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Widening Income Inequality: Poems
“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . [Seidel’s] poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today
Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker).
Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude.
Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”
Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker).
Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude.
Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”
- GenresPoetry21st Century
118 pages, Hardcover
First published February 16, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
September 23, 2024
Acerbic yet fun poems for the most part. Syria, ageing, Obama’s second term, city renewal and change over 70 years, climate change, a lot of the war in Iraq and American intervention in general, Paris and race relationships form the main themes of the bundle
I long for Paris and everywhere else that no longer matters - Pussy Days
The initial poems in Widening Income Inequality: Poems are so sharp and well executed that I was disappointed not to find more like it later on, but Frederick Seidel writes in rhyme in an assured manner. Many of the 2017 themes feel outdated already in ways, but gems like the two poems below, about getting older and the tyrannical in all of us, below make the whole bundle worthwhile in my view:
Remembering Elaine's
We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.
How wonderful to be so magnified.
Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied.
You were who you weren't till now.
We'd been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sow
And now we'd write a book, without having to know how.
If you didn't get a hangover, that was one kind of bad
And was a sign of something, but if you had
Tranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work,
Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don't be a jerk,
Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don't smirk.
We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes,
The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless—and so did Don,
Elaine's original red-haired cokehead maître d’
Who had a beautiful wife, dangerously.
But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe.
Many distinguished dead were there
At one of the front tables, fragrant talk everywhere.
Plimpton, Mailer, Styron, Bobby Short—fellows, have another drink.
You had to keep drinking or you'd sink.
Smoking fifty cigarettes a day made your squid-ink fingers stink.
Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene
Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean
That way, because others who drank as much or more didn't
Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn't
Do cocaine, and didn't get fucked up, and just didn't!
The dead are gone—
Their thousand and one nights vanished into dawn.
Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around
Till dawn turned into day? Last round!
Construction of the new Second Avenue subway enters the ground.
Aldrich once protested to Elaine that his bill for the night was too high.
She showed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he started to cry.
(Or was it eighteen?)
We were the scene.
Now the floor has been swept clean.
Everyone's gone.
Elaine and Elaine's have vanished into the dawn.
Elaine the woman, who weighed hundreds of pounds, is floating around—
Her ghost calls out: Last round!
Wailing, construction of the new Second Avenue subway pounds the ground.
Robespierre
Who wouldn’t like to have the power to kill
Friends and enemies at will and fill
The jails with people you don’t know or know
Only slightly from meeting them a year ago,
Maybe at an AA meeting, where they don’t even use last names.
Hi, I’m Fred. Instead of being someone who constantly blames
And complains, why not annihilate?
Why not hate? Why not exterminate? Why not violate
Their rights and their bodies? Tell
The truth. Who wouldn’t like to? There’s a wishing well in hell
Where every wish is granted.
Decapitation gets decanted.
Suppose you have the chance
To guillotine the executioner after having guillotined everyone else in France?
I long for Paris and everywhere else that no longer matters - Pussy Days
The initial poems in Widening Income Inequality: Poems are so sharp and well executed that I was disappointed not to find more like it later on, but Frederick Seidel writes in rhyme in an assured manner. Many of the 2017 themes feel outdated already in ways, but gems like the two poems below, about getting older and the tyrannical in all of us, below make the whole bundle worthwhile in my view:
Remembering Elaine's
We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.
How wonderful to be so magnified.
Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied.
You were who you weren't till now.
We'd been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sow
And now we'd write a book, without having to know how.
If you didn't get a hangover, that was one kind of bad
And was a sign of something, but if you had
Tranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work,
Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don't be a jerk,
Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don't smirk.
We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes,
The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless—and so did Don,
Elaine's original red-haired cokehead maître d’
Who had a beautiful wife, dangerously.
But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe.
Many distinguished dead were there
At one of the front tables, fragrant talk everywhere.
Plimpton, Mailer, Styron, Bobby Short—fellows, have another drink.
You had to keep drinking or you'd sink.
Smoking fifty cigarettes a day made your squid-ink fingers stink.
Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene
Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean
That way, because others who drank as much or more didn't
Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn't
Do cocaine, and didn't get fucked up, and just didn't!
The dead are gone—
Their thousand and one nights vanished into dawn.
Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around
Till dawn turned into day? Last round!
Construction of the new Second Avenue subway enters the ground.
Aldrich once protested to Elaine that his bill for the night was too high.
She showed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he started to cry.
(Or was it eighteen?)
We were the scene.
Now the floor has been swept clean.
Everyone's gone.
Elaine and Elaine's have vanished into the dawn.
Elaine the woman, who weighed hundreds of pounds, is floating around—
Her ghost calls out: Last round!
Wailing, construction of the new Second Avenue subway pounds the ground.
Robespierre
Who wouldn’t like to have the power to kill
Friends and enemies at will and fill
The jails with people you don’t know or know
Only slightly from meeting them a year ago,
Maybe at an AA meeting, where they don’t even use last names.
Hi, I’m Fred. Instead of being someone who constantly blames
And complains, why not annihilate?
Why not hate? Why not exterminate? Why not violate
Their rights and their bodies? Tell
The truth. Who wouldn’t like to? There’s a wishing well in hell
Where every wish is granted.
Decapitation gets decanted.
Suppose you have the chance
To guillotine the executioner after having guillotined everyone else in France?
December 1, 2019
Of the three collections Seidel has published this decade, ‘Widening Income Inequality’ is the most focused and consistent. The typical Seidel themes are present and correct - sex, snobbery, Ducatis, politically incorrect provocations, and an incessant whittling away at social and artistic hypocrisy - but underpinned by musings on ageing, infirmity and mortality.
September 12, 2016
Seidel is the Hannibal Lecter of (post)modern lyric poetry.
March 1, 2016
"Talking, talking, talking, at my desk in silence
Putting my head in the open mouth of my MacBook Air.
Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare.
The poem eats anything, doesn't care.
I sing of Obama's graying second-term hair."
Putting my head in the open mouth of my MacBook Air.
Being alive is served to the keyboard raw or rare.
The poem eats anything, doesn't care.
I sing of Obama's graying second-term hair."
August 26, 2021
Despite reading at least a hundred poetry collections a year, I don't often review them. I just felt it was important to acknowledge that it's been a long time since I've read something so hateful and artless as this book of wet, fetid garbage. Misogyny? Check. Racism? Check. Oddly specific bigotry? Check. Written by an archaic White guy who chooses to write from a creepy, violent aesthetic to "challenge" readers? Check.
This reads like the kind of garbage that people in the 90s wrote to be Edgy. But by the 90s, this guy had already been spewing garbage for thirty years. Much of it, rightfully, unpublished.
If you enjoy listening to a bigot on a bus tell you about why he hates whichever generalized community he (and it's almost always a he) hates, this collection is fo you. Otherwise, there are millions of poetry collections in the world that deserve your attention more than this.
This reads like the kind of garbage that people in the 90s wrote to be Edgy. But by the 90s, this guy had already been spewing garbage for thirty years. Much of it, rightfully, unpublished.
If you enjoy listening to a bigot on a bus tell you about why he hates whichever generalized community he (and it's almost always a he) hates, this collection is fo you. Otherwise, there are millions of poetry collections in the world that deserve your attention more than this.
March 22, 2016
Frederick Seidel strikes me as the only writer I know in my language whose work is of absolutely crucial life or death importance.
March 24, 2022
Trudging through poem after poem that is defiantly elitist, sexist, racist ends up being the only thing Seidel would probably take any offense of being called: boring.
August 28, 2019
I’ll admit I’m not an avid reader of poetry, but it is something I’ve taken an interest in recently. I was told that Seidel was a good place to start for people who want something outside of what would be taught in an intro class, and I suppose that’s correct. I did a lot of highlighting, and there were a ton of lines and stanzas that I found pretty genius or profound, but over all I just couldn’t connect to a lot of the poems as whole pieces of art. I’m not an intellectual or a New Yorker or a Francophile and maybe that’s the problem. However, I would like to checkout some more of Seidel’s work later on down the road.
January 9, 2021
Seidel is a weirdo and that won’t change. But it’s compelling to see him gesture at awareness that the world is moving past him and people like him in lots of ways. His poetics of conspicuous consumption read differently now and I’m interested to see him vaguely absorbing that? (Not much, to be clear, we mostly just see an increased sense of the mortal and the bodily).
I always get from his poetry the sense that I’d probably be tickled to have a conversation with the man, abhor his politics if it ever came to that, and wouldn’t want to be in his head for love or money. Widening Income Inequality is more of that, in all the best and worst ways.
I always get from his poetry the sense that I’d probably be tickled to have a conversation with the man, abhor his politics if it ever came to that, and wouldn’t want to be in his head for love or money. Widening Income Inequality is more of that, in all the best and worst ways.
October 4, 2025
an astoundingly coherent, shockingly vulgar and surprisingly tender collection on aging, on war, on Obama and more. full of contradictions, it’s a love letter to a hated new york, a eulogy to flawed friends, a violent anti-war statement.
this being my first encounter with seidel, i didn’t know what to expect. i was marveled by the dedication to remain poetic but kept at bay by his far-from-PC self-expression. i’m left confounded and stunned, but having grown.
this being my first encounter with seidel, i didn’t know what to expect. i was marveled by the dedication to remain poetic but kept at bay by his far-from-PC self-expression. i’m left confounded and stunned, but having grown.
Read
April 13, 2021 “We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.”
Opening stanza. Ordered his 500 pg poetry collection soon after.
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.”
Opening stanza. Ordered his 500 pg poetry collection soon after.
June 12, 2017
Everyone has heard about the man from Nantucket. This is more poetic version of that with some anti republican and NYC references thrown in.
August 6, 2023
4.5/5
February 22, 2017
Something about his poems really gel with me. Like he is having fun, but sometimes there is something darker, sadder.
April 2, 2020
sometimes i feel like i'm being beaten over the head with his opinions, sometimes the poems are too dense to even read because you have to go in with a whole lot of background knowledge. this is a Personal Problem because the one poem that drew mainly from the Aeneid was very awesome and I loved it a lot. On the other hand, sometimes the poems are just too long and probably could have been much shorter.
EDIT 4/1/20:
I still am not a fan of this collection, but I was certainly able to pick out a couple of poems I liked a little bit more (hence, changing the rating from 2 to 3 stars). However: the collection requires too much context for it be useful or even readable to pretty much anyone besides Seidel himself. It's sort of a labor-intensive process to read through a single one of these poems, and at the end of one there doesn't seem to be much of a point. They're not just dense, but far too broad and try to tackle social issues head on, in, for example, a poem about the loss of a loved one, and sometimes, you just have to sigh, and say: really, WHY?
EDIT 4/1/20:
I still am not a fan of this collection, but I was certainly able to pick out a couple of poems I liked a little bit more (hence, changing the rating from 2 to 3 stars). However: the collection requires too much context for it be useful or even readable to pretty much anyone besides Seidel himself. It's sort of a labor-intensive process to read through a single one of these poems, and at the end of one there doesn't seem to be much of a point. They're not just dense, but far too broad and try to tackle social issues head on, in, for example, a poem about the loss of a loved one, and sometimes, you just have to sigh, and say: really, WHY?
February 2, 2017
Poetry has got a bad rep. Can't relate to modern poetry? This might be a good place to start. Seidel rhythms, Seidel talks about current events, Seidel is funny. He is also dark. He goes where almost no one else dares. This is great stuff!
February 21, 2016
Imagine a high-brow, 80-year-old Bukowski.
March 6, 2016
With occasional flashes of brillance, this poet cheapens his work with painfully corny puns and straining rhymes.
April 1, 2016
"and then you have to go out and vote Because we live in a democracy and you can’t simply float Your life away playing with rubber duckies. Sure, they’re cute bright yellow"
-poet at seventy eight
-poet at seventy eight
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews