“Antecedents” was found by Jayne Holsinger among Hugh’s papers. From the first line, it can be surmised that it was originally written in 2004, and then revisited in 2016. It was never published, and was probably written as a self-examination, an attempt by Hugh to explain his motives for writing poetry to himself. There is no indication that he planned to add to the text. I have lightly edited it for clarity and continuity.
Antecedents 8/25/2016 8:27 PM POEMS 2004 11/20/04
The question of origins is always interesting.
When did I start writing and why? I think it was around the age of thirteen—as opposed to some five-year-old prodigies that I know. Up until then I was sort of a regular kid. A kid growing up in the streets of Brooklyn. Not artistic at all. For instance, around the age of eight my mother tried, unsuccessfully, to have me take piano lessons. She bought a beautiful little upright that fit snugly into our small Brooklyn apartment on East 8th and Church. When the piano men delivered it, I had the bad luck to be down in the street playing with friends in front of our apartment building. “Who’s the fag that’s getting a piano?” one of them yelled. I was mortified and said nothing. I went for lessons every Saturday morning with an old German man. It was torture and I hated to practice. After six months my mother stopped the lessons and sold the piano.
In Junior high school I remember reading Arthur Guiterman in our English class anthology. As I remember it, it began:
The sultan was vexed by a dream that had troubled his slumber
For feasting on lobsters and cream, with half-ripened cucumbers
And lying with head to the South gives the nightmare full power
He dreamed that the teeth of his mouth tumbled out in a shower.
And goes on to recount the efforts of said Sultan to decipher this dream. As I recall the moral that the poem drew was that how you say something is more important than what’s said. A fairly modern idea for a reactionary poet. But in any case it was no doubt the sound that seduced me. I memorized the whole poem. And another one, as well, by Guiterman in the same anthology. And why did I do this? I had never read poetry, had never memorized a poem. A great mystery.
Around the age of fourteen or so I started to discover “the life the mind.” I was madly in love with a cheerleader named Gail whom I had met at summer camp. We had friendship rings and exchanged letters. She lived on Long Island, in Freeport, while I lived in Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn, where we had moved when I was thirteen. It was right across from Staten Island and I even watched them string the Narrows Bridge. lt was, however, a painful relationship. Though we were close, to her, of course, I was just a friend. She was a “sophisticated” high school girl and cheerleader who dated older boys. I somehow wanted her to be my girlfriend instead of my platonic friend, and when I first realized the true nature of our relationship, I was devastated. Also, my father gave me a very hard time about being in love with Gail, getting on a train to see her in faraway Freeport at the tender age of fourteen. (I had turned fourteen the summer I met her at Camp Lebanon.) He had a major heart attack at this time—though he lived till the age of ninety and died in 1990—but implied that it was my involvement with Gail that had made him sick. Being in love with a cheerleader was no task for a young boy. I should be home studying, not cavorting in a sexual manner, though of course there was no sex involved. It was the first time in my life that I was consciously depressed. I remember coming home on the train from Freeport and weeping. I looked out of the window and watched some sailor and his girl embracing. Ah, young love.
MIT: Sept 1957
l6-17: 12th grade (Senior year): Sept 1956-June 57
15-16: 11th grade (Junior year): Sept 1955-June 56
to Ft. Hamilton: 14 ½ to 15: soph year: Feb 1955
go to Erasmus: 14 to l4 ½ to (move to Bay Ridge) : Sept 1954
turn 14 graduate 9th: June 1954
turn l3 graduate 7th 8th: June 1953
turn l2 graduate 6th grade : 1952
At the age of fourteen, I entered my sophomore year at Erasmus Hall High School. I was still living on the outskirts of Flatbush in Brooklyn near Church and East 8th. One of my high school course was typical Euclidean geometry and I was hooked. I loved the beauty of the diagrams, the language of the axioms and theorems. It was, how shall I say it, like poetry. I began to discover the life of the mind. And the strange quirkiness of my mind arose. On the one hand there was the abstract perfection of mathematics, where one could lose oneself against the burgeoning sexual chaos of early teen years. And on the other hand, there were the usual turmoil of burgeoning sexuality that all adolescents experience, compounded in my case by an amnesia about the disturbing past that swirled around my mother's postpartum psychosis and subsequent shock therapies, during the years that I was growing up.
Thus for some reason out of this cauldron I must have started to write poetry. But why this outlet and not some other? I had no desire to be a poet. And at this time and for a long time after until my late twenties, I was sure that I wanted to be a mathematician, or a cosmologist in the tradition of Einstein. The great mystery. No doubt we are all born with certain strengths and weaknesses. In my case I seemed to experience words very viscerally. The sound of words. It was what was at hand. I had no one to help me. Not my parents, not my so-called friends, the boys I had grown up with and had played with in the streets of Brooklyn. Nor the friends I made later when I moved to Bay Ride at the age of fourteen and a half. None of these people were the least bit interested in poetry. How strange the world is.
I suppose that for me poetry, has always been a vehicle to somehow return to the Mother. As poetry comes from the Mother, as we know. If somehow I could master the poem, if somehow I could say a thing perfectly, then I would regain the love of my Mother, a love of course that I could never regain. And strangely too, the critical voice that always hovers above the page even to this day is the voice of the critical mother, whose absence confirms for me that I am never good enough, never smart enough, never enough of whatever is enough to regain her. Of course I did not see such esoteric things then. But it was then I started to draw away from the streets, as it were. I began to draw away and inhabit the secret place of mathematics and poetry.
In high school I saw myself more and more as a mathematician a possible scientist. My father had been trained as a chemical engineer. An immigrant, coming here at the age of six, and the oldest in his family, he had worked his way through night school at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and had graduated around 1925. He had also wanted to be a doctor, but said that at that time a Jew had a hard time getting into medical school. He was a ham radio operator and even opened an early radio store on Liberty Street in Manhattan. He was in business with his cousin who told me that they had installed one of the first phone systems in the Waldorf Astoria. And when I was growing up in a household where my mother had suffered a severe postpartum depression, my fondest memories are “technical” interactions with my father, where he would teach me things like chess, and model airplane making, and where we would go on weekends as he puttered in the radio stores of Manhattan to indulge his hobby of making hi-fi components and so on.
And even though I was what would today be called, a techie—and because I was bright—I also took things like honor English. One day the teacher, Miss Haigney, asked us to write an essay about why we pitied adults. In my best nostalgic style I produced the required product. Miss H. of course could not believe that her techie could have written such a piece. She accused me of plagiarizing, as I recall, Bradbury and Salinger. And she would not accept my denials.
And books: there was Mark Van Doren's anthology of world poetry. I would sit in my room and read through the various translations. I am flipping through its pages now and remembering. From the long-lined Hebrew of the “The Dead of the Wilderness” (Chaim Nachman Bialik), with its l6/17-syllable lines with 6 stresses, and each line beginning with a trochee, to Tennyson's “Song from Maud,” to Pound's “The Garden.” “The Morning Glory,” from the Confucian Book Of Odes (compiled, ca. 500 BC) is the first poem in that volume, translated by Helen Waddell, and the last is “Sonnet” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (“born 1892-”), “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.” And do I remember Zukofsky, once Van Doren's student, inserting “ass” after bare?
And there were also young ladies. For some reason, I developed a fondness for “intellectual” girls. I began to show my scribbling to the Gentile Judy Plumb. A means of seduction? And a girl in my high school, a year below rne, Lee Rosenblum. I had bought a record of The Waste Land recited by an English actor. I suppose it appealed to some idea I had of culture, with a capital “c.” I took Lee out sometimes and instead of kissing her, recited The Waste Land. O the follies of youth.
But in those days I thought I would be a scientist of some sort, a mathematician, perhaps. I went to MIT for one semester, starting in 1957. But I caught the Asian Flu, and my parents wanted me to come back home. My father had gone so far as to get me into Brooklyn Poly, unknown to me. When they visited me in the infirmary, they told me that they wanted me to come home. I acquiesced, and that was what changed my life. I left MIT and came back to NY and started at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn., where I met the poet Louis Zukofsky, who changed my life. Just this year I was part of a large celebration, a three-day conference at Columbia University to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Zukofsky’s birth in 1904. And I also fantasized that had I stayed at MIT, I would never have met Zukofsky, and my life would have been very different. Would I have written a different kind of poem? What a question. But certainly Robert Lowell had returned to Boston in 1957 and was teaching at Harvard. Surely I might have taken a walk down the Charles to take one of his workshops. And then I might be a Lowellian instead of a Zukofskian.
At Brooklyn Polytechnic, I joined the literary magazine Counterweight. And we heard there was an actual poet in the school. So we approached him to be our advisor, and we started a poetry club. I've written about Zukofsky before in Louis Zukofsky: Man & Poet (National Poetry Foundation, 1979). When I look at the poems from those days, they are spare, spare. Where did I gct that style from—from Louis. Always his edits were geared toward cutting back. Why did I write like that? Was it just knowing Louis, or was it something in me akin to my desire for mathematics? Perhaps a little bit of both? Of course when one is young and does not know what it is one is trying to do, I suppose that anything goes. And later I would read Pound and the ABC of Reading. And I would delete all adjectives from my line, breathed out à la Olson.
Zukofsky introduced us to the pantheon of his friends: Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, Pound, of course, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and young poets like Creeley, and Cid Corman. I loved Williams of course, and especially his long poem Paterson. (Louis Pigno and I drove out one snowy day to view the [Paterson] falls. All the trees were caked in ice.) And the plain spokenness of Reznikoff. Here was a discourse I could take to heart, as opposed to the studied eloquence of The Waste Land, for example.
And Pound’s Cantos. I could hear in the Cantos pure energy. Pound seemed to have the uncanny ability to say anything he wanted with enormous energy. Of what was I speaking? I pull from my shelf The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I have named it: Hugh Seidman, December 1959. I was nineteen years old. I had started Poly in Feb of 1958, not yet seventeen.
1957 Sept (l7)—freshman
1958 Sept (l8)—sophomore
1959 Sept (19)—junior
1960 Sept (20)—senior
1961 Sept (21)—first year of grad school
Obviously I bought the book because Louis told us to read Pound. It would probably take me a little while to get to it. The companion volume, An Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, was only bought five years later, in October of 1964.
In 1965, after a bad love affair, among other things, had caved me in, I put myself into the psych ward at Mt. Sinai. A not unpleasant experience, which did not compare unfavorably with other instances in which I put myself into other literary colonies like Yaddo and MacDowell. I say literary in the sense that some part of my time up in Sinai during those six weeks consisted of some intense study of the Cantos. I did a careful word by word “translation” using the Annotated Index. I suppose in one way it pleased my sense of vanity and my sense of being in touch with the forefront of poetry (I always like to think of myself as having been a member of the avant garde for about fifteen minutes once in my youth), and certainly I must have thought to myself that this must be the real thing, else why would Edwards and Vasse devote over 325 pages of scholarship to plumbing its depths.
But certainly there must have been more to it than that, as I'm sure my interest must have been more than mere snobbishness. I'm sure I would have lost interest had it been no more than that. There was energy here, energy to burn. And Pound's great ear, or so it seemed to reverberate to me. One of the greatest ears that ever had been? He seemed to be able to say anything with great energy.
—NF
Antecedents 8/25/2016 8:27 PM POEMS 2004 11/20/04
The question of origins is always interesting.
When did I start writing and why? I think it was around the age of thirteen—as opposed to some five-year-old prodigies that I know. Up until then I was sort of a regular kid. A kid growing up in the streets of Brooklyn. Not artistic at all. For instance, around the age of eight my mother tried, unsuccessfully, to have me take piano lessons. She bought a beautiful little upright that fit snugly into our small Brooklyn apartment on East 8th and Church. When the piano men delivered it, I had the bad luck to be down in the street playing with friends in front of our apartment building. “Who’s the fag that’s getting a piano?” one of them yelled. I was mortified and said nothing. I went for lessons every Saturday morning with an old German man. It was torture and I hated to practice. After six months my mother stopped the lessons and sold the piano.
In Junior high school I remember reading Arthur Guiterman in our English class anthology. As I remember it, it began:
The sultan was vexed by a dream that had troubled his slumber
For feasting on lobsters and cream, with half-ripened cucumbers
And lying with head to the South gives the nightmare full power
He dreamed that the teeth of his mouth tumbled out in a shower.
And goes on to recount the efforts of said Sultan to decipher this dream. As I recall the moral that the poem drew was that how you say something is more important than what’s said. A fairly modern idea for a reactionary poet. But in any case it was no doubt the sound that seduced me. I memorized the whole poem. And another one, as well, by Guiterman in the same anthology. And why did I do this? I had never read poetry, had never memorized a poem. A great mystery.
Around the age of fourteen or so I started to discover “the life the mind.” I was madly in love with a cheerleader named Gail whom I had met at summer camp. We had friendship rings and exchanged letters. She lived on Long Island, in Freeport, while I lived in Bay Ridge, in Brooklyn, where we had moved when I was thirteen. It was right across from Staten Island and I even watched them string the Narrows Bridge. lt was, however, a painful relationship. Though we were close, to her, of course, I was just a friend. She was a “sophisticated” high school girl and cheerleader who dated older boys. I somehow wanted her to be my girlfriend instead of my platonic friend, and when I first realized the true nature of our relationship, I was devastated. Also, my father gave me a very hard time about being in love with Gail, getting on a train to see her in faraway Freeport at the tender age of fourteen. (I had turned fourteen the summer I met her at Camp Lebanon.) He had a major heart attack at this time—though he lived till the age of ninety and died in 1990—but implied that it was my involvement with Gail that had made him sick. Being in love with a cheerleader was no task for a young boy. I should be home studying, not cavorting in a sexual manner, though of course there was no sex involved. It was the first time in my life that I was consciously depressed. I remember coming home on the train from Freeport and weeping. I looked out of the window and watched some sailor and his girl embracing. Ah, young love.
MIT: Sept 1957
l6-17: 12th grade (Senior year): Sept 1956-June 57
15-16: 11th grade (Junior year): Sept 1955-June 56
to Ft. Hamilton: 14 ½ to 15: soph year: Feb 1955
go to Erasmus: 14 to l4 ½ to (move to Bay Ridge) : Sept 1954
turn 14 graduate 9th: June 1954
turn l3 graduate 7th 8th: June 1953
turn l2 graduate 6th grade : 1952
At the age of fourteen, I entered my sophomore year at Erasmus Hall High School. I was still living on the outskirts of Flatbush in Brooklyn near Church and East 8th. One of my high school course was typical Euclidean geometry and I was hooked. I loved the beauty of the diagrams, the language of the axioms and theorems. It was, how shall I say it, like poetry. I began to discover the life of the mind. And the strange quirkiness of my mind arose. On the one hand there was the abstract perfection of mathematics, where one could lose oneself against the burgeoning sexual chaos of early teen years. And on the other hand, there were the usual turmoil of burgeoning sexuality that all adolescents experience, compounded in my case by an amnesia about the disturbing past that swirled around my mother's postpartum psychosis and subsequent shock therapies, during the years that I was growing up.
Thus for some reason out of this cauldron I must have started to write poetry. But why this outlet and not some other? I had no desire to be a poet. And at this time and for a long time after until my late twenties, I was sure that I wanted to be a mathematician, or a cosmologist in the tradition of Einstein. The great mystery. No doubt we are all born with certain strengths and weaknesses. In my case I seemed to experience words very viscerally. The sound of words. It was what was at hand. I had no one to help me. Not my parents, not my so-called friends, the boys I had grown up with and had played with in the streets of Brooklyn. Nor the friends I made later when I moved to Bay Ride at the age of fourteen and a half. None of these people were the least bit interested in poetry. How strange the world is.
I suppose that for me poetry, has always been a vehicle to somehow return to the Mother. As poetry comes from the Mother, as we know. If somehow I could master the poem, if somehow I could say a thing perfectly, then I would regain the love of my Mother, a love of course that I could never regain. And strangely too, the critical voice that always hovers above the page even to this day is the voice of the critical mother, whose absence confirms for me that I am never good enough, never smart enough, never enough of whatever is enough to regain her. Of course I did not see such esoteric things then. But it was then I started to draw away from the streets, as it were. I began to draw away and inhabit the secret place of mathematics and poetry.
In high school I saw myself more and more as a mathematician a possible scientist. My father had been trained as a chemical engineer. An immigrant, coming here at the age of six, and the oldest in his family, he had worked his way through night school at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and had graduated around 1925. He had also wanted to be a doctor, but said that at that time a Jew had a hard time getting into medical school. He was a ham radio operator and even opened an early radio store on Liberty Street in Manhattan. He was in business with his cousin who told me that they had installed one of the first phone systems in the Waldorf Astoria. And when I was growing up in a household where my mother had suffered a severe postpartum depression, my fondest memories are “technical” interactions with my father, where he would teach me things like chess, and model airplane making, and where we would go on weekends as he puttered in the radio stores of Manhattan to indulge his hobby of making hi-fi components and so on.
And even though I was what would today be called, a techie—and because I was bright—I also took things like honor English. One day the teacher, Miss Haigney, asked us to write an essay about why we pitied adults. In my best nostalgic style I produced the required product. Miss H. of course could not believe that her techie could have written such a piece. She accused me of plagiarizing, as I recall, Bradbury and Salinger. And she would not accept my denials.
And books: there was Mark Van Doren's anthology of world poetry. I would sit in my room and read through the various translations. I am flipping through its pages now and remembering. From the long-lined Hebrew of the “The Dead of the Wilderness” (Chaim Nachman Bialik), with its l6/17-syllable lines with 6 stresses, and each line beginning with a trochee, to Tennyson's “Song from Maud,” to Pound's “The Garden.” “The Morning Glory,” from the Confucian Book Of Odes (compiled, ca. 500 BC) is the first poem in that volume, translated by Helen Waddell, and the last is “Sonnet” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (“born 1892-”), “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.” And do I remember Zukofsky, once Van Doren's student, inserting “ass” after bare?
And there were also young ladies. For some reason, I developed a fondness for “intellectual” girls. I began to show my scribbling to the Gentile Judy Plumb. A means of seduction? And a girl in my high school, a year below rne, Lee Rosenblum. I had bought a record of The Waste Land recited by an English actor. I suppose it appealed to some idea I had of culture, with a capital “c.” I took Lee out sometimes and instead of kissing her, recited The Waste Land. O the follies of youth.
But in those days I thought I would be a scientist of some sort, a mathematician, perhaps. I went to MIT for one semester, starting in 1957. But I caught the Asian Flu, and my parents wanted me to come back home. My father had gone so far as to get me into Brooklyn Poly, unknown to me. When they visited me in the infirmary, they told me that they wanted me to come home. I acquiesced, and that was what changed my life. I left MIT and came back to NY and started at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn., where I met the poet Louis Zukofsky, who changed my life. Just this year I was part of a large celebration, a three-day conference at Columbia University to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Zukofsky’s birth in 1904. And I also fantasized that had I stayed at MIT, I would never have met Zukofsky, and my life would have been very different. Would I have written a different kind of poem? What a question. But certainly Robert Lowell had returned to Boston in 1957 and was teaching at Harvard. Surely I might have taken a walk down the Charles to take one of his workshops. And then I might be a Lowellian instead of a Zukofskian.
At Brooklyn Polytechnic, I joined the literary magazine Counterweight. And we heard there was an actual poet in the school. So we approached him to be our advisor, and we started a poetry club. I've written about Zukofsky before in Louis Zukofsky: Man & Poet (National Poetry Foundation, 1979). When I look at the poems from those days, they are spare, spare. Where did I gct that style from—from Louis. Always his edits were geared toward cutting back. Why did I write like that? Was it just knowing Louis, or was it something in me akin to my desire for mathematics? Perhaps a little bit of both? Of course when one is young and does not know what it is one is trying to do, I suppose that anything goes. And later I would read Pound and the ABC of Reading. And I would delete all adjectives from my line, breathed out à la Olson.
Zukofsky introduced us to the pantheon of his friends: Lorine Niedecker, William Carlos Williams, Pound, of course, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and young poets like Creeley, and Cid Corman. I loved Williams of course, and especially his long poem Paterson. (Louis Pigno and I drove out one snowy day to view the [Paterson] falls. All the trees were caked in ice.) And the plain spokenness of Reznikoff. Here was a discourse I could take to heart, as opposed to the studied eloquence of The Waste Land, for example.
And Pound’s Cantos. I could hear in the Cantos pure energy. Pound seemed to have the uncanny ability to say anything he wanted with enormous energy. Of what was I speaking? I pull from my shelf The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I have named it: Hugh Seidman, December 1959. I was nineteen years old. I had started Poly in Feb of 1958, not yet seventeen.
1957 Sept (l7)—freshman
1958 Sept (l8)—sophomore
1959 Sept (19)—junior
1960 Sept (20)—senior
1961 Sept (21)—first year of grad school
Obviously I bought the book because Louis told us to read Pound. It would probably take me a little while to get to it. The companion volume, An Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, was only bought five years later, in October of 1964.
In 1965, after a bad love affair, among other things, had caved me in, I put myself into the psych ward at Mt. Sinai. A not unpleasant experience, which did not compare unfavorably with other instances in which I put myself into other literary colonies like Yaddo and MacDowell. I say literary in the sense that some part of my time up in Sinai during those six weeks consisted of some intense study of the Cantos. I did a careful word by word “translation” using the Annotated Index. I suppose in one way it pleased my sense of vanity and my sense of being in touch with the forefront of poetry (I always like to think of myself as having been a member of the avant garde for about fifteen minutes once in my youth), and certainly I must have thought to myself that this must be the real thing, else why would Edwards and Vasse devote over 325 pages of scholarship to plumbing its depths.
But certainly there must have been more to it than that, as I'm sure my interest must have been more than mere snobbishness. I'm sure I would have lost interest had it been no more than that. There was energy here, energy to burn. And Pound's great ear, or so it seemed to reverberate to me. One of the greatest ears that ever had been? He seemed to be able to say anything with great energy.