SEIDEL'D

One of my more interesting reading experiences in the Contemporary Poetry Reading Group this semester was provided by excerpts from Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga (2006). I say "interesting" because that vaguely laudatory word covers both a positive and a negative reaction -- because it alludes to something slippery about Seidel's verse, a quality that I don't quite "get," though it does intrigue me. And, I must admit, I'm not sure I even "get" why it gets me.

I don't know much about Seidel except he's rich, was born in 1936, published his first book of poems in 1962, and didn't publish another book until 1979. His Collected Poems, 1959-2009 is scheduled to appear next year.

Judging by Ooga-Booga, he's an acquired taste that I'm on my way to acquiring, though I'm still inquiring of myself my reasons. It's because, I believe, that these poems confront me in a way that the poets I end up living with for awhile do, or did. I should use the past tense because it's rare for that to happen any more. And that, I suspect, adds something to Seidel's allure. It's not that I walk around considering myself a jaded guy, but when I read poems by a jaded guy something in me goes "oh yeah."

The jadedness of Seidel's outlook suits the time, perhaps? Or to put it more stringently on that temporal front: the inclusive dates of his Collected Poems spans my life from birth to next year. Maybe I'd like to believe a change is coming (other than death). But Seidel reminds me of two things: death is the change that's coming (no matter how rich you are), and I'll never be as rich as he is. Which is to say: whatever I expect a poet to show me, it's rare that he shows me a style to which only celebrities, heads of state, and that elusive 5% of the population with 37% of the wealth are accustomed. What does that mean in practical terms? It means that in Seidel we find none of the dreadful earnestness of well-meaning poets being confessional about lives in marginal writing programs, dutifully looking at art and reading biographies to have something to write about, occasionally name-dropping places with cultural panache so as to join the ranks of world-class touring poets.

Seidel does that touring stuff too, of course, but in his case, as in "Barbados," the tour is replete with a rich insider's ennui, to say nothing of a dangerous tendency to be as rancid as anything he might witness. Other poets with political axes to grind do, of course, give us glimpses of brutal acts and consequences to jar us out of our literary complacency. But Seidel somehow seems to suggest that all he's grinding is his pencil, to make it sharper. Whatever the outcome of the chaos we live in, he seems to say, I was there.

But what makes his writing hard to fathom, for me, is its childlike simplicity. Or, rather, its simplicity is so arch, so tongue-in-cheek, so craftily artless, that one always waits to be slapped or jabbed by the inevitable line that arrives with all the specific, precise density -- drowning in acid -- of Robert Lowell or T. S. Eliot when they suddenly drop the right phrase into its inevitable place.

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,
And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.
The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter
Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.
One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer -- what a show!--
Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.
London once seemed the epitome of no regrets
And the old excellence one used to know
Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.
--"Kill Poem"

Yeah, and "a savage servility slides by on grease." To me, the echoes of Lowell's "Skunk Hour" dance through a poem that is aiming to be a Charles Bukowski poem for an uncannily different demographic. But Bukowski is never far from my mind when reading Seidel: it's not only that "fuck you if you can't take me" kind of ethos that these poems exude, there's also that sense of the poem as the only possible repository for a life of this tenor. Once your lines become this spare, they spare nothing.

But look also at how the diction does whatever it wants -- the beautiful balance of line 3 ends with that hanging "utter" that is itself pretty damned utter. And then the "what a show!" interpolation which in a flash makes speaker and poem as cartoonish as anything -- or at least as any inconceivable commercial for Ducati racers(!) could be. Then the "matched exotics" of "egrets" and "regrets" so funny and so baldly bad, as we veer into "the old excellence" that ends with a line worthy of Lowell and an image that suddenly brings in the death and blood that lurks so smugly behind all our diversionary tactics. Gee.

What I like about Seidel is the way he plays our banalities back at us, but first subjects them to a sea-change that causes the acrid brine of his own peculiar vision to cling to them:

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.
But this young woman is young. We kiss.
It's almost incest when it gets to this.
This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.
--"Climbing Everest"

What is said is what any commentator commenting on how the rich old court the fresh young might say -- but it would be said in a wagging finger way, or at least with mockery of the jaded, fading oldster trying to ignite himself via youth. But Seidel says it with a kind of rueful surprise at being the oldster accepted by youth in his "hunger-for-younger." In other words, it's not jaded at all, but almost charmingly surprised by the mores of "almost incest," where the words "consensual, national" do the job of making both old and young part of a machine that operates simply because it operates. "My dynamite penis / Is totally into Venus" Seidel quips, the intonation of youth appropriated by age to make it -- the sex act -- partake of "the moment" as, we tend to think, only youth can. The insinuation of the poem -- that such sex acts, like that Ducati racer, are grandiose acts of death-courting -- never stops asserting itself after that first verse of foreplay, and each joke gets a little edgier, stripped of any self-satisfaction, but gripped by the vanity of vanitas, which is to say that being vain is a vain endeavor, that the grave is grave, and that "the train wreck in the tent" is addicted to all the tender mercies he can get.

One thing's for sure: I'll be getting a copy of those Collected Poems.

OBAMA-RAMA

At The Decemberists concert at Terminal 5 on Wednesday, lead singer Colin Meloy led the crowd in a chant -- when he shouted "yes we can," the crowd of 3,000 replied "yes we did!" It was a great feeling, not only because Barack Obama (who was present on stage as a cardboard cutout through much of the concert) will be our next president, but because the youthful crowd had a certain proprietary claim. Obama took the youth vote of under 30s 66% to 31%, higher than any previous election, and he took first time voters about 70% to 30%. Of course, 95% of the African-American vote had a lot to do with it, too, much of which might also be counted in that first time tally. But the Obama victory feels like it's as much about youth as about race. Never before have I seen a political figure who captured such youthful hopes -- maybe Bobby Kennedy had a similar potential in his brief run. And the racial aspect of the victory is indeed important for any assessment of America's future potential, for the world those youths will live in. To see Obama take Virginia (the only Democrat since LBJ in '64) -- Virginia, home of the former Confederate capitol -- is truly historic. What's so telling about overcoming history is that in an eye-blink the future is no longer dictated by what used to be the case. Obama, more even than King or Malcolm or any previous African-American leader, sets a new dignity and possibility upon the shoulders of African-Americans in this country: rather than a figure in opposition, crying for change, making the system examine its own workings, making white Americans examine their consciences and prejudices, Obama has arrived as change within the system, as a leader for the varied population that is really America. No longer should our non-white subcultures feel disenfranchised by the fact that it was always a white man at the top. And this is not a regional victory, or a Supreme Court appointment. This is a man who received more votes than anyone in U.S. history.

Obama's 65,082,844(and counting) votes puts him above the most recent competition: in 2004, Bush II, running for re-election, received over 62 million. While it's gratifying to know that Obama beat W's time, it's still demoralizing to think that almost 63 million people voted for that bozo in 2004. America has much to answer for. But it's heartening to consider that John Kerry, Bush's opponent in 2004, received around 59 million votes to put him at third highest. That's still a pretty good Bush-backlash. McCain, Obama's opponent, comes in 4th (so far) with 57,179,043 which means he may have received less of a vote of confidence than did Kerry, running against a sitting "war president," while "the fundamentals of the economy were still sound."

Who was fifth? Ronnie Reagan, in his re-election landslide, garnered 54,455,075 votes. I'm hopeful for the numbers for Obama's re-election bid. I wonder how high it can go, if the Repubs really put up Palin again. I'm told evangelical Christians are a quarter of the U.S. population (which is pretty frighteningly high, if you ask me) but still, in terms of number of votes, I don't think it will look like much. Before we consider such horrors (or slaughters?), let's look at America's real moment of shame. In 2000, the 6th highest popular vote went to Al Gore with about 51 million votes, but the president then (and now) was the 7th highest: W., with only 50,456,002. And that's where the "every vote counts" mantra enters the hallowed halls of U.S. fallacies. And the state of affairs we're suffering through now begins there. Because not only was the election stolen, it was stolen by the most venal group of leaders in America's history.

Where, you're asking, is Bill "let's end this fairtytale" Clinton in all this? His numbers come AFTER the first Bush, in 1988, when George Herbert got 48,886,097 votes. Clinton came close to that with his re-election bid, garnering 47,402,357, and in his initial victory, in 1992, 44,909,326. And that's the Top Ten, folks. Ronnie's initial victory was only 43,904,153, but his opponent, Jimmy Carter, got the lowest tally of these eight elections, putting him at number 16 with 35,483,883 votes -- and that was his re-election bid. Ouch.

In electoral college terms, Obama has much further to go. The big crush came from Reagan in 1984 (525 points) and 1980 (489 points). Next, we go to Bush the First, with 426 in 1988. And that, my friends, was the Republican country, the high point of the party, the turning back of FDR and LBJ. Clinton comes in, at places 4 and 5, with 379 in his re-election, only 9 more points than his initial victory in 1992: 370. So, you see, the country didn't exactly go ga-ga over those Clintons. Would Hillary have beaten McCain? We'll never know. Personally, I'd rather the "glass ceiling" be cracked by someone not so indebted to a former male president to make her name, but just as long as it's not Sarah Palin doing the cracking...

Our man Obama places 6th in electoral college points, his 364 finishing behind Bill's score both times. No one else since 1980 cracked 300. W., the president by the slightest margins imaginable, claimed 286 points in 2004 and 271 in 2000, leaving his opponents to place 9th (Gore, with 266 in 2000) and 10th (Kerry with 252 in 2004). In case you're waiting for me to get to McCain (and Palin), he comes in 12th with 163. Papa Bush narrowly beat his time in his re-election loss to Clinton in 1992, with 168. Oh those Red states. God love 'em. Of course, if the Missouri tally ever comes in, then McCain will most likely rise above Bush the 1st with 174 points. Otherwise, Obama will be just 4 points lower than Bill's re-election tally, and move from 6th to 5th. Which would be nice, for Obama to crack the top five of this crew. C'mon, Missouri, show us.

Of course, I've left out the other big landslides: Nixon almost matched Ronnie's re-election with his re-election tally of 520 in 1972, and LBJ's election in 1964 gave him 486 points, which was close to Reagan's first election. But those were different times. Those liberal days that Ronnie effectively dismissed. Now what?

The buying power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's getting shallow and weak
Well, the place I love best is a sweet memory
It's a new path that we trod
--Bob Dylan, "Workingman's Blues #2" (2006)

LE FLÂNEUR IN THE MANNER OF MUSIL

Today is Robert Musil's birthday (b. 1880), and rather than go on about his life -- which as a tale of undeserved neglect and bad breaks as well as profound accomplishment puts to shame that of a whining contemporary author I commented on recently -- I just want to quote at length this passage which I read sometime last month and which I found ravishing. It's one of those passages that draws one in, creating a shared sense of feeling that one just knows is going to go somewhere unexpected by the end, but that, while it's happening, is remarkable enough because of its sustained lucidity. Then suddenly the trap closes and we're pitched from, first, an aimless stroller, then to a vague criminality, and then to that enclosed bubble that is the consciousness of the Man without Qualities, and which finally seems to be the modus vivendi of the writer himself:

For whenever his travels took him to cities to which he was not connected by business of any kind, he particularly enjoyed the feeling of solitude this gave him, and he had rarely felt this so keenly as he did now. He noticed the colors of the streetcars, the automobiles, shop windows, and archways, the shapes of church towers, the faces and the façades, and even though they all had the usual European resemblances, his gaze flew over them like an insect that has strayed into a field bright with unfamiliar colors and cannot, try as it will, find a place to settle on. Such aimless, purposeless strolling through a town vitally absorbed in itself, the keenness of perception increasing in proportion as the strangeness of the surroundings intensifies, heightened still further by the connection that it is not oneself that matters but only this mass of faces, these movements wrenched loose from the body to become armies of arms, legs, or teeth, to all of which the future belongs -- all this can evoke the feeling that being a whole and inviolate strolling human being is positively antisocial and criminal. But if one lets oneself go even further in this fashion, this feeling may also unexpectedly produce a physical well-being and irresponsibility amounting to folly, as if the body were no longer part of a world where the sensual self is enclosed in strands of nerves and blood vessels but belongs to a world bathed in somnolent sweetness. These were the words that Ulrich used to describe to his sister what might perhaps have been the result of a state of mind without goal or ambition, or the result of a diminished ability to maintain an illusory individuality, or perhaps nothing more than that 'primal myth of the gods,' that 'double face of nature,' that 'giving' and 'taking vision,' which he was after all pursuing like a hunter.
--Robert Musil, "A Family of Two" in The Man Without Qualities, Part III: Into the Millennium (The Criminals), trans. by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

END OF AN ERA?

David Brooks has some sobering thoughts in the New York Times today, even assuming "our guy" wins. The points he raises are relevant, though I think he's a bit precipitous in ending "the Baby Boom's" watch. By most calculations, the Baby Boom includes everyone born from '44 to '64 and Obama fits into that span, if toward the tail-end, unlike Hillary and Bill and W. who are at the start of that span. Once again, my cohort (born in the '50s) seems like "the lost generation." Oh well.

Brooks' comments remind me of the end of the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate when hip underdog Bill McKay actually wins the presidency ... as the adoring multitudes break in, he tries a last time to convey his question to his Svengali-like campaign manager (a savvy Peter Boyle): "what do we do now?"