Instead, he befriended Ezra Pound and T.S.
Seidels work isnt easily summarized.
I like poems that are daggers that sing…
Photo: Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
However much they upset you, they also affect you.
Frederick Seidel:I dont like itis the really simple answer, and therefore I dont do it.
As with reading publicly, I did it briefly many, many decades ago.
Seidel’s latest collection,So What, was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year.
And didnt like it.
What is it about it that you dont like?
What are people so frightened of when it comes to you and your work?
The very short answer is I dont know.
These things normally arent included in poems.
Thats a completely inadequate answer.
Thats a fair start.
They dont because you say no, or because they dont get recognized to begin with?
The task, after allthe business at handis to write a poem.
Something that suits whatever it is without knowing what it sets out to be.
Thats a big point, I think: whatever it is, without its knowing what it is.
Its a sometimes quite unpleasant and lengthy undertaking.
Is it your job to channel something, or to steer something that already exists in some way?
I think thats a way of putting it.
Its very important, though, not to leave out the craft part of this.
That is to say
Its not a mystical undertaking.
Youre listening to it as you do it.
Youre making music of some sort or other.
But you do persist in trying to get it right.
Seidels latest collection,So What, was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year.
Is that a fair, if perhaps tangential, limning of this sinister quality that your poems sometimes have?
I dont knowbut I dont mind that.
And thats why it came to my attention.
You were 13 at the timewhy did you know about the Bollingen Prize for Poetry?
I swooned over the beauty of the language.
His whole story spoke to me.
They didnt want to kill him.
And a few years later, I took a Greyhound bus to visit him there.
You and Pound had already been corresponding.
I think I was following my fate.
I thought I was doing something large that I couldnt avoid doing, that this was necessary.
Going to see him was part of an anointment.
He was known as a fascist, a neo-Nazi.
It fitted unpleasantly in with Pounds fascist connections and troubles.
And Pound said yes?
He didnt say anything.
[But] that was the end of Kasper.
Fast forward a couple years, and you took another leave from Harvard to visit another poet.
Pound was instrumental in saying, Youve absolutely got to see [T.S.]
But like, hes sickjust stay 15 minutes.
And that meeting with Eliot felt meaningful.
We talked about St. Louis; we talked about everything.
The entire thing is just incredible, but thats just the beginningor perhaps the middle.
Harold Brodkey babysat for you when you were a child?
Robert Lowell was a mentor and a friend?
You were an occasional drinking buddy of Francis Bacon?
[Seidel laughs, seemingly just remembering something.]
Are you the Zelig of American letters?
When you look back on this, does it all seem rather extraordinary to you?
NoI look back with amusement and affection.
Pound is a special case; Eliot a very different sort of thing.
More recently, both Trump and Josh Hawley have made their way into your work.
Is it easy to explain what people were outraged about?
YesI think thats very nice.
Yes, I think thats right.
I think there were people who felt it was an inappropriate way to address what had happened.
To whom I say: Too bad.
Theres plenty to worry about, plenty that shocks and dismaysand I write about it.
And I admire the Roman poets who wrote about it.
Its very much part of what I do, and have done, and what matters.
I hear the bugle call of duty to write about these things.
How, and where, and when do you write poems?
I write all the time.
I write in the morning and continue working throughout the day, and I write on the computer.
Before that there was a typewriter, and pen and paper before that.
How long do you take to make a poemhours, days, weeks, years?
There have been a few that have taken years.
But the usual would be a week or two.
I mean by that 50 or 50,000 revisions.
How do you know when its done?
No, shes not involved in the work.
How did you meet?
Was there anything to the fact that she has one of the greatest names in contemporary human history?
Everythingis in that factI mean, for heavens sake!
In the ninth second, the place is mine and Im no longer interested.
Did I really say that?
I mean, probably trueI lament the loss of that kind of wonderment:Here I am at Claridges.
And then its gone:Its mine.
I live here.Theres something lost in the losing of the awestruck aw, shucks.
Youve written a lotabout motorcyclesin your poems.
Theres something about them that, forme, was conducive to poetry.
Arrests, traffic tickets?
Stopped quite a few times, but it always ends up: Thats some machine youve got there.
Never got a ticket.
And when did you give it up, or why?
Or have you not really formally given it upyou just dont ride much anymore?
Thats an attractive way to put itif you dont mind, Ill borrow that.
