JJ Rousseau makes love
with Thoreau
in the unimagined collective
consciousness of the future.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Frederick Seidel and the Possibilities of Transcendence, Part I
I do not write like Frederick Seidel nor do I desire to write like Frederick Seidel. Anachronistic or reactionary as it may be I hold onto a belief that writing can (should?) possess an aesthetic grandeur, that sentences can reflect a tint of magnificence with a potential to if not redeem then at least make tolerable an ugly world more often flooded with the vomited pollution of mediocre language. The question of aesthetics hinges upon how one decides to respond to this world and what one believes poetry can do. Take Seidel’s poem “Home,” published in the newest n+1, a poem that is something of a political advertisement in its own way. It’s about New York homeless, and it’s probably best to let it speak for itself:
The homeless are popping like pimples.
They’re a little dog’s little unsheathed erection sticking out red.
It makes us passers-by sing.
Ho ho. It’s spring.
Pretty much all of Seidel is contained in these four lines. Disgust for the world. An affinity for the dainty, delicate image. The world’s tritest rhyme. Doggerel as anti-art. Two stanzas later he writes, “Uncooked hamburger / Erupts when he lowers his trousers.” It would take a while to come up with a more revolting image. When I initially read him, this sort of thing bothered me. Why write this way? It is almost as if he is not trying, but that misses the point and begs the question trying what. The more important question is how one writes about the urban homeless who are both spat upon and consciously ignored individuals deserving of pity as well as more than a little gross. I have a friend who lives at the corner of Haight and Ashbury who has found shit on his doorstep on more than one occasion, which has exhausted his patience. I’ve read other poems about the homeless that are merely sentimental. Seidel gets around this by rubbing the reader’s face in it, almost literally, but he also implicates himself and everyone else walking around upper Manhattan. “I bathe in their screams / I dress for the evening.” This is a more conventional indictment of public callousness, an act of advocacy to some degree, which is a point Seidel acknowledges by closing the poem “I paid for this ad.”
He covers multiple angles of the problem of writing about “society.” He checks off appropriate outrage, confronting the uncomfortable facts and creates a compelling aesthetic sense—rooted as it is in overpowering disgust—but he doesn’t manage to transcend the reality. This is the point at which he and I diverge, because as much as the entire idea of transcendence has been assailed as a false solution or even a bourgeois narcotic, I can’t think of any point in making art that does not attempt to make something new, something better out of the obvious repugnance that clings to the world. Seidel believes no such thing. And he could be right. But I don’t see how it’s possible to live in that world.
The homeless are popping like pimples.
They’re a little dog’s little unsheathed erection sticking out red.
It makes us passers-by sing.
Ho ho. It’s spring.
Pretty much all of Seidel is contained in these four lines. Disgust for the world. An affinity for the dainty, delicate image. The world’s tritest rhyme. Doggerel as anti-art. Two stanzas later he writes, “Uncooked hamburger / Erupts when he lowers his trousers.” It would take a while to come up with a more revolting image. When I initially read him, this sort of thing bothered me. Why write this way? It is almost as if he is not trying, but that misses the point and begs the question trying what. The more important question is how one writes about the urban homeless who are both spat upon and consciously ignored individuals deserving of pity as well as more than a little gross. I have a friend who lives at the corner of Haight and Ashbury who has found shit on his doorstep on more than one occasion, which has exhausted his patience. I’ve read other poems about the homeless that are merely sentimental. Seidel gets around this by rubbing the reader’s face in it, almost literally, but he also implicates himself and everyone else walking around upper Manhattan. “I bathe in their screams / I dress for the evening.” This is a more conventional indictment of public callousness, an act of advocacy to some degree, which is a point Seidel acknowledges by closing the poem “I paid for this ad.”
He covers multiple angles of the problem of writing about “society.” He checks off appropriate outrage, confronting the uncomfortable facts and creates a compelling aesthetic sense—rooted as it is in overpowering disgust—but he doesn’t manage to transcend the reality. This is the point at which he and I diverge, because as much as the entire idea of transcendence has been assailed as a false solution or even a bourgeois narcotic, I can’t think of any point in making art that does not attempt to make something new, something better out of the obvious repugnance that clings to the world. Seidel believes no such thing. And he could be right. But I don’t see how it’s possible to live in that world.
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