#frederick seidel

[havingapoemwithyou]

Vermont by Frederick Seidel

[petaltexturedskies]

Frederick Seidel, from “June” The Cosmos Trilogy

[thesourodofeiticeiro]

[firstfullmoon]

Your life is anything you want it to— And loves you more than it can show or tell.

Frederick Seidel, from “Vermont”

[victusinveritas]

1937 - Frederick Seidel

It’s always about to rain except When it’s already raining, like now. They go from the pub to the cinema through the rain, To the newsreel and the Disney cartoon, With tickets that are half-price

One day a week in the afternoon. It was the Basque city of Guernica last week, Weeping under airplanes dropping bombs. Walt Disney is not Picasso, But his art is gloriously sunny,

But Mickey Mouse has already said The poems of Lorca will never be funny. Disney, the century’s genius, makes amends. Only he can make butterflies And hurricanes make friends.

D. H. Lawrence is a kamikaze Burning up the sky On his way to bite England explosively and die. He has bad English teeth

That are sharp as a shark And a burning brain That sings like a lark. Silkworms eat mulberry leaves to feed Rainer Maria Rilke the silk he needs

To address the angelic orders. Even the enormous angels Dismount from the sublime, dismount From Pegasus, the horse with wings, And instead of wine, sip brine.

The nostrils of the T. S. Eliot crocodile Lurk just above the surface of the river Nile. His periscope is two nostrils that watch like eyes. His snout stays submerged In water bitter as bile.

Kisses of passion grunt like electroshock And cause convulsions and rigor mortis And sexually join together Two hard-shelled hunchbacks, Each shaped like a tortoise.

They’re Eliot, they’re Lawrence, Each honking on and on, on his moral high horse. If Lawrence caught her, Lawrence would slaughter Emily Dickinson, Eliot’s daughter. Some will get sick and some will die But that is not the reason why A small plane Tows an advertisement For a nearby bar and restaurant

Through the sky Above the beach at Gibson Lane. It is the opposite of insane. Everybody knows Pete the pilot. It’s his plane,

Which he crashes without harm now and again. Black marvelous waves, white August, Is the summer song of Gibson Beach. There’s a skywriting plane crossing the sun With a marriage proposal from someone for someone.

[laylaslibrary]

I went to sleep last night so I could see you.

-Frederick Seidel, from “The Last Poem in the Book,” These Days (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989)

[majestativa]

À nos mains un désir d’outre destin, quelle crainte à nos lèvres demain? (In our hands desire that transcends. What fear on our lips tomorrow?)

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char, transl by Frederick Seidel, (1992)

[thefudge]

Bestie you seems to have great taste and i need to know what’s your favorite poetry books

aww thank you! i have pretty standard taste in poetry books, i dig a lot of the usual suspects, and i can't really list them all, but i CAN recommend two poetry books i read recently and really loved:

gregory orr, orpheus & eurydice: a lyric sequence ("everything had lost its voice and listened now inside,/ listened to Orpheus")

frederick seidel, evening man - the poem "boys" from this collection will always twist a knife in me, especially that last line "thank god for your daddy, boy"