Frederick Seidel’s latest collection is Peaches Goes It Alone.
Stray dogs with a red plastic tag in one ear Have been licensed By the city to be safe and allowed to live in the street, So they wander around, or more likely just lie there, Healthy, checked by a city vet, without a care. They’re red-tagged Turks and they’re an elite. You walk past them in the street. They’re bums, they’re the homeless, not educated. It’s...
Quite frankly, nothing much happens. You walk downhill all day From the fascistically monumental Four Seasons Ritz Hotel. I have to say, I’ve had a pleasant stay. My Junior Suite makes me feel like Mussolini, it is huge. I think of the edifice as Salazar in stone. Salazar’s slogan for Portugal was ‘Proudly Alone’, My kind of dictator. He wanted a grand hotel in Lisbon...
There wasn’t anyone to thank. Two hours from Paris in a field. The car was burning in a ditch. Of course, the young star of the movie can’t be killed off so early.
He felt he had to get off the train when he saw the station sign Charleville – Without knowing why – but something had happened there. Rimbaud explodes with too good, With the terrible happiness of light.
He...
The golden light is white. It is the colour of moonlight in the middle of the night If you suddenly wake and you are a child In the forest and the wild Animals all around you are sleeping. You are in your bed and you are weeping For no reason. It is because it is tiger season. The big-game hunters’ guns are banging. The corpse of a real beauty is hanging From a tree in the darkness,...
My life. I live with it. I look at it. My spied on, with malice.
It’s my wife. It’s my husband. It sleeps with me. I wake with it. It doesn’t matter.
If I’m unfaithful – if I drank too much – It’s me. It’s mine. It’s all legal. I smell the back of my hand, And like the smell.
Twenty-five years ago when I was still alive. I was twenty-five....
Frederick Seidel reads his poem ‘In Late December’.
‘A perfect week for digging up the block.’ Frederick Seidel reads his poem ‘Trump for President!’.
A popular clip on YouTube shows a local news reporter trying to interview a costume-shop owner who’d been charged with cyberstalking. The woman is dressed as a giant rabbit and refuses to...
Whether in person or in print, self-consciousness is unsettling. Self-conscious writers, like self-conscious speakers, can’t help betraying that they’re more concerned with their...
A year or two ago, Geoffrey Hartman urged literary critics to declare their independence. They should not regard criticism as an activity secondary to the literature it addressed, but as an art...
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