Status of the Mourned by Hugh Seidman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Status of the Mourned by Hugh Seidman Jon Curley (bio) status of the mourned Hugh Seidman Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/status-of-the-mourned.html 84 pages, Print, $15.00 For over a half century, Hugh Seidman has crafted a formidable body of work that reflects the Objectivist mandate for sincerity, honesty, and clarity in poetic representation. A student of Louis Zukofsky, who theorized Objectivism as primarily a set of guidelines rather than an actual avant garde movement, [End Page 108] Seidman emerged in 1970 with Collecting Evidence (1970), dedicated to describing "a difference in reference/an epiphany." In Status of the Mourned, his newest collection, he is not only collecting the evidence but taking stock: composing a chronicle of his life and the lives of others, as elegist, fabulist, and witness to personal loss and historical catastrophe. It is a weird, arresting requiem that can veer abruptly from mournful meditation to quickened reverie. This whiplash movement across a spectrum of sentiment guarantees that it pulses with vitality and inquiry, probing "The living lives lived." In his eighty-second year, Seidman refuses the grandiose pronouncement of a presumed poetic elder statesman, the lofty utterances of a pretentious self-fashioned Bard, or the complacent curatorial considerations of a career bringing finality or semi-closure to his musings. As with his contemporary and close friend Michael Heller's recent work (whose Telescope: Selected Poems was published by New York Review Books in 2019), his so-called Late Style is an advancement in reckoning, a refusal to be settled in either particular moods or modes. These poems are at times frustrated, forlorn, and ferocious; they are always on fire. A Seidman requiem is a sustained recording of grief and loss but also the establishment of a sequence of resurrection songs "amid the remarkable fervor that raises/the dead to the status of the living." Memorial markers are occasions for conjuration, bringing dead kin and friends back to conscience, back to the poet's page, assembling threshold portraits of the dead in duel perspective: gone and beyond; here and animate. These remembrances are brought to bear on Seidman's sense of how he reckons with their occasions—how they shape his sense of self and self-judgement. As Burt Kimmelman has noted in the publication Jacket, a "singular characteristic of Seidman's work is its ethical imperative, of how to live." Childhood reminisces, international historical events ranging over decades, homages to forebears and influences, and exacting tributes in the form of raw obituaries predominate here. Seidman's preoccupations and passions are vast and differentiated into multiple frames for discerning the poet's role in remembering his and others' experiences. Always there is the awareness of mortality's fragility and the imminent end of all as "Einstein on the Beach" succinctly telegraphs the final journey awaited: "All passports stamped for the underworld." [End Page 109] The verse is volatile, moving frenetically across moods, critiques, and judgements, established then cancelled, modified and then, as often as not, jettisoned. After numerous inventories of international conflict and barbarity, the reckoning would seem clear, following Adorno's dictum about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being untenable as in "Writing and Catastrophe": "Poem implodes—cannot hold 'holocaust.'" Or from "Statements for Poetry": Not magic, logos, light.What "hope"? But Seidman remains twitchy and any sense of these lines being final conclusions are soon undermined elsewhere (but the quotations surrounding "holocaust" and "hope" still express frustration with the inadequacy of such terms and meanings). Elsewhere, however, in the poem defiance of resignation registers, even the fragile force of language can bring possibility; so arise more promising equations "Failed fate/art? Still—bloody heart!" and "History: stubborn, shrill,/Most dreams, dreams will." In "Two Poems," a tribute to his teacher and fellow poet Adrienne Rich, Seidman writes the following in the second section subtitled "The Hope of Poetry": I type this as time stopsI attain the workshop I graduate to the hopeless cosmosI labor because of you with the hope of poetry Hope against hope is the fulfillment of a poetic gesture unsuited to the world and therefore so crucial to it. Restless then...