The poems in Ooga-Booga are the richest yet and read like no one else’s: They’re surreal without being especially difficult, and utterly unpretentious, suffused with the peculiar American loneliness of Raymond Chandler. Even when writing about sex, Seidel sounds incurably alone. And the charges of elitism and starfucking fall apart as soon as one actually reads the poems—a lunchtime glass of Haut-Brion at Montrachet becomes a self-dissection, and Seidel is toughest on himself ... While I can think of a more likable book of poems, I can scarcely imagine a better one.
...the poems themselves seem almost designed to keep his readers at arm's length. Replete with cash and defiantly frank about the pleasures of spending it, brusquely honest about the compulsive pleasures of sex...his poems tend, as his editor Jonathan Galassi once put it, to be 'uncompromising to the point of cruelty' ... The shadows of age and mortality that have always lurked around his poems have crept in from the corners, throwing his particular brand of glitter into chilly, too-bright relief, and the ritzy trappings with which he is accustomed to defining and buttressing himself...are no longer enough to fend off the sense of an ending ... It is this pressing awareness of threat that lifts Ooga-Booga from the bitchy, venal, brittlely amusing entity it could so easily and entertainingly have been into the realm of excellence. Seidel's unique and compelling mix of unapologetic materialism and unsparing, unsentimental honesty has created a painfully clear-eyed apprehension of the value of life and the horror of its loss.
Seidel’s love of death is redolent of Rilke and Rimbaud. But in Ooga-Booga, we also hear the jazzy couplets of T.S. Eliot, the misanthropy of Anthony Hecht, and the self-involved yet skilled syllabic rhythms of Robert Lowell ... Devoted readers of Seidel will recognize not only people and places, but such recurring themes as the woes of Milton’s Satan—a 'soul bereft in its torment'—and the gifted 'American in Paris' who, like Henry Adams, assimilates but remains apart, casting a puritanical eye on the merry-making. Also found here is a mirroring of bifurcated selves, slaves and masters changing places ... Too many of these poems seem to be drafts of other, better poems, sharing not only characters and places, but also lines and metaphors. The inclusion of lesser poems that share material with stronger poems forces the reader to wonder why Seidel included them at all, whether he deliberately disregards his own craft or feels himself near the end of his career and must publish the dregs as well as the fine vintage of his art.
Every now and then Seidel reminds me of Frank O’Hara, with his forthright sexiness, strings of seemingly unrelated assertions, and passing allusions in personal poems to the larger world ... Seidel’s own art doesn’t scream. It’s too well-educated and cultured and mannered (as in mannerism, as in mannerly) to perform that way. It might make us want to scream ... You certainly can like Seidel at his harshest if you can admit to yourself that you have laughed at offensive jokes, are drawn to car wrecks, and found even the slightest bit of prurience amid the televised horror of 9/11 and other awful events. Which is to say, if you can admit you’re human, and—not guilty-feeling, but culpable.
Mystification and outrage are still Mr. Seidel's most effective tools, and he has seldom employed them to better effect than in his new book, Ooga-Booga ... Lust, in fact, is Mr. Seidel's great theme, and few poets have written better or more honestly about the way desire dehumanizes both its subject and its object ... The revelations and disclosures in Ooga-Booga get much more explicit than that, and they extend from the sexual to the political (in a sequence called 'The Bush Administration') and finally, fundamentally, the existential ... You would have go back to confessional masters like Lowell and Berryman to find poetry as daringly self-revealing, as risky and compelling.
In Seidel’s poetry, privilege and wealth do not effectively insulate the speaker from third-world genocide, terrorism, and starvation; quite the opposite—those horrors are amplified ... On the positive side of the ledger, he takes risks utterly unthinkable, even as merely mutinous provocation, in an academic workshop. The effect is gratifying but somehow out of proportion ... At other times, he suffers clear defeats, and his internal rhymes begin to sound clotted and finally cloying.
What makes his writing so hard to fathom is its childlike simplicity. Or, rather, its simplicity is so arch, so tongue-in-cheek, so craftily artless, that one always waits to be slapped or jabbed by the inevitable line that arrives with all the specific, precise density -- drowning in acid -- of Robert Lowell or T. S. Eliot when they suddenly drop the right phrase into its inevitable place ... What I like about Seidel is the way he plays our banalities back at us, but first subjects them to a sea-change that causes the acrid brine of his own peculiar vision to cling to them.
Seidel's 14th book finds his caustic vigor undiminished, his high-volume confidence as entertaining—or disturbing—as ever: gleeful antiwar protests and self-mocking, obvious rhymes zip easily among a bombed Baghdad, a deluxe version of Paris and a hyperbolically glitzy jetset New York ... Seidel perhaps satirizes a Western capitalism in which no one can be rich enough, fast enough or man enough to satisfy his own ideals. Yet for every reader who finds brilliant, social critique, there may be another who wonders if it's all a joke.
