This book of poetry is amazing. It’s refreshing to read of things other than rage, capitalism, racism and other lackluster things.

Frederick Seidel, when I read his Poems 1959-2009, a few years ago, almost immediately, became one of my favorite poets. In a consumer society while most poets rage against capitalism, wealth, and materialism, Seidel born into wealth, writes with a boyish innocence of his adult toys, the women he’s known, the places he’s traveled, and the famous people he’s met, with unabashed joy, a highly translatable joy, and I loved him for it. You can find him in the grand hotels of New York City and speeding down Italian autobahns, guest of a member of the Ducati family. Seidel owns several expensive high end Ducati motorcycles which he rides through his poems.

At nineteen years old, he met Ezra Pound. When Allen Ginsberg met Pound, he asked him to identity some of his Italian place references in The Cantos. The young Seidel went Ginsberg one better, not knowing a word of Chinese, he convinced Pound to change some of his Chinese poems. Seidel was past seventy-three years old, when I first read his poems. What struck me about his poetry is that he seemed to have read everyone, past and present, within the tradition. At eighty-eight, his recognizable influences are fewer. As writers mature, Influences are usually subsumed, hidden within the text, for the most part, recognized by seasoned readers. Seidel in this volume appears to have intentionally divested his work of influences and much of his playfulness, evident by his chosen forms, short poems, easy rhymes, and his tone, forgoing his earlier rigor of content. If I were stumbling on his work for the first time, I would believe he lacked poetic tradition, not even giving him a pass for perhaps dabbling in free form and experimental verse.

But approached as divestiture, the gains accrue in his past work, leaving him just enough poetic wealth for personal use. Traces of his verve of language, his poetic forms, whimsical and playful, remain. A couple of his page long poems are in this volume, speeding along without a care in the world. If mastery, in this case the mastery of poetry, is wealth, Seidel is wealthy. To enjoy one’s wealth in a manner that brings smiles and laughter to the faces of others, at least in the arts, is a real and true gift. Read this volume, but also accept his previous work.

Thank you to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for an advanced reader’s copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC to review.

I've been curious about Frederick Seidel's poetry for quite some time and appreciated the chance to read his latest collection.

The positives:

1) FS definitely embodies the 0 f*cks given aesthetic, which may resonate with readers looking for rebellion against current poetry vogue(s).
2) There were lines whose beauty, strangeness, and sometimes reflexiveness gave me a delicious pause ("Come back, Beauty, don't be dead," "Hardhats wearing hard hats build the building going up—," "The most beautiful woman who ever was / Is what the crematorium does."
3) The muscularity of the motorcycle devotional poems by a speaker in his eighties was unexpected and invigorating.
4) The unnerving sing-song rhymes grew on me in their petulant crassness. I envision the speaker of these poems as an octogenarian who farts vigorously on the antique sign that points at him.
5) Poems I found most intriguing: "Moto Poeta," "Lucky Ducky" (Trump most definitely deserves to be in a lineup with Nero. And Caligula.)

The not-so-positives:

1) Pointlessness as the point is hardly an idea original enough to sustain an entire collection, although perhaps it does carry more weight in the sunset of a speaker's life.
2) Oftentimes, the name drops seemed utterly interchangeable and shallowly referenced, which disappointed me.
3) In the year 2024, this writer is really smashing the cringe button with the outdated racial terms and stereotyping, even with a few poems that made me hopeful that a more thoughtful and complex discourse might be taking shape. Alas, no. Not really.
4) Though I tried to be open to this style of writing, I felt impatient for more substance.

Overall, this book was a mismatch for me as a reader of poetry. That it is on the verge of publication with a major publishing house is both perplexing and a testament to rapidly changing values in poetry that, in this case, were outrun by a niche notoriety that preceded those changes. I am clearly not part of the intended audience for this book, but there must be one. Godspeed to those readers.

When I reached the end of 'So What', a new collection from the prolific, somewhat provocative poet Frederick Seidel, the lingering feeling was fitting; could be distilled into a set of just two syllables: so...what? While I do not doubt Seidel's talent - his list of many accolades and admirers speaks for itself - nor that for some, reading this selection will be a real, rare pleasure, but unfortunately for me this failed to make much of an impact. The occasional line sparked some amusement - some of his turns of phrase or use of rhyme - but the vast majority of the verses felt crude and thoughtless. The repeated references to Donald Trump felt both quite dated and ineffective, as if they had been shoehorned to make political points which naturally, in 2024, feel redundant.

Due to the affective, evocative nature of its form, I think poetry tends to be more polarising than other kinds of fiction - and so, I would hazard a guess that this one just happened not to be *for* a reader like me; it does not necessarily mean, I think, that the work itself is completely flawed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this free ARC ebook!

Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC!

It’s a bold move to open a collection with a declaration of poetry’s uselessness, but that is exactly what Frederick Seidel does in the titular “So What.”

The poem is not so much a rejection as it is a reframing—how are beauty and art and war and violence in such close and profane proximity? Despite this fascinating premise, "So What" rarely moves beyond treating poetry like an artistic exercise.

There are still thematic contours here, though. This is a collection concerned with hindsight and mortality. The speaker in these poems often pulls apart notions of aging gracefully through wistful, sing-songy rhymes that are tinted with shades of irony and nostalgia in equal measure.

Many of these poems recycle lines in a way that feels redundant more than iterative, as if the speaker doesn’t recall saying the exact same thing a few poems before. It’s almost unsettling, and it invites the reader to wrestle with whether these pieces are littered or decorated with the detritus of memory. To be perfectly blunt, the former seems true as Seidel repeatedly critiques Donald Trump’s presidency in a way that feels both self-congratulatory and anachronistic. In 2016, it was vital; in 2024, it's embarrassing. I am not sure what art can offer us when it merely repeats an opinion most of us share.

While I can aesthetically appreciate the collection, I found myself otherwise unmoved. It’s possibly a matter of taste, but to me, this reads like poetry as pure object—it is disengaged from any of the conflicts or tensions it namedrops, and what could be considered austerity feels more like sterility. For a collection that eschews meaning in its opening, this book spends a great deal of time acting with the tacit assumption that poetry is the only force powerful enough to change politics. As such, aestheticized violence becomes the collection’s guiding impulse—world events via newspaper clippings over Saturday morning coffee in a brownstone.

Poetry as politic is nothing new, so it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why the tone rings disingenuous here, but I’ll try my best:

The world of "So What" is one that the speaker never participates in; he only consumes it.

One could make the argument that this is all part of a grand artistic vision to comment on our personal relationship with history, but the book’s length and general self-indulgence (most prominent in “A Matched Pair of Purdeys,” in which Seidel’s name appears alongside many literary greats) suggest a self-mythology that has been accepted as truth—a provocateur who no longer has anything to say about the world he inhabits.