Ooga Booga

Over on The Elegant Variation, I discover news of a poet I've strangely never heard of before: Frederick Seidel. His new collection is called Ooga Booga, which seems a very good title to me; and a very quick trawl of the internet reveals a long and serious review by Adam Kirsch, from the New Republic (intensely interesting - basically he is saying Seidel is the poet of our Decadent Period; and Seidel seems from this article to be as creepy and as fascinating as the picture on the left might suggest, much as one might question whether one has outgrown the need for creepy fascination - and there also seems to be an indirect link with the equally obsessive collector of types, Joseph Cornell), and this paragraph from Calvin Bedient at the Boston Review:

Ogre to what used to be called (without a sneer) sentiment, grim beyond Gothic contrivance, the most frightening American poet ever—phallus-man, hangman of political barbarism—Seidel is the poet the twentieth century deserved. (But why stop there, the poet the millennium deserved.) Which is his brilliance, his grief. How he has given himself to our terribleness! Four and a half million years ago in the woodlands arose an ape, the males of which, bonding, raided and killed for the hell of it. Only human beings, their descendants, have improved on their abomination. Professor Richard Wrangham of Harvard calls the type the "demonic male," a label that stirs religion into biology. Seidel's namings are cleaner. Seidel guts our malignancy of all echoes of exalting theology. Spokesman and scourge of marauding testosterone (in These Days, he says of "my penis" that "I ought to cut if off / And feed it to itself"), he points poems like guns at his unforgivable knowledge. If he learned harshness and directness from Robert Lowell, one of his earliest admirers, he left behind Lowell's magnificence like so much dress-up clothing dumped into the trash. You can't like Seidel's poems—they're deliberately virulent; you can only gasp at their skill and daring, their sickening warp, their mercilessness.

Hmm. What he doesn't say is anything about Seidel's wonderful ear, the robustly textured and musical sound of his poetry even on the page - which I can't exemplify here because I have only a couple of extracts to go on myself, as yet. Certainly it seems that Seidel, of whom I had strangely never heard (& strangely seems to be the easiest word) is someone I wish now I had always known about. But maybe these things find us.

And his reading voice, over at his website, is strangely beautiful. Apparently he hasn't given a reading in 43 years.

And if he did, you know, he might be a bit scary.

By the way, I have separated this post out from the previous compendious book-review post, as it seemed to belong on its own. and it's more readable, poor lamb.