Area Code 212: Poems - Hardcover

Seidel, Frederick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374105812 ISBN 13: 9780374105815

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

Area Code 212 is the journey's end in ice and flames of Seidel's brilliant Cosmos Poems trilogy. Reversing the order and outlook of Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidel's three-book series begins in the heavens (with The Cosmos Poems) and then descends steeply--through the Purgatory of Life on Earth, the second volume--to at last arrive at home, in Manhattan, with its famous area code.

About this title

About the Author

Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems include Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; Poems, 1959-1979; My Tokyo; Going Fast; The Cosmos Poems, and Life on Earth.

Reviews

Seidel has been writing about the dark side of Euro-American richesse-murder, mayhem and California-since the Eisenhower Era. The last two years have seen the release of The Cosmos Poems and Life on Earth, parts of a trilogy slowly zooming in on Manhattan (the area code in question) from space. His project here might be best thought of as attempted shock therapy for the island's richest 1%; most of these poems take place in that milieu and are literally addressed to that audience: the poems collected here were commissioned by and first appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Leisure and Arts page. From the opening "I Do" ("I do pablum. I do doo-doo. I do heroic deeds.") we move to "Dido with Dildo" ("She stood on her toes to kiss me./ Like in the nineteen fifties./ I glued my mucho macho lips to destiny.") and through to "The War of the Worlds," where visitors are "taking photographs/ Of ground zero-of Allah akbar in formaldehyde in a jar./ God is great. Love is hate." These and the other 30 poems here are coldblooded recitations of postures toward, feelings about and descriptions of a world in love with itself and with money and violence-as reflected in the speaker, who reveals details about "Fred Seidel" in previous books, but here confines himself to "go[ing] public with this/ Beautiful big breasts and a penis/ Military-industrial complex." It's a complicated ruse-humanism masquerading as shallowness and nihilism-and one that the poems cannot quite maintain. The intended targets will not recognize themselves in these intentionally gross caricatures, little more than a form of elegantly voyeuristic violence.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Seidel completes his powerful trilogy, The Cosmos Poems, a sequence in which the poet reverses Dante's journey and descends from the heavens to life on a scarred earth. Here he arrives at ground zero, Manhattan, a place of great wealth, chutzpah, and despair. New York is the poet's home, and he both particularizes it as it is in the present and casts it as an archetypal city, a mecca, an oasis, dropping back into time to anchor his deep anger and sorrow over the suffering and mania that both fueled and resulted from the terrorist attacks of September 11. But before Seidel makes that tragedy explicit, he explores the intrinsic absurdity of human life in spare and irreverent poems spiked with puns and assembled along the fractured lines of a Picasso. Lust and violence are tersely accounted for, suicide is considered, blood and fire flow and ignite. But the piercing light of language finely honed and fearlessly delivered is a bracing antidote, a reason to go on, both for the poet and for his readers. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Area Code 212 is the third volume in Seidel's inverted Dantean trilogy, beginning with Cosmos Poems and Life on Earth. Many of the poems here initially appeared in the Wall Street Journal as a poetic series on months of the year, and this temporal framework provides the basic structure of the work. Frustrated love provides the other unifying theme, as the poet offers graphic poems on "Venus" and "Dido with Dildo" to illustrate his "love life here in hell." The poems are not so much verbal statements as verbal performances of emotional states rage, despair, wonder, and a certain playfulness. Seidel delights in colloquial speech and arresting metaphors: "The poem he was writing put/ Its arms around his neck." He likes to scramble history and geography, at one point juxtaposing Groucho Marx and the Taj Mahal. In the manner of all good poets, Seidel reconfigures reality, always proposing something entirely new: "The road lay down/ In front of the car." Recommended for all public and academic libraries. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374105812
• ISBN 13: 9780374105815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80