Frederick Seidel seems like an interesting guy. He was born rich and went to Harvard for college, from where he contacted older famous poets like Ezra Pound and Archibald MacLeish, imagining a career that was bigger than his peers’. He left before senior year to try a vow of silence in Paris but came back to college because his parents insisted. He never worked a day job, from what I can tell in online bios. He published one book of poems to some acclaim in his early 20’s and then didn’t publish again for 17 years, spending his time a bit like a dilettante, dining at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, living for a stretch in France and a stretch in the English countryside.
Most people haven’t heard of him because he’s not in academia. He doesn’t teach, sit on awards panels, or give readings of his work, which means that other poets don’t owe him anything, and he’s hardly anthologized or taught in college courses. He owns some Ducati motorcycles on which he speeds through the Hamptons where he has a house. But he does write, having published 13 books of poems, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Many consider him one of the best living American poets.
Poetry doesn’t usually arrest me but Seidel’s poem in The New Yorker last week really did. Called “Downtown,” it goes like this (catch it in The New Yorker here, or buy his collected poems here):
July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.
It is beautiful that they have to disappear.
It’s like the time you said I love you madly.
That was an hour ago. It’s been a fervent year.
I don’t really love fireworks, not really, the flavorful floating shroud
In the nighttime sky above the river and the crowd.
This time, because of the distance upriver perhaps, they’re not loud,
Even the colors aren’t, the patterns getting pregnant and popping.
They get bigger and louder when they start stopping.
They try to rally
At the finale.
It’s the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery—
Which is why the fireworks happen on this side of the island this year.
Shad are back, and we celebrate the Hudson’s Clean Water Act recovery.
What a joy to eat the unborn. We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters we’re.
We’ll binge on shad roe next spring in the delicious few minutes it’s here.
That poem feels to me like a dance, because the rhythm of the lines carries so much of their meaning. In that first line, the word “exhale” modifies “sadly,” but the two words are so far apart that the sentence practically sighs between them. In the next line, “beautiful” modifies “disappear”—but the first word means something so different from the second that these words jump up from their spots to kiss each other mid-line.
There’s the way the guttural sounds (“g”) flicker with the labial (“p”) and the letters double up, so build like fireworks, in “patterns getting pregnant and popping.” And there’s the short bursts that persist, bringing his meaning to life, in the phrase “start stopping.”
In the lines in which he’s confessing boredom over fireworks, the phrase “not really” interrupts the flow, recreating the wandering mind of a person who doesn’t love the music. “Because of the distance upriver perhaps,” between commas, also muffles the bang of the celebration in the background. Throughout, his rhythm conveys what he means.
When Seidel talks about eating the eggs of a fish that’s been endangered, he’s talking about how we rush time as we try to consume in life; in that light comes the line “what monsters we’re.” Our grammar barely does its job as it eats itself.
I’m loving other spots, too. Is there any line in the poem that stands out for you?
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
