‘A poetic voice unlike anyone else’s’

Frederick Seidel, one of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets, orders an espresso and Pellegrino at the Carlyle Hotel.

It is late morning, dark and cozy in the Carlyle’s Gallery lounge. The Twin Towers have fallen. George W. Bush is president. Robert Kennedy is dead. Ezra Pound is a modernist. Seidel rides a motorcycle.

The poet is 71. He loves Fred Astaire.

“I want it all to matter,” he says, “whether it gets down on the page or not.”

For more than 50 years, Seidel has been writing poems -- topical poems and timeless poems. Poems about sex, the cosmos, motorcycles and growing old. Difficult, troubling poems that may or may not have rhyme or meter, or may or may not have an obvious meaning, but still leave brave readers feeling the presence of a strange and brilliant mind.

“What I like best about his work is the utterly unique way it manages to be both inclusive, bringing a vast range of themes and subjects and people into the poems, while managing to make them at the same time formally and musically audacious,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams. “He has a poetic voice unlike anyone else’s.”

Wearing a jacket and slacks, no tie, Seidel is a casual, cultured man with a high forehead and a spark of scandal in his eyes. He almost never talks to the media, but agreed to an interview in support of “Ooga-Booga,” his most recent collection. The Carlyle, across town from his Upper West Side apartment, is a favorite locale, honored in his poem, “Frederick Seidel,” in which he declares: “I am a result of the concierge of the Carlyle.”

“I like being alone, and I like hotels,” he says, noting that hotels often are in his poems. “I like the sense of being safely enclosed, anonymous, but not -- able to feel cosseted and comforted and protected by what’s around, but left alone by it. That’s what I think is terrific about hotels. You’re alone, but you’re not.”

He writes day and night, he says, and appears not to worry about who reads him. A recent nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, he didn’t attend the ceremony and didn’t bother writing a statement in case he won (he didn’t).

The news is often bad in his work, whether the crash of the World Trade Center or the failings of his body (“The melanoma on my skin/Resumes what’s wrong with me within”). The same man who spells suicidal “sui-Seidel” remains wondrous, fascinated, grateful to be alive, in love with “the sky above.”

“I’m quite taken up with what’s going on now, when it’s going on. I like the times I’m living in. In fact, it’s been a privilege, a fascination, to be living through these decades,” he says.

A native of St. Louis, Seidel has been a dedicated writer since age 13, when poetry cast its spell. The author was seated in a school library, reading Time magazine instead of doing his homework, when he spotted an article about Ezra Pound and read an excerpt from one of his cantos, “What thou lovest well remains/the rest is dross.”

“It was just a wand, a Disney wand with sparkles, touching me, sparkles almost piercing -- the almost unbearable beauty of those lines, which are as beautiful now, some years later, as they were then,” he says.

A young modernist was born, who would well carry on the tradition of classical learning and contemporary dread. Seidel not only read Pound and T.S. Eliot, but got to know them. He’s met a lot of people: from fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg to John F. Kennedy, who visited the Harvard University campus while Seidel was a student and Kennedy a senator.

One reason he resists interviews is not just protection of his private life, but the conservation of his creative life, as if every word released were so much energy burned. Poetry, he explains, is a state of mind apart from the poet, yet also above the poet, below the poet, and deeply within.

“You’re doing so many things on so many tracks at the same time -- dozens and dozens of things, mentally -- that were you successfully to separate out the different strands, you would make the task impossible,” says Seidel, now the author of 11 books, including “Sunrise,” winner of National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1981, and “Going Fast,” a Pulitzer finalist in 1999.

He is in his own world, but very much of the world. He is mad about movies and music and a connoisseur of politics, as pastime and metaphysics. He is one poet for whom presidents matter, not only as lawmakers, but as cultural forces, whose personal essence becomes public matter.

“I’m very much aware of politics, because I very much enjoy politics,” he says. “There have been a few blank periods when I was deprived of my pleasure.... But, for the most part, it’s very much a part of what I see as coloring the world, permeating the world.”