Numbers to Live By: Cornell 5/8/77 & Ducati 916
It’s a hell of an Easter weekend at the New York Times. Yesterday delivered an article on the Grateful Dead that brought with it an odd wave of nostalgia for the early days of the internet, when I spent a fair amount of time trading tapes on the rec.music.gdead Usenet group.
And now we get Wyatt Mason’s profile of Frederick Seidel in the Times Magazine. I’m as big a fan of Mason as I am of Seidel, and so you won’t be surprised to hear I found the whole article a treat. But since, like every self-respecting almost-poetry blog, we’ve had our share of back-and-forth about MFA programs here at digital emunction, I thought I’d pull out this paragraph for special consideration:
“It is striking how little Seidel figures in accounts of contemporary poetry,” Adam Phillips has written. Striking, yes, but not surprising. As Galassi puts it, with a mix of admiration and resignation, “Fred doesn’t lift a finger to make himself known.” He doesn’t do book tours, nor has he given readings, not one. From one major anthology of poetry, the Oxford, he was excluded for 47 years, and he still won’t be found in another, the Norton. This fact is explained by his having nothing to do with the world of M.F.A. programs. “Think about who the anthology makers are,” Major Jackson, a successful young poet and poetry professor at the University of Vermont, told me. “Who the tastemakers are. Those are folks who have studied creative writing as a discipline and apprenticed themselves and gone on to teach themselves and then gone on to create students who will come along and include their teachers in anthologies. Seidel doesn’t have that kind of empire.”
Much as I trust Mason generally, I don’t think I can agree with that sentence I’ve italicized. Certainly a part of me wants it to be true, so that I can tally another instance of erring judgment to the general bill of indictment against MFA programs. But is it?
As everyone who writes about him is (necessarily) quick to note, Seidel has not exactly wanted for advantages in life. In Mason’s words, Seidel’s family money put him in a position to “exploit the fruits of the American empire at its most ripe, its wealth, its freedoms.” His biography is full of facts and incidents that, in a different telling of the story, might be pointed to as the ones that made all the difference: a Harvard education; personal contact with Ezra Pound; a prize for his first book awarded by Stanley Kunitz, Louise Bogan, and Robert Lowell; close friendships with people like FSG’s Jonathan Galassi. Should we really believe that the neglect of the MFA-industrial complex is a sufficient counterweight to all that? Has Iowa really conquered Harvard?
It would be an impressive fact if true, for it would signify the final dissipation of the Harvard-NYC axis that gave us E.E. Cummings, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Lowell. Unfortunately that seems less probable than the less exciting idea that these things simply take time. Canon formation is a lagging process, especially for poets like Seidel who do much of their important work late. (Mason: “What Seidel did, in the first 25 years of his writing life, was publish a mere 46 poems; what he has done, in the subsequent 25 years, is follow them with 264 more. More remarkable than the increase in quantity is a consistent increase in quality.”) Seidel might not be in the Norton Anthology yet, but that’s just a question of when, not if. Likewise, the very fact that the New York Times would make room for his profile suggests that rumors of his neglect are premature at best, and likely exaggerated.
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For more on Seidel you can (and should) check out not only Mason’s profile but also his Friday post at Sentences, as well as Christian Lorentzen’s review-essay of the new Collected in The National. I also hear that Michael Robbins, who reviewed Seidel’s Ooga-Booga for Chicago Review a few years ago, might have something in the works, but we’ll have to wait and see to be sure.
OK, so you’re a Deadhead. That’s cool, Bobby, I mean, I don’t judge people based on their … preferences. You never thought of me like that, though, right? I mean, it’s cool if you did, it’s just … you know, I don’t want our friendship to be weird or anything … But, like, I know it’s hard, coming out, & like, I’ll support you, uh … but you’re not going to, like, start wearing tie-dyes or Birkenstocks, are you? I mean not because it would bother me! But there are a lot of ignorant people out there, man.
I missed your earlier post/discussion on MFA programs, Bobby, so thanks for linking to it. Had I known about it, I might have even joined in, but, perhaps not: I hardly want to hear another argument about MFA programs, cronyism, the split between avant and SoQ (in all its variations), the taste-makers and those who virtuously avoid participating in taste-making. Not that those arguments have to be a total wash: at least they can get us talking about poetry and social conditions. And if nothing else they show how the market currently produces both the hopes and the terrors of the contemporary poet, produces, that is, the very terms which the poet is meant to accept or reject. For if, on the one hand, one suspects that these arguments are invested in and try to recuperate poetry as socially relevant either by making it a more prominent feature of the social (through poetic institutions, through fair contests, through remaking the canon, etc.) or by removing it from the social entirely (through the rejection of networks, cronyism, empire, etc.), one can’t help but admit, on the other hand, that that relevance locates its horizon within the boundaries of what is often called the “poetic community” (singular or plural) and leaves untouched the larger forces and assumptions that condition those boundaries, a point exemplified by the delicious irony (which you note) of seeing Seidel as a counterweight to “empire” and the “MFA-industrial complex” when he “has not exactly wanted for advantages in life.” One is almost left to wonder what the downturn in the market will do to this argument when all these MFAers find it harder than ever to get an academic job (not that it has been easy). But it may turn out to be just another opportunity for people to proclaim, along with Kenneth Goldsmith, that it is always a bad time for poetry. Wow, what a relief.
Michael, it is a tough cross we ex-heads bear, so thanks for the support, You needn’t worry yourself: my short affair with tie-dye died in college and Birkenstocks never were my thing. As for me, well, as long as Dick’s Pick’s keeps its Amazon sales rank, I think I’ll be okay.
Boyd: in short, yes. I guess my main beef with the role of the MFA today is that the “poetic community,” as you call it, has become virtually identical with the population of poetry MFA graduates. And the more those two circles coincide, the more the argument that an MFA is necessary for a young poet gains force. I don’t think that’s a good thing for poetry, because (and this part Mason and Jackson are right about) it tends to enforce certain conformities of thinking. And before Seth Abramson rides in hooting and hollering about being called a fascist, let me quickly add that the MFA isn’t uniquely bad in this respect: every institution enforces conformities of thinking. I would simply like to see more institutions and more (and differing) conformities at play in poetry world.
Looks as if I can announce (knock wood) that my Seidel review for the LRB is a go. Thanks for the notice, BB.
In sad coincidence, I’m reviewing Craig Arnold’s book for someone else now. It’s been over a week since he went missing – the probable conclusion is terribly inescapable.