Dapper Humanism

Abstract

Dapper Humanism Kevin Prufer (bio) Ooga-Booga. Frederick Seidel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. http://www.fsgbooks.com. 112 pages; cloth, $24.00; paper, $13.00. A recent, rapturous New York Magazine article (December 11, 2006) profiles the "hopelessly rich" Frederick Seidel thusly: The man is sumptuous. He hangs on the edge of a red-leather banquette behind his regular corner table at Cafe Luxembourg, cradling a second espresso, and his ash-colored suit—made to measure by Richard Anderson of 13 Savile Row—fits so perfectly that it looks like it was dusted onto his slender frame with a box of confectioners' sugar. Reading Ooga-Booga, I imagine him meditating on his cuticles, his mortality, or the cut of another man's coat, a thin-lipped smile—is it benevolence or disapproval?—and want badly to dislike him. After all, the Seidel of these poems exudes a kind of opulence and dissolution that is distinctly fall-of-Rome: loathsome, fascinating, self-satisfied, and very, very sparkly. But the truth is that, at his best, the generally awful-minded Seidel is also an insightful, technically superb, and often deeply humane poet, able to conflate the luxuries I imagine decorate his life with searing, social commentary or acute introspection. In "On Being Debonair," for instance, Seidel tells us, It is a joy to sit aloneWithout a book.I use myself up being fine while I dine.I am a result of the concierge at the Carlyle.I order a bottle of Bordeaux.I am a boulevard of eleganceIn my well-known restaurants. Lest we become too comfortable with the wine and the Carlyle and all that, however, the speaker's mind drifts first to Iraq, where "[t]he desert this time of year / Is troops in desert camouflage. / I dine with my Carlyle smile," then to an unnamed woman, who tries to soothe him. It is here, when we expect a return to opulence and comfort, that Seidel offers us something richer and more interesting. "I will cut your heart out," he writes, And drink the rubies and eat the coral.I like the female for its coral.I go to Carnegie HallTo make her open her mouth onstage and scream. Ooga-Booga is, in fact, punctuated by such screams, moments of rage, and fear rising from beneath the brocade of these poems. Where we don't expect it, the specter of battle in Iraq, of senseless military brutality, rises ("Winter, Spring, Baghdad, Fall," he interjects in one poem), then dissipates. In one of the best poems in the collection, "The Bush Administration," Seidel drifts from one surreal, terrifying moment to another, coming closest to clear [End Page 14] editorial when he writes, The United States of America preemptively eats the world.The doctrine of eat lest you be eatenIs famished, roarsAnd tears the heads off before its own is sawed off. Elsewhere, Seidel meditates on sex and, frequently simultaneously, his own impending death. In one poem, the poet's mortality appears personified as a kind of twisted Fred Astaire, "Dapper in hats, / Dapper in spats, / Espousing white tie and tails or a tailcoat and striped trousers." Elsewhere, observing an attractive, much younger woman, he writes, "We kiss. / It's almost incest when it gets to this." Or, in a perverse sonnet that begins "A naked woman my age is a total nightmare," he tells us: I hate the old couples on their walkers givingOff odors of love, and in City Diner eating a rayOf hope, and then paying and trembling back out on Broadway, Drumming and dancing, chanting something nearly unbearable,Spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible. At its strongest, there's something spookily reminiscent of the very best of Stevie Smith in Seidel's frequently arrhythmic poetry—a deceptively conversational tone, always hinting at the profundity and the void, while maintaining a surprisingly musical surface. These poems trip along in a faux-naive, delightfully colloquial mode, managing, generally, to twist themselves into disturbing little rhymes at the ends of lines. Listening to the poems, one can't know where the rhymes will fall—the lines vary in...