and Bernardo Bertolucci, as friends. Independently wealthy, Seidel is
somewhat of an anomaly in contemporary poetry; though he eschews
public readings and teaching, his work has received wide critical
acclaim. His admirers include the novelist Norman Rush and literary
critic Richard Poirier. Seidel’s work is influenced by his life-style,
and he is both famous and infamous for writing poems that deal
frankly with the trappings of wealth—including his penchant for
hand-built Ducati motorcycles, sex with much younger women, and
expensive hotels. Though he has come under attack for “namedropping,” poet Billy Collins has defended Seidel, arguing, “When he
mentions East Hampton or the Carlyle or Le Cirque or Ducati, it
doesn’t even seem like name-dropping. He does what every exciting
poet must do: avoid writing what everyone thinks of as ‘poetry.’ ”
Seidel’s early work was frequently compared to Robert Lowell for its
prophetic voice and willingness to engage history, but his poetry has
also been compared to Sylvia Plath’s for its conflation of personal
drama with political event. In books like My Tokyo (1993)and Going
Faster (1998), Seidel uses recent events and famous figures—among
them assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and France's
controversial decision to begin nuclear testing in the South Pacific in
the mid-1990s—to evoke a nostalgic, even plaintive, tone. "To a great
extent, 'Going Fast' is concerned with endings and mourning for a less
technocratic world," noted New York Times critic Melanie Rehak.
In 2003, Seidel published The Cosmos Trilogy, a collection of three
earlier books: The Cosmos Poems (2000), Life on Earth (2001), and
Area Code 212 (2002). Spanning history and touching on subjects
from Joan of Arc, to the Nazis, to Hollywood, and post-9/11 New
York, the book was modeled after Dante’s Inferno. Seidel wrote the
first volume of the trilogy, The Cosmos Poems, after being
commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History to
commemorate the opening of the Hayden Planetarium; sections of
Area Code 212 were serialized by the Wall Street Journal. Praised
and censured—sometimes in the same review—in equal measure,
Seidel’s admirers contend that his poems are sophisticated masques,
each subtly altering a poetic performance of “Frederick Seidel” in the
manner of the Confessional poets whom he came of age with.
59
Le portrait magazine