Frederick Seidel’s long devotion to Savile Row suits, Cleverley shoes, Ducati motorcycles, and Patek Philippe watches—accoutrements of the one percent, or at worst the two percent—has made him seem, though he grew up among bobby soxers, a Beau Brummell past his sell-by date. If at eighty he’s finally aged into himself, he’s a man no less at odds with the world. Seidel lives in a bespoke suit of amused rage and disappointment.
The poems in Widening Income Inequality, a phrase much in the news (and a splendid name for a grunge band), display Seidel’s poems at their most fetid and triumphant, their subjects often nipped from the headlines, phrases strewn like salt on an open wound, with a strong dose of political incorrectness added.1
I’m Mussolini,
And the woman spread out on my enormous Duce desk looks teeny.
The desk becomes an altar, sacred. The woman’s naked.
I call the woman teeny only because I need the rhyme.
The shock of naked looks huge on top of a desktop and the slime.
Duce! Duce! Duce! is what girls get wet with.
This one’s perhaps the wettest one’s ever met with.
It’s hard to shock readers these days. Though Seidel’s late poems court a blend of crassness and bad taste, wearing a boater and toting a bouquet, he’s still the little boy—a little boy of eighty—who’s learned a few bad words and wants to try them out. Short lines are followed by lines
