William Bibby

Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel

Saturday, 31 October 2009 at 18:12

It seems that Frederick Seidel causes some confusion by his poetry with English Poetic sensibilities. He is much better received in the United States with reviews in the New York Review of Books and in the October issue, a poem published.

One reason for this is that he comes with a truly American voice tinged with European anguish and as a result is not fully comprehended, it seems, this side of the Atlantic.

Blake is the ghost in Frederick (Sui) Seidal’s work and his ‘cod’ rhymes are no worse than ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright/in the forests of the night…’ but his metaphors are not lit by the arcane struggle between good and evil, envisioned by Blake but have been modernised to address the struggle between luxury and starvation, sex and death, napalm manufacture and the hurtling functions of his Ducati Corse; possibly Hell.

Ooga-Booga seen in this light steps smartly away (dances with Fred Astaire) from the Blakesian image to the confessional voice of Robert Lowell who influenced him but later caught and spun by Gregory Corso and above all Allen Ginsberg who had his own Blakesian demons.

‘Howl’ broke loose and throughout Ooga-Booga we can hear Frederick Seidel trying to snap his tortured bonds and break out too.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twenty seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

(Opening lines of America, published in Howl, October 1956)


The United States of America preemptively eats the world.

The doctrine of eat lest you be eaten

Is famished, roars

And tears their heads off before its own is sawed off.

The human being sawing screams ’God is Great!’

(Opening lines of stanza 4 of Bush Administration in Ooga-Booga published 2006)

It is the modernist mannerism of Tropic of Cancer and Under the Volcano; angry,ribald, insulting and deft.

Its ‘popper’ poetry, both The Open Society and amyl-nitrate, throwing Seidel into epileptic poetic seizures, as this stanza from Dante’s Beatrice demonstrates:


I bought the racer

To replace her.

It became my slave and I its.

All it lacked was tits.

All it lacked

Between its wheels was hair.

I don’t care.

We do it anyway.

The Beatles could sing this or the Ramones. Or Ginsberg:


Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down
the American river!…

This is America not England, full of blank threats like going down a US penitentiary corridor.

For some reason Faber publish Frederick Seidal two years or more later than his American publishers. Are they waiting for permission? Is Fred going to Bologna first to have his racing Ducati built in order to self immolate his bitch and himself? Will sales increase after his spectacular wipe out:

The racer being made for me

Is not ready,but is getting deadly.

Seidal understands only too well the slow turning of the material screw

as`we herd our junked up planet into smaller and smaller corners, now populated by billions of others and this to Seidel is perverse and his perversity liberates itself in verse:

My own poetry I find incomprehensible.

Actually, I have no one.

Everything in art is couplets.

Mine don’t rhyme.

Or

Judith slew Holofernes.

Cut his head off.

Slew slime.

Cunt with a dick

Cut the monster’s head off.

Holofernes startled head farts blood

And falls off.

And he also deals in the anguish

Islam is submission

Behead the man

Who will not listen!

My head and hand are coming to an end.

There’s no co-ordination; as Ginsberg dealt with it in 1956 only a decade before Seidal started writing poetry.

Oh yes, he’s been around for a while.

FROM ROD FARLEY 27TH. OCTOBER 2009

Tuesday, 27 October 2009 at 11:25

Ah...I see...I think I see.

I'm wondering about this pinning down as you call it of Death, Love etc. I was reasonably impressed by your paragraph, until I thought 'Hey, What is this crap? Surely we want to try & understand people's experiences of love etc. - not death cos that's freaky & hard-going - in order to compare our life-stories with others' & so connect with the rest of the race?. If I had exactly the same numbness when I saw a beauty as you did, I'd say Crikey, I've been there! (Probably had the same shit from the same dealer, actually.) If not, I'd say Crikey, missed out again. (& change my dealer.)

Keep scribbling. I like this interchange. You're sort of unpredictable.

Do you carry a gun? Sorry, just a thought.

Rod Farley



Dear Rod....the time is fast approaching w­hen the purchase of a fire-arm seems inevitable. I have little experience with them but I believe you can hit your target from many hundreds of feet...well this could be a bit of a metaphore. I never have to say I have missed out again because I have never tried....wouldn't succeed to describe either love or death. When you're dead there isn't much communication...when your in love you don't need words...nevertheless they are the two things which demand our attention and about which most things written are written. Arjuna understands only too well Krishna's mocking response to his question...abandon hope and experience what is there....throw yourself in...or as Ted Hughes used to say 'stick your head in the bucket'.


What is the telephone number of your dealer?

THE NINE TYPES OF POEM

Thursday, 15 October 2009 at 11:03

Nothing looks good unless it’s numbered, No 7, 34B, K101, 1914-18, 9.11.2001 which turned out to have a greater effect down here than a discovery located in the orbit of Jupiter, 9mm and so on.

So it’s good to number poetry; give it the fragile bridge it needs to span the turbulence of the words. In my view there are nine types of poem.

1. Descriptive Poems: Countryside, haircuts, kitchens etc.

2. Story Poems. Someone went somewhere and did something.

3. Joke Poems. Puns, one liners, allegorical fixes on the now.

4. Literary Poems. Full of dazzling technique, classical form and eclectic reference.

5. Metaphorical Poems. The most common. Endless varieties of how one thing means another.

6. Moment Poems. That spring open like a trap door into a new world to explain something that cannot be explained.

7. Influenced Poems. Where the ideas, line structure, mirror (mostly unconsciously) the greater original.

8. Autobiographical poems.

9. Political/Polemic Poems.

All the above naturally include elements of some of the others but the main thrust is, usually, fairly apparent.

I would like to take each one and provide an example and discuss it.

No.6 Moment Poems.

This poem by Lesley Saunders is called The Experiment.

Of the boy or boys who took part nearly everything must be invented:
whether their parents had given consent, whether friends were envious
or scared, how unexpectedly their dreams of flying would end – though

you’d know the moment you’d met one by the excitable wings of his collar,
by the folded ailerons of the shoulder-blades, the way his uncertain hair
has coiled itself into wires, and the eyes like skies after lightening; even so

hearing a series of small storms in a room upstairs,you’d hardly infer
what was there: something suspended, clairvoyant, a body of evidence
plying between laws of desire and repulsion, results and their cause,

the child all the while sparkling, a lark mirror, a dark chandelier, levitating
feathers, confetti, little leaves of gold that fill his nose and mouth like a shout,
till he’s an ariel in the bird-catcher’s hand, thrilled almost to bits.

What makes it work is the silk, and the virtue repeatedly applied to his heels:
hinting, if only the rain holds off, at brave new systems for travelling through time
over wild-eyed distances, hire wire acts over oceans and prairies, a rodeo of lights.

For some looking back it must have seemed just a dream, a phrase they’d been
going through, unconditional, perfect; for others, a warning of danger to come,
charged, resistant, different, a world hung by a thread; the future before it’s begun


It is not in our nature not to want to know although others have disagreed with this.

William Empson for instance in Seven Types of Ambiguity ‘The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live aswell as one can;….’. Given the depletion of nerve and intelligence as aesthetics are conceived and then suppressed by our reverence for material effect, it is a miracle that we can still remain calm in the face of absolute paradox.

In ‘wanting to know’ we seem to be always presented with the barrel of the gun pointing at our heads rather than holding the trigger. Think of the discovery and implementation of atomic power or the different but more insidious power of the dark side of the Internet. And of course the internal combustion engine that has, in large part, enabled our global civilisation to achieve greater wealth than ever before but has also been central to the slaughter of millions and now the contamination of our planet. The thing we wanted to know and subsequently created turns on us like a jealous deity.

It may be that ‘not wanting to know’ holds a very important aspect of ourselves because in the act of ‘not wanting to know’ we do, it seems to me, two things.

First we stop making demands on the pragmatic resolution of a question and secondly acknowledge that an absolute answer is a dead end and that more creative and imaginative answers will not only be relative but open ended, leading to other questions.

For someone to assert that ‘God exists’ is not nearly so rewarding as saying that to believe in the existence of God incorporation of God being ‘nothing’ and ‘non-existence’ might also be involved, which in turn would lead to a greater insight than that so absolutely inferred in the first statement.

This contemporary poem leads to insights not apparent in its attempt to discriminate between a wiser/older set of eyes observing something that is not fully understood except by the protagonists of the story even when they had acquired the wisdom to do so in the final stanza.

So the story of the poem is a simple set piece between a misunderstanding (consummated in the final lines) as the principal characters look at themselves and the observing poet coolly describes one universal truth as something discreet and uniquely ingenious. In this case The Experiment.

‘Not knowing’ then becomes more than just unconscious growing up. It also becomes the very light the poet uses to illuminate what it was like ‘not to know’.Leslie Saunders delivers this for the reader so that we may also use ‘not knowing’ to understand how childhood might well be seen as an experiment the outcome of which is unpredictable.

So lets look at this and see what a moment Leslie Saunders has managed to invoke.

Her munitions are ‘aileron’, ‘something suspended’, levitating feathers’ and‘heels’ in stanzas 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively.

An aileron is a hinged flap on an aircraft for maintaining lateral control, in other words giving the ability to move from side to side, or to balance sideways movement. It suggests also a restriction in movement.

Childhood is necessarily restricted by the provision of life within the environment surrounding the child. No one can grow up in an expanded childhood that negotiates everything there is. And yet the imagination of childhood allows for the creation of possibilities even though there is the impossibility of being able to fly by oneself.

The imagination of a child can create flight but it is something that one has to suspend before physical reality reduces the notion to rubble. A suspended belief is itself dangling in air.

So another tack is required and the myth of Icarus and his waxed and feathered wings offers a solution to the imagination for the soaring energy of the initial enterprise. What happens next can be safely kept for the melancholy of adolescence and the grim physical laws that circumscribed his boundless enthusiasm.

Myth comes to the rescue a second time with the heels winged liked doves and Perseus covering unimaginable distances for his rescue missions.

So we are delivered flight as the perfect imaginative escape, its Olympian ideal crushed by the inevitable flight from childhood only in the final lines.This is a moment where two things become one thing and the poem flowers with truth and grief.

Rod Farley writes on 5th. October (a Monday as he reminds us) 2009

Monday, 5 October 2009 at 11:22

It's me again, Rod Farley. I've been reading your October offerings & one I think I understand, the other I haven't a clue about. Might as well be in a fucking foreign language. Perhaps it is - there's a thought.

I'll do Krishna's Foot first. K. seems (according to my encyclopaedia, cos I wasn't brought up on all this Indian stuff) to be The Preserver, God of Wisdom & the 8th incarnation of Vishnu. So I looked him up too & the article mentioned Brahma the Creator. So isn't it Brahma's Foot you should be talking about?

Otherwise I really liked the image of the deer & the endless earth beyond - reminds me of the last verse of Adlestrop, with the blackbird singing and 'round him, farther & farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire & Gloucestershire'. Bags of back-up, if you see what I mean. And our 'fidelity to a lie', as you put it, is so hopelessly true. So you've got points for that one, Bibby.

But the other poem. I don't even get near it. Is it an eco-poem? Where's the "Brokerage"?

So we start off with thoughtless, sleep-walking action. Am I right so far, or should I just chuck this whole thing & read a book? Are the 'clouds above us' the real ones, or the sea above us (if we're still supposed to be underwater) & what isn't dead? The Sea? Would it make any difference to cloud-formation if it was? And 'until they cease' - who are they?

All too hard for a Monday afternoon. Now where's that book...?



Many thanks for ­this. I'll look at Brokerage ( it about us being broken and about how we are becoming the brokers between God and the creation). Perhaps the 'sea' shouldn't die so miserably? Good luck with the prose...a hopeless substitute of course.

Now in response to Krishna......it is based on the moment in the Bhagvad Gita when Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna on the battlefield. Reaveals himself in his 'cosmic' form and among the many startling things Arjuna sees are a stream of humanity entering one foot and exiting his other. Krishna points out that these are the souls of humanity coming into birth and leaving in death and explains how this is continual and everlasting. The refernce in 'fidelity in a lie' which you were so quick to seize upon, is that Krishna earlier in the Gita asks Arjuna what is mans greatest folly or self delusion and the answer is that although surrounded by death, individual humans cling to the hope that they will never die.

Received from Mr Nick Hurt 27th. September

Sunday, 27 September 2009 at 11:20

.....I can see you as we were
hunched over an old Remington
with an e that didn't work
in the cold dawn light of Clapham...



Many th­anks for this. Like you, there are now, so many other pieces of the alphabet that seem to be lost or misplaced that the results come infrequently...but it's all there is.

A reply from Rod Farley on August 28th 2009

Friday, 28 August 2009 at 11:17

I don't get you. Are you in favour of thinking the Un..., or not?
Cos I am.
I want poems to shock, not leave the silly bloody reader saying 'Oh, that's nice' in a whiny ever-so voice. Poems have got to be big. Bring back Ulysses - I mean Tennyson's, not the Irish madman's - & Dryden, Sassoon, Arnold, Byron, Graves. No more sissy stuff like Wordsworth & Laurie Lee, which is only fit for the loo.
Why are we agreeing about the toilet? Have you got a problem in that area?

Rod Farley





Thanks Rod (can I call you Rod?) Trying to make sense of something that is too difficult to articulate, or to make accessable something that is important but elludes descrip­tion, is what I mean by the 'unthinkable', not outrageous, highly contentious, controversial thoughts but rather those things which deny thought about them. For instance you can't really have meaningful thoughts about death, you can imagine death, and you can speculate on death but you can't describe death as it really is for the obvious reason that you haven't experienced it. You can't properly articulate your thoughts about falling in love, you can describe your feelings, you can create metaphors to attempt an explanation but you can't pin down 'love' to a series of concrete ideas like you can about, say, democracy.So in order to create (in this case) poetry about one of these subjects it seems to me that one has to master a form of 'atmosphere' which sometimes means that the poem (or the painting, or the music) doesn't appear to make much obvious sense but, if it works, will capture a feeling or form a novel idea for the reader. Sign posts. This is what I think contemporary poetry should do and at its best give a moment of deep reflection and surprising insight.Not, however, a new way of looking at broccoli as if it were an entirely mysterious and unexplored object, which is what much contemporary poetry is about.

In the next Blog I discuss one of these poems.....but I haven't finished it yet because the toilet's blocked.

18th. August a response from Mr. Rod Farley

Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 11:15

I admire WB for bearing his soul so fearlessly on his weblog, but stick to poems, William. Your prose is shit.

The degeneration of poetry into navel-gazing 'ball-lessness' is a result not, my friend, of the emergence of women poets, but the zeitgeist in general. No one dares generalise, be brave in thought or word, paint the picture large etc. etc. because we're all so fucking scared of being scrap-heaped as 'fascists', 'retards' or 'Olde Colonials'. So poets end up retrieving little bits of nostalgia, screwing up the phrases to sound mysterious, and ending with a 2-line, ever-so-clever conclusion/thought for the poor reader to take away to the loo.
Come back, Mr Larkin; teach 'em how to think the unthinkable.

Having got that off my chest, I have to say your poems are OK.



Many thanks MR. Farley...'think(ing) the unthinkable' and then manipulating the thought into shape and rendering it as poetry is exactly what I am arguing against, the crises of thinking the unthinkable must allow the poetry to escape these kind of doctrinaire rules. But I do agree about the toilet.