Ekstasis

Seidel at the Samovar, Part Two (via FSGVideos)

Ta-Nehisi Coates reads from Frederick Seidel’s POEMS 1959-2009: “Boys,” and “October.” Filmed April 14 at the Russian Samovar by Gregory King.

…Coates is one of my favorite bloggers and Seidel is, probably, my favorite living poet. Coates really is the perfect person to be reading Seidel’s “Boys.” He actully chose that particular poem, from the collection. He explains:

Anyway, there was something transgressive about this entire exercise. The first poem is about a son who’s father exhibits a kind of paternal racism toward his black servants, and how the implicit brutality of it all thrills the son. The second poem ends with Seidel admiring the woman’s “blond hair at dawn”—among other things. Readers of this blog will know how distant I am from both paternal racism, and any woman’s “blond hair at dawn.” OK, being from Baltimore where the black girls dye their hair all sorts of colors, I confess to knowing a little about “blond hair at dawn.”

But my point is that reading these pieces was like living in someone else’s skin for a moment. And yet, in some deep sense, finding myself there at the bone. It is human to revel in brutality—race is irrelevant to this fact. It is human to revel in beauty—-race is irrelevant to this fact.

And this is a stanza of Seidel’s poem:

When I was a little boy,
My father had beautiful manners,
A perfect haughty gentleman.
Impeccable with everyone.
In labor relations with the various unions,
For example, he apparently had no peer.
It was not so much that he was generous,
I gather, but rather that he was fair.
So it was a jolt, a jolt of joy,
To hear him cut the shit
And call a black man Boy.
The white-haired old negro was a shoeshine boy.
One of the sovereign experiences of my life was my joy
Hearing my father in a fury call the man boy.

…Watch the end-stopped lines. Watch the enjambment. Seidel is someone who, if nothing else, has really examined his privilege, who has spent years and books upon books examining it, though we as readers may not (often, don’t) like where he takes such thoughts. Read the whole poem (if you search, the whole thing is available on google books) if you can, it’s worth it. Seidel is masterful and certainly the most (really, one of the only) truly subversive people writing today.