Feature

The Motorcycle Diarist

Born in St. Louis to a Jewish family—his father owned a West Virginia mine as part of a coal-and-coke business—Seidel showed up at Harvard fully formed. “Fred was ahead of us all,” says his college roommate Charles Sifton, now a federal judge. “He was already writing and designing his own clothes, putting lapels on vests.” Lelyveld, another classmate, concurs: “He had an elegance particularly striking in a Harvard junior.” As a freshman, Seidel met the comfortably incarcerated Ezra Pound, who, in turn, arranged an introduction to T.S. Eliot, another St. Louis refugee.

In 1962, Robert Lowell, Louise Bogan, and Stanley Kunitz selected Seidel’s first collection, Final Solutions, for the 92nd Street Y’s inaugural Helen Burlin Memorial Award, which included a book deal with Atheneum Press. When Seidel, all of 26, was asked to make changes to several poems—the Y claimed they libeled Mamie Eisenhower, among others—he refused. The sponsor withdrew the prize, and the judges resigned in protest. The Times covered the flap, and Jason Epstein at Random House published the book.

The follow-up didn’t come for seventeen years. Shortly after Final Solutions, Seidel stopped writing. “Though I had written a lot, I had not found how to write a poem,” he says. “I simply had nothing to say.” In the interim, he inaugurated the scene at Elaine’s and became a father, certain that the authentic voice he was waiting for would come. He describes Sunrise, published in 1980, as “a push of a tomb door.”

“At her old apartment at 12, Rue de Seine/We lived like hummingbirds on nectar and oxygen.”

Ten books have followed, each, according to Poirier, “better than the one before.” The poems in Ooga-Booga are the richest yet and read like no one else’s: They’re surreal without being especially difficult, and utterly unpretentious, suffused with the peculiar American loneliness of Raymond Chandler. Even when writing about sex, Seidel sounds incurably alone. And the charges of elitism and starfucking fall apart as soon as one actually reads the poems—a lunchtime glass of Haut-Brion at Montrachet becomes a self-dissection, and Seidel is toughest on himself: “I’m sucking on the barrel of a crystal pistol / To get a bullet to my brain.”

Throughout there are passages of startling lyricism. In “Broadway Melody,” he watches an infirm couple leaving a diner, “spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible.” “Barbados,” a nightmarish Diego Rivera mural of a poem, is the loveliest Seidel has written to date, and he’s perfected the subtle rhythms and rhymes that rocket the stanzas forward like his Ducati 916 SPS. While I can think of a more likable book of poems, I can scarcely imagine a better one.

The last poem, “Death of the Shah,” describes a recent trip to Ghana. Seidel’s wanderlust has taken him to remote places—when the American Museum of Natural History commissioned him to write a series of poems on the subject of the cosmos, to celebrate a new planetarium, he says he even lobbied Bob Kerrey to have NASA send him to space. When Seidel catches the incredulous look on my face, he adds, “I’m in terrific shape,” looking a little crestfallen. Later, he asks a favor: “Would you write about something more than just the beautiful women, fast motorcycles, and great clothes?” I promise I will try.