“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . [Seidel’s] poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today
Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker).
Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude.
Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”
“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . [Seidel’s] poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today
Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker).
Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude.
Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”
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“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . [Seidel’s] poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today
Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker).
Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude.
Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374715076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 02/16/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 342 KB |
About the Author
Frederick Seidel's books of poems include Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; My Tokyo; Going Fast; The Cosmos Poems; Life on Earth; Ooga-Booga; and Poems 1959-2009.
Read an Excerpt
Widening Income Inequality
By Frederick Seidel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2016 Frederick SeidelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71507-6
CHAPTER 1
REMEMBERING ELAINE'S
We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
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.
How wonderful to be so magnified.
Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied.
You were who you weren't till now.
We'd been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sow
And now we'd write a book, without having to know how.
If you didn't get a hangover, that was one kind of bad
And was a sign of something, but if you had
Tranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work,
Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don't be a jerk,
Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don't smirk.
We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes,
The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless — and so did Don,
Elaine's original red-haired cokehead maître d'
Who had a beautiful wife, dangerously.
But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe.
Many distinguished dead were there
At one of the front tables, fragrant talk everywhere.
Plimpton, Mailer, Styron, Bobby Short — fellows, have another drink.
You had to keep drinking or you'd sink.
Smoking fifty cigarettes a day made your squid-ink fingers stink.
Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene
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!
The dead are gone —
Their thousand and one nights vanished into dawn.
Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around
Till dawn turned into day? Last round!
Construction of the new Second Avenue subway enters the ground.
Aldrich once protested to Elaine that his bill for the night was too high.
She showed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he started to cry.
(Or was it eighteen?)
We were the scene.
Now the floor has been swept clean.
Everyone's gone.
Elaine and Elaine's have vanished into the dawn.
Elaine the woman, who weighed hundreds of pounds, is floating around —
Her ghost calls out: Last round!
Wailing, construction of the new Second Avenue subway pounds the ground.
CITY
Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking
With the grief of being left,
A dog bereft.
Right now, a car is parking.
The dog emits
Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow
That float upward from the street below
To where another victim sits:
Who listens to the whole city
And the dog honking like a car alarm,
And doesn't mean the dog any harm,
And doesn't feel any pity.
LIFTOFF
On the other side of the street, the buildings sit on smoke,
About to lift off — it's spring!
Cosmonauts and astronauts comfortably in their apartments in armchairs
For the journey to summer.
And actually over here, in here, it's spring also, and I leap out of my study
Window repeatedly, like a loop of film repeating itself,
Leap but I'm yanked back up, leap but yanked back up, on a bungee cord,
Jumped or fell, slipped or pushed, either way repeatedly
Bipolar, particularly since I already knew I had to lose weight, and I start to fly
Back and forth in the canyon between the two sides of Broadway
With all the other pigeons flashing white in the sunlight.
I don't know what I'm talking about as usual, but yes!
I settle on a ledge and, moaning, peer inside the room,
And there you are, old man at my computer, pecking away, cooing spring.
FEBRUARY 30TH
The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge
Outside the window is Jack Kennedy —
Standing on one leg and looking jerkily around
And staring straight into the room at me.
Ask not what your country can do for you —
Ask what you can do for your country.
Here's how.
That wouldn't be the way I'd do it.
I'm afraid you leave me no choice now.
The sequence begins with the grooves
Of the carving board
Filling with roast beef blood.
Everything keeps changing and we want it to,
But don't want anything to change.
The pigeons fly back and forth
And look like they're looking for something.
I went to sleep in Havana,
Turned over on my back in Saigon,
And woke up in Kabul,
With Baghdad as both air conditioner and down comforter.
The speckled pigeon standing on the ledge
Outside the window looks really a bit like me,
Me standing on one leg and looking jerkily around
And looking right into the room at me.
Unshaved men run Iran.
In consequence, Nixon with his five o'clock shadow
Rises from the grave to campaign.
His ghost can't stop — even in broad daylight.
In certain neighborhoods, you hear a victim singing,
Corazón, you're chewing on my heart!
Don't forget to spit the seeds out!
Rat-a-tat. Shot dead in the street.
The pigeon outside on the ledge
Came back from Iraq with PTSD.
It stands there, standing on one leg in speckled camouflage,
Staring in through the window at the VA therapist.
Everything keeps changing and we want it to,
But don't want anything to change. Stet.
Everything keeps changing and we want it to,
But don't want anything to change.
Every day I don't die is February 30th,
And more sex is possible.
Flocks of pigeons are whirling around and flash white
In the sunlight like they know something.
Here's what. Here's who needs to be made up.
Here's who I would do.
The makeup artist is hard at work in the Oval Office.
The fireplace fire is lit with the air-conditioning on full blast.
FRANCE NOW
I slide my swastika into your lubricious Place Clichy.
I like my women horizontal and when they stand up vicious and Vichy.
I want to jackboot rhythmically down your Champs-Élysées
With my behind behind me taking selfies of the Grand Palais.
Look at my arm raised in the razor salute of greeting.
I greet you like a Caesar, Heil! for our big meeting.
My open-top Mercedes creeps through the charming, cheering crowd.
I greet you, lovely body of Paris, you who are so proud,
And surtout you French artists and French movie stars who
Are eager to collaborate and would never hide a Jew.
My oh my. How times have changed.
But the fanatics have gotten even more deranged.
Seventy-five years after Hitler toured charming, cheering Paris, Parisians say
They won't give in to terrorist tyranny, and yesterday
Two million people marched arm in arm, hand in hand,
After the latest murderous horror, to take a stand
Against the fascist Nazi Islamist jihadi blasphemous horror and murder.
Absurd is getting absurder.
It's absurd in France to be a Jew
Because someone will want to murder you —
Someone who spreads infidel blood all over the walls and floor like jam —
Someone who, like you, doesn't eat ham.
He/she activates her/his suicide vest.
Children just out of the nest
Wearing a suicide vest
Are the best.
It's alarming
And queer to read Osama bin Laden writing an essay about global warming.
So he was also human, like the ISIS fighters writing
Poems in the manner of the great pre-Islamic odes in the midst of the fighting.
We are the Marseillaise. We are la civilisation française. Make no mistake,
Civilization is at stake.
We are a paper frigate sailing on a burning lake —
Many decks and sails, and white and fancy as a wedding cake.
Listen. The Mu'allaqa of Imru' al-Qays, the Iliad of the Arabs, keeps singing
In the desert, "Come, let us weep," while the bells of Notre-Dame keep ringing
With alarm. In one of the Hadith,
Muhammad crowns me with a wreath
But damns me for eternity, Imru' al-Qays, and Labid as well,
But me especially as the most poetic of poets and their leader into hell.
AT A PARTY
It's her nose. It's ravishing. It's hooked. It's huge.
The room storms with the woman's blinding beauty, a deluge.
The face with the nose smiles, then quietly kisses you raw,
Her impossibly lovely profile looking suddenly like a lobster claw.
Kisses you suddenly, completely out of the blue.
It's hard to understand what the face wants you to do.
Kisses you softly, deeply, over and over, and not a word is said.
That's you over there in the middle of your old age asleep in bed
At the top of the World Trade Center Twin Towers, the party's roar
Silenced when lightning opens the floor
And walks into the room and thunder stands there —
With Gauguin's nose — kissing you in the scorched, terrified air.
BEAUTIFUL FABU
Another lovely New York day in May —
The opposite of the overflowing ashtray
Of silent crushed-out cigarettes with their traces of my DNA
Buried long ago in my Pompeii,
My smokestack youth, that I've outlived to enjoy today.
I once was olives waiting on an olive tree,
And I was green waiting to be harvested by me —
But too young, too soon, I started pathetically
Reaching for a cigarette even before I got out of bed, yes, really!
Puffing away on my way to COPD.
The rubble has stopped smoking, Fabu!
You begged me to stop smoking — which I knew, Fabu, I had to do.
The sky was the size of summer, blue-eyed summer-blue,
Tourists window-shopping up and down the avenue,
When the World Trade Center towers fell on you.
MICHAEL C. ROCKEFELLER WING, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
A man with the bulging belly of the rich man of his tribe,
Older than middle-aged, and of course with many wives,
Possibly the tribal chief but possibly a tribal scribe
Who eats and drinks a lot and abundantly thrives,
Walks through Central Park to get to the Met,
And, after, over to Madison, destination Sant' Ambroeus,
A restaurant whose name rhymes with enjoy us,
To meet and eat pretty girls before the sun sets, which soon will set.
He walks through Central Park and gets to Fifth,
And then to Madison, destination Sant' Ambroeus,
The patron saint of Milan who rhymes with joyous,
Name of a stylish restaurant with a front part about the width
A bulging belly needs to sip an espresso at the bar,
While your typical sleek Milan Italian is the width of a cigar.
Death stands there with its thing sticking out,
Working the espresso machine until it spurts and gives a shout.
How many times have I told you how savage Central Park is.
You have to come while you're alive and visit us.
We'll hold each other, exclaiming, Are we really here! Is it us!
And how beautiful, deep inside the park, when the lights go on, the dark is.
Live captives cooking in the cannibals' boiling pot soar
In the summer breeze musically hushing the trees.
Jakarta, Cairo, Tokyo, Rio, Beijing, London, Accra, Mecca wait on their knees
To be beheaded in their gore.
ROBESPIERRE
Who wouldn't like to have the power to kill
Friends and enemies at will and fill
The jails with people you don't know or know
Only slightly from meeting them a year ago,
Maybe at an AA meeting, where they don't even use last names.
Hi, I'm Fred. Instead of being someone who constantly blames
And complains, why not annihilate?
Why not hate? Why not exterminate? Why not violate
Their rights and their bodies? Tell
The truth. Who wouldn't like to? There's a wishing well in hell
Where every wish is granted.
Decapitation gets decanted.
Suppose you have the chance
To guillotine the executioner after having guillotined everyone else in France?
LE PONT MIRABEAU
(Apollinaire)
Under Eads Bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis
Flows the Seine
And our past loves.
Do I really have to remember all that again
And remember
Joy came only after so much pain?
Hand in hand, face to face,
Let the belfry softly bong the late hour.
Nights go by. Days go by.
I'm alive. I'm here. I'm in flower.
The days go by. But I'm still here. In full flower.
Let night come. Let the hour chime on the mantel.
Love goes away the way this river flows away.
How violently flowers fade. How awfully slow life is.
How violently a flower fades. How violent our hopes are.
The days pass and the weeks pass.
The past does not return, nor do past loves.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
Hand in hand, standing face to face,
Under the arch of the bridge our outstretched arms make
Flows our appetite for life away from us downstream,
And our dream
Of getting back our love of life again.
Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.
PUSSY DAYS
Putting my lenses in, I see No Man's Land in the mirror —
Which makes me think of times in Tokyo so long ago
When, on some subway station platform, in a crowd,
Not finding a single person who spoke English
To ask how I could get to somewhere,
For a panicked several minutes
I experienced near-weightlessness and something quite like bliss.
Once, in India, I crossed a midday plaza —
This was Mumbai, then still called Bombay —
And there were maybe twenty-five thousand people, myself the only white,
And no one in the mob of brown giving me a thought.
I walked invisibly through the Indian indifference.
I crossed across the packed brown Bombay busyness —
A man who wanted to be No Man's Land, free at last.
Now listen, do the right thing, you're a gentleman, be a gentleman.
Empty yourself of meaning
And be a man without ideas.
I went from Bali to Bombay, already sick with something,
From Bombay to Cairo, getting sicker.
Next, on to Tehran, where rooms constantly tilted.
Ah, Shireen, one-night-stand of the Shah, looking as if
She had just stepped out of a swimming pool always.
Many swallow-tailed footmen served much caviar.
Among us in the tent was a spy of the Shah.
I was murmuring hurrah,
Once I learned the guest pretending to be drunk was a spy of the Shah.
Then came the revolution
And Reza Pahlavi fled, and rather soon after came cancer.
And then, poor Shah, came cancer — and looking for an answer.
My doctor in New York was summoned to Mexico City with others
From around the world, but they were not permitted to examine the Shah,
But they could ask him how he was feeling.
Doctors from around the world
Were not allowed to see the Shah undressed
And see the nothingness.
My celebrity GP treated heads of state and me.
One patient was Fiat's Gianni Agnelli, who gave the doctor a Ferrari.
Nothing was the matter with me,
But something is the matter with me.
The Shah needed a splenectomy.
One would eventually be performed in Egypt but too late,
A spleen removal done by a cardiac surgeon, Michael DeBakey the Great.
I, too, took a sickness with me for three years around the world,
But the tropical diseases man at New York Hospital,
After months of tests, couldn't find anything the matter.
It doesn't matter.
I was looking at No Man's Land
Between the trenches and World War I will never end.
Millions are already dead. Hemingway is writing instead.
The tropical diseases man who found nothing the matter
Became the second doctor of mine summoned south of the border.
Tropical Disease Man, by proposing
That the United States, on humanitarian grounds, let the murderer
And torturer into the country for treatment — which then happened —
Helped incite the calamitous Islamist
Takeover of the U.S. embassy.
I long for Hemingway in Paris.
I long for Paris and everywhere else that no longer matters.
I long for the stupid English and the French
And the trenches and the stench.
I long for A Farewell to Arms and the sadness as simple as a rainbow,
And rowing across the lake at night with Catherine Barkley, who will die.
My fellow Americans, cry with me for pussy days gone by.
Women sunbathe along the shore of a deep blue sea.
The eyelid of the day blinks on the blue to signify another tropical day.
A mind green as a golf course bakes in the hot sun and from the green
Rises a perfume of luscious and obscene
Pages turning and the woman's legs open and the reader reads the poem.
Something is the matter with me.
I'm too happy.
Pound and Hemingway and Joyce in Paris lassoed
And branded the goddamned English language — cowboys in Paree!
Each fellow had his favorite café where he liked to be.
At the top of the stairs leading up to the street from the metro,
French riot police, squatting behind a machine gun on a tripod,
Waiting no doubt for some Algerian, swiveled the gun around to aim at me
On a lovely summer's day in 1960.
I immediately looked behind me to show them you boys don't want me!
I was being stabbed in the stomach, the room was spinning,
And, according to the tests, nothing was the matter.
Tropical Disease Man joked: "Maybe you got bitten by a shark in Bali!"
Twenty little schoolchildren in Connecticut were slaughtered last Friday.
Things happen even in Bali
When you write poetry.
Maybe the world got bitten by a shark.
I'm taking off from Newark Liberty International Airport.
The captain has turned the seatbelt sign off while we're still climbing.
I'm opening the emergency exit door located nearest me
To wing-walk above the Statue of Liberty
And the bountiful chemical factories of New Jersey.
I've reached the altitude of No Man's Land and I'm seeking asylum.
A PROBLEM WITH THE LANDING GEAR
Cars traveling the other way
On the other side of the double yellow dividing line
Carry people you don't know and never will.
The woman on the other side of the bed reading a book
Is likewise going somewhere else.
You are and you aren't yours.
It's like you're on the other side of the road
From yourself in your car.
You're on the other side of the bed
From her book.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Widening Income Inequality by Frederick Seidel. Copyright © 2016 Frederick Seidel. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Remembering Elaine's,
City,
Liftoff,
February 30th,
France Now,
At a Party,
Beautiful Fabu,
Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Robespierre,
Le Pont Mirabeau,
Pussy Days,
A Problem with the Landing Gear,
Aeneidos Liber Quartus,
The Pond,
America,
Patek Philippe Ref. 3842,
Cors de chasse,
The Little Car,
Punta Cana,
Boom and Boom and Boom,
A Man About to Come,
Winter Day, Birdsong,
Annie,
Autumn Leaves,
Breaking News,
March 2012,
Man with a Mouth,
Model Train,
The Bird on the Crocodile's Back,
The Lovely Redhead,
Song,
Snowing,
Psalm,
Song to the Moon,
Green Absinthe,
Don't Blink, Life!,
Monday Morning,
Man in Slicker,
The End of Summer,
The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri,
Claudio Castiglione and Massimo Tamburini,
Montauk,
Down Below Riverside Park,
Karl,
Fred Seidel,
Morning and Melancholia,
Sunshine,
Sunset at Swan Lake,
Spring Fever,
Hip-Hop,
Polio Days,
Versailles,
My First Wife,
To Stop the World from Ending,
Me,
Poet at Seventy-Eight,
To Philip Roth, for His Eightieth,
What a Day,
Widening Income Inequality,
About the Author,
Also by Frederick Seidel,
Copyright,