Shout Out to Frederick Seidel and Marc Maron [by Amy Lawless]

Why isn't ANYONE talking about the Frederick Seidel poem in the New Yorker in the January 10, 2011 issue?  Why does it have to be me?  I barely showered today.  I was at the liquor store at 3:45 pm.  I'm not camera ready!

To preface:....I know as a woman I'm supposed to be all mad and signing petitions about how there are barely any articles written by women in the New Yorker.  I totally get that.  I totally do. Women ROCK and should be featured more in magazines that sit on coffee tables but are barely read. But this poem by Seidel is fucking phenomenal.  It was brought to my attention by my friend James who emailed me because it reminded him of me and I'm a half-blown narcissist (as are we all, except those of us who are full blown narcissists).  So i read it because I'm so "busy" that half the time my New Yorkers just sit on my coffee table (especially if all the articles are written by men *wink*... So i read the Seidel poem and I love Ooga Booga.  Doesn't everyone?  If you don't, there's something missing from your life. You just don't realize you love it yet.  What's great about "Rain" is that it not only is a poem about our current world (Forget journalism! I just read a poem perfectly distilling 2010!): Greece's stone filled pocket suicide, and the obsession with Twilight. I mean that's basically last year, eh? The other beautiful thing about it is that it's written in longish lines that all rhyme, but because I'm a little thick today I didn't even notice that until the fourth and last stanza.

Here are a few choice lines from "Rain":

It's the recession.
It's very weird in New York.
Teen vampires are the teen obsession.
Rosebud mouths who don't use a knife and fork.
Germany at first won't save Greece, but really has to.
It's hot in parts of Texas, but rain drowns Tennessee, people die.
It's the euro. It's the Greek debt. Greece knew
It has to stop lying, but timeo Danaos, they're Greeks, Greeks lie.

 

I mean it's really daffy, but it's lovable daft.  The last stanza holds some of the most heavy-handed end rhymes since Daddy (LOL), but sometimes we want to end with a bang and not a whimper.  (Pour your heart out Tom Eliot!)

Also, why aren't more poets listening to the WTF with Mark Maron Podcast?  Marc Maron, a Jewish comic who is constantly in a state of self-doubt and disrepair, interviews comedians twice a week.  Wait wait stay with me.  I know you may not like comedians.  Dude i know. What's more annoying than someone who's trying to make you laugh?  But these interviews aren't really that different from talking to your poet friends.  I mean what's the point of life?  We poets create poems.  They write jokes. There's this "THING" we do that we aren't sure why we do it (we certainly aren't getting paid for it...). And comedians are the same way.  They are freaks.  They have trouble socializing.  Ahh, now the light goes on.  Yes, please listen to it.  Some of the most beautiful conversations about artistic craft available on any media are going on in Maron's garage.  And they're free.  I am still catching up to all the amazingness, but the 2 parter with Louis CK, the 2 part interview with Judd Apatow both blew me away.

Comments

[molly]

YES. Your "beautiful conversations about artistic craft" line totally nails it. It applies to ANY creative work, and there's something about hearing other people's struggles with it that's so gratifying.

[Steven Dube]

Frederick Seidel is simply the finest poet.

[DL]

Great column, Amy.

[Joy]

i really enjoyed that poem in the NYer and i'm glad you brought it up. just when you think you get where seidel is going, he goes somewhere entirely else/weird in the next line.

also i enjoy his lack of neediness.

[Diann Blakely]

I'm with all of y'all. I'm more than a little behind on NYers and life in general, but I love Seidel, reviewed him for ANTIOCH last year, and if I can just get beyond about fifty different hurdles in my path, I'm going to post the review on my FB "Notes" page.

AND--since I'm getting to broadcast to the rest of the world that hasn't heard already about this Voodoo Episcopalian's strange and superstitious overlapping systems of beliefs, David St. John, now one of ANTIOCH's advisory/contributing editors, who had a beautiful sequence of translations in a recent issue, also has a gorgeous poem in a recent NYer, was one of the first people to publish me, then honored me again by breaking his no-publishing-poets-more-than-once and included three of the earliest poems in what became CITIES OF FLESH AND THE DEAD, including that from which the book takes its title, and then again by selecting me for a PUSHCART PRIZE ANTHOLOGY which he edited, but most of all, he has honored me by becoming among the five or so poets I feel I write for. He IS one of the angels that has come toward me, to steal the title of his marvelous book of essays and interviews--and you can look at my FB wall to see the truth of this statement (also of what I say about myself and coincidences and superstitions).