Frederick Seidel
Auteur de Ooga-Booga: Poems
A propos de l'auteur
Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems include "Final Solutions"; "Sunrise", winner of the Lamont Prize & the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; "These Days"; "Poems, 1959-1979"; "My Tokyo" (FSG, 1993); "Going Fast" (FSG, 1998); & "The Cosmos Poems" (FSG, 2000). (Bowker Author Biography)
Crédit image: Photograph by Antonin Kratochvil. From the New York Times Magazine, 4/12/2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12Seidel-t.html?pagewanted=all
Œuvres de Frederick Seidel
Widening Income Inequality: Poems 3 exemplaires
Oeuvres associées
My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love (1998) — Contributeur — 68 exemplaires
Buzz Words: Poems About Insects (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) (2021) — Contributeur — 34 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1936-02-19
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- New York, New York, USA
- Études
- Harvard University
- Prix et distinctions
- PEN/Voelcker Award (2002)
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 27
- Aussi par
- 12
- Membres
- 449
- Popularité
- #54,622
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 5
- ISBN
- 44
- Favoris
- 3
Yet more evidence that honest reportage from the disaffected has more critical force than puritanical censorship: it's impossible to read this and feel anything but disgust for Seidel, his world (i.e., the ultra-rich), and the world surrounding that world, in which everything is for sale, for the purposes of sex and hedonism. He's a bit like Houllebecq, if Houllebecq was much smarter and a better writer, and was a poet, rather than a novelist with poetry on the side.
And formally, he's a breath of fresh air: none of your precise, non-rhythmic patter; no hesitation in throwing in cliched rhymes if they'll get the job done; willing to find the tunes in words from anywhere (bad pop song rhythm; good hip-hop rhythm; Eliotesque slides and so on). Where most poets seem to think sentences are either logocentric impositions on their own free spirit, or that syntax is for other people, Seidel makes do with almost Hemingway-levels of minimalism, as in this final stanza of 'Ode to Spring':
"I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface."
The poems in this book mostly avoid neat closure, as here, where a trimeter would have made more conventional sense; I found this frustrating, but of course, that's the point.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading 'Evening Man' and 'Ooga-Booga' back to back; the unvarying themes (which Seidel himself pokes fun at) aren't entirely saved by the varying forms, and by the end I was ready for something else.… (plus d'informations)