
I lost you and you lost me.
Ignorant where our pathways crossed,
we wandered both alone and lost.
Where was my luggage? You were sleeping
and wouldn’t wake. I shook you, weeping.
I had a question, I had more
that needed answers—two, three, four.
I asked someone who should have known.
He slammed the door. You were alone,
roaming red halls that curved. You knocked
at random doors, but all were locked.
I’d gone to bed, but in which room?
The hotel was a catacomb.
our story lines run parallel.
Sweet dreams you wish me every night.
We kiss and then put out the light.
But many nights we wander from
lobby to corridor, room to room,
and I lose you and you lose me
in the Hotel Anxiety.
In these poems, the usual division of life into the private domestic sphere and the public social sphere has been destroyed—perhaps by the pandemic if we want to interpret the poems in that way, or by some other, unexplained phenomenon that is left unstated. Either way, the external world barely appears in these poems. Instead, the division becomes that between the domestic world of waking reality, and the dream world of sleep. The world of dreams becomes the only exit from life within the home, but just as home life is impregnated with a sense of menace (as in “Marble Cake”), so the dream world is not really an escape; instead, it is a world where the anxieties and stresses we associate with the social world of work take us prisoner and act out on us. In dreams, quotidian worries take on an omnipotent, phantasmagoric form.
So what is the solution? As the poems in this book make clear, in a world divided between the domestic and the dream, there is no certain refuge to be found in either the home or the bed. The title poem, placed near the centre of the book, seems to suggest there is no pat answer. Here it is in full:
A pigeon cooing on the sill.
The old cat lives on love and water.
Your mother’s balanced by your daughter:
one faces death, one will give birth.
The fulcrum is our life on earth,
beginning, ending in a bed.
We have to marry love and dread.
Dark clouds are roiling in the sky.
The daily drumbeat of the lie,
steady—no, crescendoing.
This premature deceptive spring
forsythia’s in bloom already.
The challenge: balance. Keep it steady,
now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,
now googling a rare sarcoma.
The ghost cat’s weightless on my lap.
My mother’s ghost floats through my nap,
as, dearest heart, we lie in bed.
Oh, we must marry love and dread;
must shield our senses from the glare
and clamor of chaos everywhere.
Life bestows gifts past expectation.
It’s time to plan a celebration:
dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
certain that summer follows spring,
that new life blossoms from the past.
The baby is the youngest guest.
But just how long can we depend
on a recurrence without end?
Everything changes, even change.
The tapestry of seasons strange-
ly stirs in an uneasy wind
that teases dreamlike through the mind.
I reach for you across the bed.
Oh, how to marry love and dread?
The book concludes with “A Poultice,” a poem about a traditional cure for injury, which sums up many of the collection’s ideas of finding ways to accept and live with things as they are. The final lines reinforce the idea that there is only, at best, a temporary forgetting of the external threats that menace us:
my love and I are rocked in time.
The motion lulls us, we forget
the bruise, the wound, the doom, the threat.
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It’s always interesting to read prose written by a poet. It can illuminate concerns that are also central to the poetry, showing similar ideas or themes from a different angle, as it were. This is the case with Piece by Piece, a new collection of essays by Rachel Hadas.
The book is written in conversational yet elegant prose, everything expressed with a limpid clarity. It covers a range of subject matter, but many of the pieces are either directly autobiographical or contain memoiristic elements. There is an assured fluidity to Hadas’s prose style, as she weaves different elements together into a smooth whole.
Of particular interest to readers of her poetry might be “Remembering the Future,” an interview of Hadas by Jessica Greenbaum. The title comes from a slightly mystical remark Hadas makes, that poems can “remember the future” (103), by which she means that a poet can sometimes come to understand their own work better long after they have written it. (She is referring to a particular poem of her own that she feels she understands much better ten years after writing it.) This attitude reveals how Hadas sees poetry as being a way to illuminate the self. For her, the impulse to poetry is purely lyric. In the same interview she talks about poetry anthologies she had as a child, and how the poems she wanted to imitate were the lyrics, not the narrative ones, and she states directly, “poems come out of my life.” (102)
Family is another dominant theme. In essays like “Mater Sagax,” in “Classics,” in “Talking to my Father,” Hadas’s parents are a recurring presence throughout this book. Her father was the classical scholar and translator of Euripides, Moses Hadas, and her mother, whom Hadas describes as “primarily a reader of books, not a writer” (8), translated the classic children’s book The Story of Ferdinand into Latin. Hadas’s reminiscences make it clear that she was born into a bookish household, and that literature was an integral part of the world around her from a very early age. That she became not just a writer, but a writer whose work is so deeply engaged with other literature (through translation, allusion, and even her interest in the cento form) is hardly surprising. The essay “Through the Smoke of This One” is, in fact, a sort of miniature study of the art of allusion, beginning with a question of the origin of a particular proverb, and then broadening out into a consideration of how writers use one another’s words, and where those words really originate.
In a similar example of how she traces the vagaries of thought, the essay “The Trembling Web and the Storage Facility” begins with the arrival of a contributor’s copy of the journal Raritan, in which Hadas has two new poems published. Unlike many authors, I suspect, Hadas actually reads the work of the other writers published with her, and the essay unfolds into a discussion of the contents of one particular issue of a literary journal. We follow the journey of her mind as she pages through the issue, sharing personal reminiscences of the authors, pursuing the references she finds—to Coleridge, Shakespeare, Plato, Shelley—and teasing out the connections between them until she has created an interlocking pattern in which this single issue of Raritan comes to appear like a complete, coherent work of its own. And then she moves, at the end, to her own two poems, and situates them in the interlocking matrix of literature that makes up the issue.
The piece is, in a way, a guide to the whole book, as the main impression one gets from it is the sense that everything is connected, if you look hard enough and, more importantly perhaps, if you have the knowledge to see the connections. Recurring figures and concerns cement this sense as we read: her parents, as already mentioned, Greece and Greek poetry, her friendship with the poet James Merrill, and other elements all recur in different essays in the book but each time, never seen in quite the same way as before. It’s as if she were taking out certain objects she carries with her, holding them up to the light, and drawing our attention to different facets of the same thing, making us see them anew each time. The book’s title seems at first to draw our attention to the parts, but “piece by piece” is of course a description of how things are built. The feeling of this book is precisely that: disparate essays nevertheless arranged into a satisfying whole.
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