Hugh In Egypt: on Hugh Seidman’s Throne/Falcon/Eye

by Joseph Donahue

Because in the world
all men have seen
she who rules the world

                        Seidman, The Immortal

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In an interview published in Jacket in 2006, Hugh Seidman let slip a discovery: Ancient Egypt lies hidden within a Zukofsky haiku. Seidman found that a syllable passing from Japanese into German brought obsolete desert sky gods to Brooklyn:
The second syllable in the Japanese word, as is rendered in English, “haiku,” revealed itself, to Seidman, to be a German nominative: “Kuh.” “Kuh” is German for cow. This cow comes not from the Rhineland but from the sun. For Seidman a syllable, in his mentor Zukofsky’s rendering, is no longer a syllable but an intersection of worlds. Seidman writes:

“Note: “Kuh” = cow (in German). A play on “haiku” — Japanese 17-syllable poem (5,7,5 in English). As LZ told us, he’s watching the sun’s reflection in building windows at dusk, which “looks” to him, as it were, like many “gold’n bees.” And, no doubt, he associates the cow (=kuh) to the sun, as in Egyptian mythology . . .    (http://jacketmagazine.com/31/seidman-ivb-nason.html)

This conjuring of Egypt by way of Germany by way of Japan is not quite fanciful. Readers of All recall Zukofsky’s own fondness for the simultaneity of Egypt and New York which transcends the grim likeness: whether in Egypt or New York, dead Jews are buried in diaspora, whether in Egypt or New York, living Jews grieve on unhallowed ground: “Not their dust where we don’t pray” (“Air”). A further simultaneity of Jews in New York being like Jews in Egypt sounds again in a description of lotus or artichoke in “Chloride of Lime and Charcoal,” leading Zukofsky to call the outer rind of the latter “sepals of Egypt.” This whimsical taxonomy hints at some possibly oppressed, possibly desirable, possibly esoteric, core within this mingling of blossoming, the exotic lotus and the self-enfolded heart of the “Egyptian” artichoke. At the time of the interview Seidman himself has, as is said these days, “done his own research” concerning apparitions of Egypt rising up in New York. In his poem “Out of Egypt” and following proper Objectivist protocols, Seidman would himself cast New York in Zukofskean terms as the place of Jewish exile and imprisonment. Those haiku skyscrapers could be obelisks, after all, like the one in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the base of which someday a German cow will be found grazing. The “sun’s reflection in building windows at dusk” seems a direct summoning of the monotheistic solar cult associated with Egyptian monumentality. We can be forgiven, then, for imagining Seidman imagining New York and ancient Egypt, each as the underworld of the other, the solar boat of Re sailing through each at night.

In All, Zukofsky sounds the familiar immigrant trope of America as the land of Jewish exile. In “A-14,” however, Zukofsky turns to the literary culture of Egypt itself, as if to explore the famed Egyptian mortuary religion on its own terms. He cites his purchase of that most notable of old Pharoah’s holy books, the assemblage of texts taken primarily from the English collection and widely available in English as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. He puns on the name of the compositor, Budge, sounding out a relation to this other serial collage poet of sorts, that could be either as adversary or as advocate, (“I won’t budge on Budge”). Seidman, in commemorating his teacher, mentor, and initiator into the art of poetic song, certainly knows what he does not here mention in regard to “Hi, Kuh,” Zukofsky’s own more sustained evocation in A of  the most ancient and foundational of Western mythological traditions, one that promises eternal life: “Thou shalt exist for millions of millions of years, a period of millions of years” (67-68) So any dead king might read on the wall of his tomb, and take heart. The initiate into poetry, the former Brooklyn Poly student Seidman, points to the “Kuh” that is the “Khu,” the German cow that is the Egyptian syllable that reveals the underworld imagination of the Egyptian religious texts. He leaves out a further association of the last syllable of the Anglicized version of the Japanese poetic form haiku, “ku,” with “Kuh,” the German cow. Seidman, as we will see in a moment, proceeds immediately to the realm of the feminine divine, while making no mention of what Zukofsky has either miscopied or altered. The steadfast explicators at the Zukofsky Z-cite become our spiritual guides:

“Kuh…: this term in Budge is spelled Khu, which either LZ mis-copied or deliberately altered. It is possible there is an intentional echo of LZ’s “Hi, Kuh” poem from I’s (pronounced eyes) (1963) (CSP 214). Khu are the spirits or souls of the dead, as Budge explains: “Another important and apparently eternal part of man was the Khu, [hieroglyph], which, judging from the meaning of the word, may be defined as a ‘shining’ or translucent Spirit-soul. For want of a better word Khu has often been translated ‘shining one,’ ‘glorious,’ ‘intelligence,’ and the like, but its true meaning must be Spirit-soul.” (https://z-site.net/notes-to-a/a-14/, sec. 358)

Is Zukofsky’s substitution of “Kuh” for “Khu” a voiceless consonant and vowel’s worth of modernist religious syncretism, the poet noting a subject rhyme between Japanese Buddhist literary culture of the Middle Ages and Egyptian texts from 1250 BCE? Placing the “Kuh” of haiku back into an Egyptian mortuary text, does Zukofsky imply the haiku is also a poetic portal between the living and the dead? Does a true haiku mark the intersection of otherwise concealed worlds? Seidman is not, here, apparently concerned with the translucent Spirit-soul lurking in the ancient Egyptian syllable “Khu.” But may it be that Throne/ Falcon/ Eye is in the end the exegesis of such an unstable syllable. The opening poem evokes the “passage of the soul,” and such may well be his theme. Seidman in his elucidation of “Hi, Kuh” draws a different path from ancient Egypt to Japan, and on to Manhattan: again, that German cow. Or, more grandly, the sun in the sky, the sun in the sky which when it shines on New York calls to mind golden bees. As Seidman asserts, possibly thinking now of the hieroglyphs evoked in A14, Zukofsky “no doubt” associates the cow that grazes serenely within Kuh with the central trope of Egyptian solar religion, the symbol of the concentration of political and religious power in the Pharoah, the sun, yes, but also the travails of any soul standing before Osiris, awaiting judgement, in hope of an immortal life once only the purview of royalty, recently dreamed of by a Jew in Brooklyn:
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In the company of other modernists, Zukofsky might be the more materially minded, but he too has his moments of Modernist mythopoetics. A little word calls forth a world. The little words can hide an epos, sometimes in a single syllable. In his intuition of such a cosmogonic syllable (“Kuh”), Seidman marked both his allegiance and his dissension from Zukofsky. Seidman excavates the most historically compelling, world-transforming survival of Egyptian mythology, its solar aspect. But significantly for Seidman, and for our understanding of his mythopoeic revision, the sun appears in a feminine manifestation. His explication continues: “The goddess Hathor was often shown as a golden cow (sometimes covered in stars), with the titles Cow of Gold, and The one who shines like gold, or as a woman with the ears of a cow and a headdress of horns holding the sun-disc (In one of her incarnations she is married to Ra, the sun god.)” The myth of a central sun god who oversees all others, an image of centralized power and omniscience, the god of state and empire, Ra surveys the kingdom every day, all day. As delineated in Egyptian Amduat: The Book of the Hidden Chamber, at night he passes through the underworld as well, holding together the living and the dead. Given the expansive political frame of Seidman’s poetry, it is hard not to think he understands the god Ra as in part an ideological fabulation, presenting an image to Egyptian culture of a single divine and all-seeing authority, whose earthly manifestation is the king. What we see in watching Seidman read Zukofsky is Seidman teasing out a full feminine-centered cosmological vision of the universe following the long reputed first civilization of the West, Egypt. From a trilingual pun on a single syllable, goddesses arise.

The Objectivist mythopoetic enters Seidman’s own poetry as well. “However Often,” one of Seidman’s finest, is a speculation on the origins of the natural and the human world, surveying, with grace and forceful particularity, the world as it presents itself while keeping us apart from it. The refrain around which the poem is built, “however much,” places a pause, a moment of distance, between the beginning of the refrain and the scenes or images subsequently evoked. It’s right there in those words, “however often.” The repetition is about the power of repetition to either close or open the doors of perception. Although the poem celebrates the possibility of recalling all that is from the experience of a single human sound, a syllable that may be part of no particular word, a cry, the poem laments that the summoning did not happen. Seidman’s take on cosmogonic utterance is to place it, or so I’m suggesting, within the religion of love conventions: the cry is a lover’s cry. What makes the poem so consummately Seidman’s is how the magic both happens and doesn’t. The conditional tense lends the poem a certain philosophical rigor, all while giving the speaker over to anguish:
“However Often” qualifies the magic it is on the brink of performing, which would be to remember and reconstruct the world in its totality. It’s a masterpiece of Objectivist Orphism, the poet left devastated by the failure to recover the beloved whose cry contains all of creation within it.

Given Seidman’s fascination with the divine feminine, and with the tropes of erotic obsession, the world summoning syllable imagined in “However Often” is best heard as uttered or sounded by a woman. In approaching Seidman’s Egyptian volume Throne/Falcon/Eye, it is notable that the poet has little investment in the world-summoning, all surveying, authoritarian and masculine gods such as Re. (Perhaps Re seemed too much like Lyndon Johnson.) What Seidman found in his gloss of “Hi, Kuh” was nothing less than an evasion of the fundamental patriarchic principal and divinizing of state power. He found in his exegesis what he finds throughout the world of all his work, continuous manifestations of the divinized feminine. In his reading of Zukofsky, Seidman turns away from Re, who would seem to be directly evoked by Zukofsky in his evocation of solarity and verticality (the sun on those skyscrapers and the proto-panopticon capacities of the solar eye). He favors Hathor, an adorned goddess presented as a source of light. Further, Seidman evades the singular authority of Re, indicative of the monotheism evolving within the Egyptian religious universe, and possibly its corollary in post-World War II American imperial power. Ultimately, in Throne/Falcon/Eye, Egypt is all and only about a goddess. The Manhattan skyscrapers evoked by Zukofsky in his haiku are linked not to temples in Japan but to Egypt, yes, to a phallic and spiritual verticality, but Seidman’s attention is on the goddess holding the sun disk. She may in terms of the Egyptian world be subordinate to Re, be ancillary, be attendant, but in Seidman’s Egypt she is the central figure.

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John Irwin pointed out long ago in American Hieroglyphics how Egypt has long been at work in the American poetic imagination. (Seidman will evoke Whitman, another student of Egypt, at the close of his Isis reverie.) With the American tour of King Tut (heralded in song by Steve Martin), Seidman could not resist the theme of conquest, the perils of masculinist power and the erotics of subjection embedded in the remaking of ancient archeology into modern fashion. Conjuring an Egyptian cosmology from an Objectivist haiku, Seidman, scrupulously attentive to his cultural moment, calls up an Egypt he clearly understands to be highly mediated by Western fantasies of origins and by centuries of aesthetic configurations of Egypt. Seidman is not concerned with state-of-the-art scholarship on antiquity, or excavation reports, or Western occulture’s spiritual speculations, or gleaning the meaning of hieroglyphs. He takes up Egyptian materials within the terms of his reception of them as an art world phenomenon. In doing so, he both honors the proto-Objectivist aesthetic ideals of ancient Egyptian art, and at the same time he forthrightly recognizes the mediation of art culture in our highly curated reimagining of Egypt, finding along the way place for his own erotic obsessions, and his brooding upon the dead.

Throne/Falcon/Eye appeared in 1982 in full Egyptian drag, three years after the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit, concluded its three-year tour of the US courtesy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and a year before the premier of Philip Glass’ opera of the Pharaoh credited with inventing monotheism, Akhnaten. On the cover, a trio of gods. Inside, explicit Egyptian themes, embedded in the flow of a lived life in New York. The intersectional pages reprise the three gods on the cover. Egyptian moments that may not announce themselves as such in the light of day lurk between words. The three figures repeated in the intersectional pages align with the terms of the title, Throne, Falcon, and Eye, reflect Seidman’s own reading of the Egyptian divine. The procession of Re through the sky and through the night with his sacred bride Hathor, evoked in the exegesis of Zukofsky, is not there. Rather, it’s the sacred single child family: Osiris, Isis, and Horus. But mostly, it’s Isis. “Cult of Isis,” is an extended meditation on the most significant and influential of deities in world religious culture as they may be said to be made manifest in Brooklyn. Olsonean or feminist contemporaries might prefer to travail mythological systems, poetically mapping the dissemination of the myth of Isis. African-American contemporaries might bring research about Egypt to a broad range of Black postwar artmaking. Seidman’s Objectivist rigors incline him towards lively depictions of American culture and the politics of his moment, keeping his Egyptian inclinations trained on the art culture phenomenon reprised by the Tut tour and the attendant publicity. Seidman gives us the presentation of Egyptian art at its most recent arrival, alert to the capitalist incentive to make it new. And not to be downplayed, the new includes new money, and new money attracts beautiful women. Readers familiar with Seidman’s earlier books would readily note his well-established erotic preoccupation with the divine feminine, as well as recall his troubled hymns to actual women. How could Hugh Seidman living in New York in the late seventies not write about Isis? She was front page. The goddess of all goddesses was taking over Manhattan, the ultimate femme fatale, looking stylish, severe, mingling death and sexiness and ultimate shiksa vibes.

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Osiris and Isis offered the poet a widely influential myth of sacrificial logic. Blood Lord, his previous book, forthrightly dramatizes his fascination with mortal agony, a drama helped along no doubt by Wilhem Reich and Cesar Vallejo. The frisson of putting something or someone to death, of being put to death within an aura of martyrdom, the bequeathal of guilt upon the scapegoat, the sudden ecstasy of moral purity, the theatrics of holy bloodletting, are generously explored, lent distinction in their rendering by the poet’s characteristic diffidence. Seidman’s friend and teacher, Adrienne Rich, had recently accommodated sacred violence to feminist concerns in poems such as “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” “Rape,” and “August,” and would soon begin her martyrology of redemptive female sufferers. In the academic world, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence (1973) and Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1972) pursued provocative contemporary cultural applications of this essentially anthropological and religious motif, exploring the presumed vital connection between sacrificial violence and cultural renewal. More immediately, within poetic rather than literary critical tradition, Seidman, as had many of his contemporaries, had clearly absorbed modern poetry’s long standing dramatization of sacred violence in relation to ritual thought, and the importance of sacred violence to experimental poetics.

Consider, in the years after World War II,  the influence in the arts and culture, not to mention in the New American Poetry, of Antonin Artaud, for whom theater became performance became liturgical transgression became Dionysian ritual agony became a fully magical poetry. In “Cult of Isis” Seidman adopts, stylizes, and embeds within his own psyche a primal tale of redemptive death, though the full tale is presumed, not told, and poet’s attention is drawn less to the goddess than to the cult, by which I mean the art culture which has sparked yet another wave of Egyptophilia across the United States. Other poems in the vicinity of “Cult of Isis” locate these concerns in adjacent mythologies. Not surprisingly, that other great mystery cult of antiquity, that of Orpheus, is reprised in “Eurydice.” Eurydice, returned from the dead, walks her daughter down a sidewalk in Greenwich Village. Eurydice is now a psychologist, “dark haired yet with one grey streak / as if the human had marred the human.” With extraordinary rhetorical and imaginative turns, the poem manages to intermix realms of the living and the dead, turn Manhattan into an underworld, recount aspects of the relation in a highly compressed but richly associative manner, and conclude with a stunning transfiguration of a former lover met in passing on the street into the fundamental trope of erotic loss and romantic grief.

“Eurydice” demonstrates Seidman’s considerable poetic powers in evoking one of the great figures in modern poetry, associated in many instances with modern poetry itself. In “Cult of Isis,” a different mystery cult, Isis herself, the divine feminine figure, hardly appears. It’s as if Seidman has, in trading Greece for Egypt, taken to heart his lines in “Eurydice” where “love’s second failure” must be cured from “the personal / blasphemy of its metaphors.” And so Isis’ most compelling and historically significant attribute, her sorrowful search, goes uninvoked. Her epic task of gathering the severed limbs of her brother and husband Osiris receives scant mention and primarily in relation to the humiliation the catastrophe of the Osirian phallus provokes in the speaker. Isis organizes the poem, if not the world itself, and yet she seems distant from it. It is a curiously chaste study of one of the world’s principal fertility goddesses. In “Cult of Isis,” Seidman’s rendering of the divine feminine presents a divine force through a cool Objectivist lens. The goddess betrays nothing of the ever-grieving prototype of the Mater Dolorosa. She is less Cosmic mother than Cosmic Dominatrix.

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“passage of the soul”

That spectacularly transgressed goad to godliness for Modernists like Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, and HD, Osiris, eventual Lord of the Dead, is summoned, apparently, by the first in a suite of five sections that comprise “Cult of Isis.” Seidman sets aside the parched lands around the Nile that might be brought to fruition by the scattering of the god’s limbs. Seidman’s speaker is both an initiate and a slave. This dual perspective may be colored by Seidman’s Vietnam era politics, his attunement to the oppressions of empire and the oppressive ideological capacities of centralized myths. A poet of the antiwar years, a witness to the Columbia uprising in 1968, a reader of Reich and Rich, Seidman needed no schooling in modernity’s use of myth, to create coherence within the personal life of secularity’s citizens, and, more darkly, to compel participation in modern patriarchal state religions. “Cult of Isis,” as has been noted, is concerned with the cultic. Gods are less embodiments of natural forces than focal points of cultural force. Each verb in the opening section, “Osiris” constitutes, when taken together (“been taught” “had learned” “had felt”) an initiation, less into wisdom than into subjection. The volume Throne /Falcon/Eye starts not in Egypt but in a voyage to Egypt. The conclusion of the book's first poem touches on the painting The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba by Claude Lorrain. Before ever getting to Egypt, it would seem, Seidman is a slave. Slavery is the passage of his soul to Egypt. Given that this opening poem allows for the theme of mystic marriage and syncretic possibilities, we might not feel justified in Judaizing the slave, despite the exile in Egypt evoked elsewhere in the volume. The poet is curious, I think, to see Egypt as a slave culture up and running long before Joseph got thrown in a pit by his brothers and sold, because Seidman is interested, like any anti-war protester of the period, in the foundational mythology of state power. Consider poems such as “Chakhcharan, Afghanistan,” “Agent Orange,” and “Ode to the Republic,” which concludes:
Taken all together, the poems in Throne/Falcon/Eye make Seidman’s alliance of imperial American power with that first monotheistic kingdom of conquests hard to miss.

The volume’s first poem, a prelude to “Cult of Isis,” alludes to the embassy of the queen of Sheba to King Solomon. The reason for this visit, described in 1 Kings 10:1-12 and 2 Chronicles 9:1-13, has been imagined and reimagined and interpreted throughout the ancient world. The Queen has inspired folkloric accounts and the sparsity of Biblical detail provoked elaborations across the Abrahamic world, and in modern times in literature, painting and film. In Throne /Falcon/ Eye, the Queen of Sheba is the first of a series of powerful, exotic, feminine figures, some mortal, some divine, and some, by way of fable, insect. The poem is seemingly ekphrastic, responding to Claude Lorrain’s painting “Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba,” but as we might expect with Seidman, the planes of reality cut into and through each other. The Queen is an embodiment of the poet’s fascinations. She is the intersection of wealth, trade, sex, art, and the spiritual. The various readings of her purpose in visiting Solomon range from opening trade routes, to renouncing sun worship and converting to Judaism, to being the mystical consort of the king in a Mysterium coniunctionis. In some readings of the legend, she’s Egyptian. (An Egyptian queen accepting the religion of a race formerly enslaved in Egypt, delirious in its irony.) She’s an emanation of Isis, situating the poet as a slave on that ship bearing her to Jerusalem, and despite the poet’s dismissiveness:
The Queen, however second-rate, is the occasion for the announcement of the volume’s theme: “the passage of the soul.” The poem moves quickly away from the painting, which assumes the Queen is bringing material wealth to King Solomon. Men in the foreground load a trunk of vibrant fabric. The Queen is barely visible amid the water, sky, glowing sun, and ships. The poem gives due diligence to the scene of the painting, but as it does so it raises doubts about what the scene ultimately is. With admirable ingenuity, Seidman skews the temporal framing that so often accompanies ekphrastic poetry. It turns out, the painting, done in 1648, may not have happened yet. The Biblically documented embassy of the Queen may not have happened yet. The refrain “Is this yet to be” nimbly facilitates the radical skepticism which accompanies some of Seidman’s most fervent and compelling poems.

Is this yet to be the freight of Claude Lorraine . . . The poem is titled simply “Embarkation” as if we are in no verifiable time, watching some other embarkation that prophesies or foreshadows the departure of the Queen in the legend. We are given enough of the painting so that we may encounter Seidman’s characteristic mixed feelings (he loves to imagine powerful if not divinized women but resents his subjection to them) which he knows is also a powerful part of his enthrallment. The poem quickly turns to the proto-embarkment of which the embassy of the Queen seems a distant baroque adumbration. The boat, it turns out, is less a galleon than a coffin. The poem then displays, in terror and wonder, Egyptian mortuary arts. We are not at all in the mind of a viewer before a painting, but in the mind of a reader of history, a history focused on the body and what can be done to it or with it, be it sexual violence or taxidermy:
Much as will happen at the close of “Cult of Isis,” receding temporal framing recontextualizes “Embarkation”’s starting point. We are in the “yet to be” yet knowing what will be. We are yet to be in a seventeenth century barque. We are yet to be preparing a body for burial, presumably that of a Pharaoh, the breast of the fleshed sky. We are yet to be in the poet’s situation, which is now portrayed. The poet would prefer to be indifferent to the debasement of the passage of the soul. Debased, because, for reasons withheld, the queen is both “nubile” and “second rate.” Is she just too young for twentieth century desiring? Is the poet just too bound to the earth by tawdry desires, settling for a queen who’s not first rate, held in port by the voyeuristic and lurid: “the prose of these rapes and revulsions,” subjects for prose that hardly distinguishes the era of its composition, since they are synonymous with writing.
 The “verdict,” which suggests a renderer who remains unrevealed, is both material and spiritual. We are condemned to the perspective of a galley slave, like rowers in Ben-Hur, by the power of the state. But also, in that the poem has explicitly evoked the “passage of the soul,” it may be we are far from the Renaissance atmospherics of the painting, sailing beside someone who has died and is on the way to be judged by Osiris. Given the porous temporal horizon, the poem exists in a time before this “verdict” has happened, happened within a consciousness for whom this slavery is prophetic. And who is the galley slave not simply serving, but himself becoming the vessel of, chained as he is to so feminine a bowsprit?

Occult and hermetic readings of the Queen Sheba would greatly expand the possible understandings of this embassy. The volume’s epigram from Caesar Vallejo summons to the periphery of each poem in the volume the magical rapport found in epithalamiums between a proper marriage and natural abundance. As in the wedding bed, so in the fields. In this instance the epigram works to further a suggestion that the poet’s residual Objectivist austerities dissuade him from elaborating: a mystic marriage of Egyptian and Jew is the culmination of this embarkment, and perhaps others.

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“Osiris”

Ultimately, “Embarkation” features a slave from a kingdom that is yet to be Egypt, but also, bearing in mind the painting of a Renaissance era European port, an Egypt already over. For Seidman, historical and mythological planes of reality cut into and through each other. In “Osiris,” the first of the five sections in the volume’s most sustained exploration of things Egyptian, “Cult of Isis,” we are again seeing the world from the point of view of a galley slave, a slave haplessly but astutely on a voyage to the origin point of monotheism, authoritarian rule, and of eternal life. “Osiris” unfolds firmly within the Egyptian cosmos. The central perceiving consciousness is, again, a slave, a slave working an oar. But again, we wonder, what boat is he on? A boat of commerce, or the boat of Re? (Is Ishmael Reed drifting by portside, like a Cowboy on the Boat of Ra?) This first poem in the suite is titled “Osiris.” Osiris, one of the most pervasive and influential gods of the Mediterranean world, as we might by now expect, does not appear. Perhaps he, too, has already happened? While Seidman only fleetingly evokes the familiar fate of Osiris, his death and dismemberment, something else is unclearly going on. It’s as if Osiris, in an utter perversion of the myth, was not killed by Typhon, but by Isis. The poem opens with the initiated slave testifying to his initiation:
The initiate reenacts the death of Osiris as if he himself is a corpse being sent to the underworld. Again, as in Embarkation, the speaker is both horrified and fascinated by mortuary procedures. In commemoration of the death of Osiris, the speaker is drained and shrouded. But note, this is no Osiris restored and glorified as an avatar of regenerative life and fecundity, but rather, an Osiris of guilt, an Osiris of atoning to a goddess who presides over the embalming of the corpse. Do we have our goddess wrong? Is this the goddess Wadjet, the cobra found in the Pharoah’s headdress? The “passage of the soul” to the land of the dead brings the slave initiate not before Osiris—who we would expect to see in his traditional role as Lord of the Dead and judge of the soul’s fate—but before Isis. The highly stylized renderings, the ritual material, the suffusion throughout the lines of a psychological subtext, certainly complicates the use of the world “cult” in the title. Seidman is announcing his own cult of Isis. (Or perhaps, ultimately, the cult of Seidman.) While much has been said about the persistence in art-culture of gnostic mythologies, occult paraphernalia, and evocations of magic at play within what has been called “western occulture,” as if the enlightenment had never happened, the word “cult” directs us, rather than simply to the goddess Isis, to the social and quasi-anthropological effect of and social practice concerning Isis, this most consequential of salvific feminine figures in world mythology.

Throughout “Cult of Isis” Seidman preempts a reading of Isis that in any way emphasizes her role as mother or sister or savior or mediator of compassion. (In Seidman, such figures barely exist at all.) The initiate into this cult, the speaker, recapitulates the quality of namelessness we associate with ancient cultural monuments. This cult is a cult of coercion and dominance rather than of enthusiasm and devotion, though it may be, for Seidman, the cult of Isis is simply the cult of all who were ever born, who do not elect to join a cult, but simply come to consciousness within one, or just within a body, or just within a dominant ideological system, within, that is a modern family. The initiate, given the tone of cool rage in which he is described (Seidman’s signature effect), revolts against familial, national, and religious pieties alike. He withholds consent from the most basic aspects of embodied life, which the mythology of Egypt lavishly narrativizes, emphasizing suffering without revivification. The speaker has been press-ganged into serving the cult rather than joining it, reminding us of the long history of conquest and subjugation, where joining a religious body is a matter of acknowledging your defeat.

Moreover, Isis is not simply commanding all, she sneers as she does so. A personal subtext is infiltrating the mythic narrative. It bears mention that though the three gods on the cover and the interleaving pages between sections of the book reprise a sacred family of sorts, Seidman’s cult offers no upside for joining, except a purification of anguish, and an ecstatic exactness of poetic image. (Which may be more than upside enough.) But Seidman is seldom, as a poet, content with Objectivist clarities. A doubleness touches all his images, a doubleness arising in the strange gaps, in the transitions between lines and stanzas, gaps wherein multiple levels of signification going on at once. Egypt in the end may just be, for Seidman, the cult of all cults, the modern family. Who is doing the making, in the following lines? The role of the son calls for a “grave face.” Why is that? And why is patriarchal solemnity the order of the day?
This is the intersection of multiple acts of sacrificial violence. The “still” is a notation of protest, of inner withholding of assent. The blame for the butchering of Osiris is directed oddly at Isis. (“her stele and her gate”) This is an atonement of a male figure to a female figure. This is a couple who are in the precincts of divinity but may be mortals whose conciliation rankles the speaker. The male figure, the father, seems humiliated in the son’s eyes. The son is made to kneel to Osiris, the Lord-To-Be-Torn, and he clearly resents having to assume a solemn if not deathly demeanor as the conventional alignment of goddess and nature, at the flood of the Nile imitating the fertile if bleeding womb of the goddess upon whom all life in Egypt depends.

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“Solitaire”

“Solitaire,” the second section of “Cult of Isis,” recasts the love life of the gods and the relation of their intercourse to the fructifying of the earth. It brings us out of Egypt, and to an “Egypt” one does not flee, but might go visit on the weekend at the Met, confirming the distraught nuptial scene sung by Vallejo in the volume’s epigram, the theme of the royal wedding. And yet we are told that “The royal couples dream in their sarcophagi / though this is never their Egypt.”

Throne/Falcon/Eye holds multiple Egypts. In one, a royal couple watches the sun travel through the hours of the night as it might be depicted for their edification on an interior coffin lid or on the walls inside their tomb. “This is never their Egypt” compels scrutiny of that small, Objectivist-friendly signifier, “this.” Which Egypt is never their Egypt? The Egypt of those dead long ago, or the Egypt of those dead in the museum or display where they would find themselves were they to awake? Where is the sarcophagi in which they are dreaming, (dreaming not the Egypt they knew, not dreaming, apparently, in the Egyptian afterworld concerning which they were already well instructed, not dreaming in the Egypt that is in fact New York City)? Is the “this” the imagination of the poet who is himself the blurred hieroglyph that unites the ancient and the contemporary, the dead and the living, lovers and family members? That the subject of the poem is the cult of Isis and not Isis herself may lower hope for a theophany while encouraging readers to dream just like any other royal couples in coffins. Still, after the explicit telling of the myth of Osiris, the god seen as ritual victim and not as the Lord of the Dead, where, we might ask, either in Brooklyn or Thebes, has Isis gone? After her sneer, the goddess gets evasive. Her emanations, however, are everywhere. The series of poems that open Throne/ Falcone/ Eye are themselves an extended meditation on divinized women, from the Queen of Sheba to Eurydice, to Amazons, to an allegory of the spider, its web an elaboration of predatory feminine impulses. The poet need not evoke her directly; the cult of Isis is ongoing and everywhere. As the poet says in “The Immortal,” “Because in the world / all men have seen / she who rules the world.”

Despite the sacrificial suffering of Osiris, for Seidman it is Isis who is the still enduring presence of that earliest divine figure associated with the West. The narrative implied by the first section enrolls the reader into her service. We are conscripts in her quest to recover her brother’s body and to keep his cock for herself, while Osiris, after his agon, will be central to the conjuring of the afterlife, will be the Lord of the Dead who weighs each of our souls. (At the conclusion of “Cult of Isis” there is mention of a verdict.) While the poet’s fascination is with the force, with the eschatological pressure intimations of the divine place upon the human world, he is equally taken with the divinizing process itself. It’s his central imaginative preoccupation, one he shares with a contemporary of great significance to him, Adrienne Rich. The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973), and The Dream of a Common Language (1978) document her own mythologizing of gender relations and creation hymns of a gynocentric cosmology, replete with martyrs, heroes, devotional practices, and ethical exhortations, all within a patriarchal universe organized to benefit malign forces.  In Throne/Falcon/Eye the mother of all, Isis, is less an excavated icon than a shapeshifting figure around whom cult behavior and theophanic sentiments gather. Passing through Western art and literature, she arrives in the poem in the femdom mode of cinema Cleopatras, from Claudette Colbert to Elizabeth Taylor. She’s an Isis more Blue Angel than Blue Velvet, more cruel assertion of the inviolable gap between human and divine than sorrowful sister. For Seidman, her grieving, her lament, her dutiful gathering of scattered limbs, in which in Christians might see a proto-Mary figure, a Stabat Mater in training, are of no concern. The poet is not interested in her for her actions, for her own story, he seems interested in her for the force of her aura, her capacity for compelling male submission while asserting her distance from sex.

In “Solitaire,” Egyptian mysteries are ongoing in New York. The mysterium coniunctionis of Isis and Osiris is a card game, possibly in a play. The Queen figure is twofaced. The Jack is defeated, sissified. As often with Seidman, heteronormative love aspires to the condition of sadomasochism. Having at the first evoked connubial accord (if only between corpses in a box), “Solitaire” turns to living relationships in contemporary times. The poem calls up the traditional fruits of the sacred marriage, correlating the aims of culture and of nature, though ultimately skewing any ready-made analogies between things above and things below. If it is Isis being evoked as the Queen, then she oversees but remains apart from the imagined dream state of the long dead couple, who in not facing each other reveal modern suppositions about marriage and intimacy, and perhaps a mordant satire on eternal love: “Nor does she awake them / nor do they face each other.”

Having imagined an afterlife that albeit never leaves the coffin, and collating the interred couple with the rejuvenation celebrated in Vallejo’s fertility hymn (again, the volume’s epigram), “Solitaire” calls out to a more “natural” world where erotic and nuptial life continue: “the crotch of the aspen that weds the moon.” The poem further compounds what is above with what is below with a flourish of eroticized violence: “The stars are the grave candles / where the wildflower / impales the night.”

As has been noted, Seidman’s Objectivist fidelities to a materialist vision of the world compel him to address the medium through which Egyptian alterity makes its way to New York: the art-culture world, a ritually governed space devoted to the worship of art within but distinct from other symbolically organized spheres of modern life. Within this space, a play is in progress, a play in an environment separated from the sharply evoked nuptials of nature and culture in the above quoted lines. Dark women preside over a symbolic reenactment of something like the myth of Isis and Osiris. (Here I am presuming a likeness between conventional playing cards and the ineffable mysteries of Egypt. Some occultist, please back me up.) Though conventional playing cards exist at a distance from such antiquity, they nonetheless offer an allegory of human agency faced with extra-human forces. They remind us of the rich life Egyptian gods have had in the Western imagination. As for what the play is, there are several titled Solitaire. It’s not clear if the poet has a particular one in mind, though a play called Solitaire was staged in New York in 1971. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, here again, Seidman highlights the negative attributes of she who rules the world, calling her two-faced, appropriate enough for a playing card, though a bit sharp, isn’t it, for the Mother of All? The cards suggest an unhappy relation between a dominant and regal female figure and a defeated and humiliated vassal, a shorthand way for Seidman to place romantic love, dare we say the whole courtly tradition, under the sign of art-culture Isis:
8

“Concubine”

The next section, “Concubine,” sets another scene within an art-culture moment. The focus shifts to another aspect of antiquity. The opening of the poem addresses the Greek version of the Egyptian sphinx, guardian of Themes, asker of riddles, possibly as imagined by Gustaf Moreau:
An escalating frisson of references and implications, Egypt to Greece, to Egypt, to New York, New York to an alley in Thebes, to a tomb to a museum, to Egypto-Greek-French Decadence in a fierce and vivid whirl of iconology that seems is part of the passage of the soul. (Or are we simply paying to get into a blockbuster exhibit? Though deeper debts and obligations are implicated in our gazing.)  Throne, falcon, eye, all imply surveillance. But the third term of the title, the eye, may also include just plain looking at art, whatever the State thinks of it. The third term, the eye—is it Horus, is it Hugh, whosoever eye it is it’s hard to read without a Zukofsky inflection, as the poem as a whole and this section in particular reveals itself to be a work of what might be termed Seidman’s Egypto-Objectivism. Is Zukofsky, not long dead himself, shadowing the museum tour, watching over during this extravaganza of unhallowed interment, his initiate who is pursuing still further interpolations of Egypt and New York?  In “Hi Kuh” Zukofsky had pointed to the punning of eye and I. The Pharaoh in the afterlife, like the author of A in the afterlife, sees and knows all. Egypt is the consummate example of the interrelation of mythology, belief in the afterlife, erotic desire, state power, cosmic kingship, and personal salvation. (Philip Glass’ contemporary opera Akhnaten rests beside Seidman’s poems as proof that all ages are contemporaneous, and perhaps all imperial politicians, from Tut to Caesar, to LBJ.) By the light of Zukofsky’s own Egyptian Objectivism, Egypt was aesthetically irresistible to Seidman. That cow within a New York haiku proposes a cosmos already Objectivist in its clean lines, heightened precision, and Pyramid text poetics, its aphorisms and fragments as elegant and elliptical as Mallarmé.

In “Concubine,” by mythologizing the eye, the organ of dominance and submission, of state surveillance and erotic display, of social satire and scientific observation, Seidman takes up a crucial aspect of divinization in a secular world: aestheticization itself. (Readers of Seidman will recall the first poem in his first book, “Tale of Genji,” how it unabashedly valorizes the power of art while attempting to restore historical distance: “Not that it mattered // or the light / they wept at”). The beauty of the approaching lines argues, for me, a barely repressed Yeatsean fascination with the difficulty of the beautiful. The artwork mingles ancient and contemporary, dead and living. Seidman’s “art-deco” reminds the reader of the art-culture interpretive frame. “Art-deco” merges old-time Egypt and modern Egyptomania, recalling thereby, as has been suggested, the long history of Egyptian styles glamorizing modernity, from fashion to architecture to interior décor to spiritual belief to fiction, poetry and cinema. Given both Zukofsky and Seidman’s devotion to a cold visuality as a vital attribute of the poetic image, the eye is in essence an Egyptian Objectivist syllable, able to dazzle and transport, stirring up fantasias of Egypt, then further conjuring up the divinized feminine presence of the Great Mother, most likely Isis, a Great Mother awarded new prana by feminist archeologists who would claim that a matriarchy preceded patriarchy. All while the title, “concubine,” resounds with the masculinist rhetoric of patriarchy:
Ancient artisans, Brooklyn neo-objectivists, museum doyens, gallery employees, restoration specialists, contemporary artists, and satiric observers of contemporary artists are conjured by the eye, around the eye, in honor the eye, the eye which renders itself the eye. This ekphrasis is our transition to another contemporary art-culture moment, older, one with Expressionist roots. Seidman leads us into a scene right out of a late Billy Wilder inspired decadent tableaux of a female artist:
The drugged Great Mother with tinted eyelids, if not by way of Wilder, has she arrived by way of Fellini or John Waters or Derek Jarman’s Jubilee? Alas, the Great Mother is making bad art; her inspiration is purely transactional. Yet the Great Mother is powerful, commands attention, knows how to make a buck. Again, in Seidman, a mother stripped of the traditional attributes of the maternal. The scene’s a touch Euro, a touch arch. The poet takes on his own art historical tone: “you may note.” He’s our ghostly docent, guiding through some small degree of depravity. Is the “oddly voluptuous carved nipple” a gentle riposte to the art culture initiate, turned on by stone? (Is there a send-up of lesbianism here?) Then comes the portrait of the concubine, right out of Weimar Berlin, a perfect riff on Gottfried Benn: “the casually beringed / in green on the couch drinking daiquiris / while her thigh is stroked…”

“Concubine” emits multiple beams of the divine feminine’s emanation. The Greek sphinx appears, calling up the myth of Oedipus and perhaps Moreau’s striking rendition. In scenes that whirl around the art-culture veneration of Isis, we can find flashes of Seidman thinking about his poetry as he ponders antiquity. “Cult of Isis” may in fact be as close as Seidman ever came to an elaboration of his poetics, as the next section of his poem makes clear. But in “Concubine” its fruits are on display: on one hand, a tone of fierce and authoritative argumentation that sounds (again) almost Yeatsian; an elegance of phrasing and a complex syntactic organization; keenly exact and memorable imagery, working a vision committed to deferring interpretation, to placing multiple readings at play. Seidman’s poetry is dedicated to saying true things about the world with a conviction that is intensified by the ambiguities hidden in the very syntax of the statement. His lines can be heard as emphatic, but they are felt as disorienting. Which makes sense. They have been tasked with holding together powerfully conflicting ideation and feelings in their commitment to singing of their muse, a muse frequently and variously evoked throughout Throne/Falcon/Eye, a muse who herself seems to find her own being beyond bearing. Revealed as much between lines as within them, an art-culture theophany: “the agony / of the masculinized jade goddess.”

9

Bar
In “Bar” a mawkish scene unfolds. A lone, lonely drinker listens to love songs. A decade worth of love’s cliches, pumped through the bar’s sound system, fill the air. Perhaps a therapist has told the lonely drinker he must work on “reframing his narrative.” The drinker has chosen to do so, but do so, perhaps as a bit of push-back against his shrink, within the oldest sign system available (perhaps inspired by the décor of the bar). A waitress, maybe to her dismay, finds herself to be a composite representative of the entire Egyptian past. “Bar” opens with the evocation of the sistrum, an Egyptian musical instrument traditionally sounded in anticipation of the presence of a god. The sistrum plays a counterpoint to the profane and exhausted tropes of love songs (and by extension, to the conventions of love poetry) that beset, in sung form, the lonely drinker. “Bar” reprises a theme raised in the first section of “Cult of Isis,” that of initiation. But the initiation “Bar” offers is an initiation more Orphic than Osirian. As has been noted, in a previous poem in the volume, the poet intimated that he was already an initiated of the New York version of an Orphic mystery cult, running into a former lover on the street. “Eurydice” is bravura mythopoetics, the rendering of a rescue from the land of the dead, for sure, but it may be the roles are reversed. The male figure in the poem is the one who would be almost brought back from death. The former lover is the divinized figure, associated with an abundant life, while the speaker sinks back into an underworld dark that resembles a movie theater where he watches her up on the screen, larger than life. In “Bar,” Seidman outlines two types of Egypto-Orphic song. The first type of song is there to be dismissed: “Let the singer sing love’s cliché decade / like youth and death in that country.” The poet is casting an icy eye on earlier poems that plumb the torments of erotic desire and delineate catastrophes of romantic love. The isolation of the central figure, the drinker at the bar, can be readily correlated to the first type of song. The second type of song is that associated not with what might be playing on the bar’s sound system, but with the ancient god summoning music of the sistrum:
These lines depict a judgment not by the eerily absent figure of Osiris, but by Ibis-Thoth, the god of, among other things, writing. Thoth is the god who weighs the hearts of the dead and reports his findings to Osiris, who passes judgement upon them. Thoth heals the eye of Horus, one of the three gods depicted on the cover of the book, who was wounded by the slayer of Osiris, Seth.

The judgment, while of the soul’s fate, seems more immediately a judgement on a kind of song, a condemnation of what I take to be fateful love songs but sung without duende, songs stripped of the transformative power instigated by sacrificial violence, untransformed by ecstatic suffering. The lines from Vallejo with which the book begins are lines from a sacred nuptial. They perform the traditional task of binding the heavens to the earth in correspondence with the fulfillment of human desire—the kind of song Seidman aspires to write. What is “that country”? New York City during the Tut exhibit? Is it the Brooklyn of Seidman’s youth? Is it, more broadly, America? Is it the place of origin of a now exhausted poetic mode, “love’s cliché,” a place which has yet to reveal its Orphic depths to the poet? (Though the powerful, harrowing, deeply personal title poem of his first book, Collecting Evidence, pursues romantic infatuation, obsessive love, and annihilating passions with commendable intensity.) Perhaps the poet feels he has not yet comprehended his art, not yet truly experienced its mythopoetic dimensions. The solitary drinker, whether he is the poet, a sketch of a failed poet, or just some poor heartbroken tippler without the resources of any poetry whatsoever, contemplates the origins and nature of poetic art, imagining it as now under the sign of Isis.

Between what the singer sings, and the music summoned by the “gilt sistrum,” Seidman proposes that there are two songs of the breast. The first can be assumed to be profane, to be that of heteronormative male desire. The second type of song is sacred, arising around an icon, a song of the stone breast through which numinous force flows, in homage to mother’s milk. Seidman vexes this much critiqued yet still, for him, resonant binarism: earthly breast, celestial breast. The poet is commendably attentive to the material and cultural realities by which ancient sacred artifacts arrive in the realm of the secular. He details how within the venues of art culture, capitalism offers its own simulation of numinosity. A congeries of Egypts contend for attention. We might at first think the second song of the breast, in contrast to the breast of pop culture blazons, is the divine breast of Isis, as if this quaff in a bar might be the moment of mythopoeic poetic conversion: the Jewish American poet becomes the Egyptian Moses of an older, more authentic, primordially ancient poetry. In this bar, how is art being imagined? That lipstick on a stone breast, is it some antique coloration restored by museum staffers, or a trace of a fetishist consummating a devotion? The poet is out to bring Objectivist clarity to the question of how once sacred artifacts in the reign of the secular become artworks. The poet needs to know what needs artworks fulfill or don’t in the psyche of the art culture initiate. The psychotropic milk of capital mingles in its flowing with that of the numinous, around, over, and through Egyptian artifacts in an ecstasy of irresolvable contradictions between past and present, sacred and secular, body and soul. The modern icon of the femme fatale is what can merge Isis with Marlene Dittrich in a single sensual rouge.

In such lines, as throughout “Cult of Isis,” we find Seidman’s poetic signature, his fusing in a torqued phrase or a burst of ambiguous pauses, ambivalent or contradictory materials, which, for all their fastidious qualifications, are pronounced with such force and drama that they seem cleansed of doubt. This second order of song is hermetic, is hermeneutical. Transported by some sublime proclamation, we are nonetheless troubled by how the words fit together. In returning to the following lines, for all their rhetorical dazzle, the reader cannot be kept from asking does the phrase “as the breast and the body” modify the noun “song” or the noun “breast”?
Is Seidman’s hypothesized second “song of the breast” devoted to contrasting life and art, presumably the living and desirable female body, with that of the stone breast of art? Flesh and inanimate matter contradict yet mirror each other. Is the second part of the copulative phrase “the breast and the body” a single subject? Is the second “song of the breast” a song of the breast and the body, with breast meaning not the human organ, but rather, sounding a faintly archaic poetic diction, does the poet use “breast” to mean the inner feelings of the singer of such a song?  Or is the copulative pulled apart, the breast as the breast, in contrast to the body bought for its art? The complex intermingling of art, the body, eroticism, ornamentation, and commerce keeps on coming: “or for art as the body only and not the nipple / lipsticked or the smeared rouge.”

As do our questions. What kind of song does a modern, secular initiate of Isis sing? Is Seidman contrasting two visions of the song of the mere body, one seemingly non-eroticized, and the other eroticized according to such conventions as find the female breast a site of fascination, which would, especially given the poem’s recovery of late nineteenth century decadent atmospherics, include lesbian erotic discourse, as well as drag or trans hymns to the female? breast? Who has put that rouge and lipstick on, and where is the rouge and lipstick displayed? (And where exactly is this bar?) “Bar” then returns to the drama of initiation that the first section of “Cult of Isis” proclaimed. The last poem in the volume makes explicit the relation between Isis and the agon of sexuality. The young initiate seems to be having his first orgasm relating it both to touching the goddess and evoking the Egyptian notion of the soul: the initiate jerking off at fourteen in Brooklyn to the ultimate shiksa, Isis. But in “Bar,” the initiation leads to the beginning of another quest, of the solitary initiate across a forbidding desert alone:
So, a second quest, but what exactly was the first, sex with an Egyptian waitress? The final poem in Throne/Falcon/Eye imagines touching a representation of Isis as if it is the narrator’s first orgasm. The breast of the Isis figure, prominently displayed in Egyptian iconography returns as the final word in “the bar,” recalling that the Cult of Isis was based as much on the figure of Isis as the mother of Horus. Isis nursing her child will become a model for the Christian configuration of Madonna and Child. Seidman in “the bar” offers a meditation on the origin of poetic song, a casual theorizing of his Egypto-Objectivist duende, where the maternal breast, the link in Egyptian mythology between creatures and the cosmos, is unavailable, perhaps because the breast as a site of sexual desire is renounced in the interest of virginal thought. In this the penultimate section of “Cult of Isis” the poet sets out a scenario of final judgement. He presents himself as an isolated inebriate before ancient artifacts. The novice evoked here, if an initiate, of a later era than antiquity but pre-modern, crosses the desert after the decline of Egypt, presumably before its archeological recovery: Pharaoh's house “lost to the desert.” Is this a Jewish American poet undoing Exodus? Is he in search of ruins before they end up in art galleries and museums? Is he imagining himself hearing the whispers of the Sphinx as in a painting by Elihu Vetter? Perhaps what is being judged in this afterlife is the poet’s song, how it distinguishes itself from the songs of its time, and how it stands in relation to the divine world which comes to the poem mediated by the institutions of art and the invisible milk of capital, yet nonetheless makes authenticity available. The gnostic drunkard is out to become pure thought. He’s crossing a desert as Judaic as it is Egyptian. Should the one parched be a poet, he’s one without song. Or perhaps what we are watching Seidman imagining is a song that evokes what it is to be abandoned by song.

10

“Element”

Egypt and New York were aligned long before Zukofsky took note. Any prisoner sent to oblivion in the New York Hall of Justice and Detention Center, “The Tombs,” built in 1838 in the first wave of Egyptian architectural style arising from the Napoleonic conquest of Egypt, would pass pylons, papyrus-stalk columns, obelisks, winged-disks and lotus flowers on his journey of atonement. A later moment in Egyptian architectural tribute would see the raising of an obelisk on a knoll in Central Park. The obelisk commissioned by a Pharaoh for a Temple of the Sun around 1450 B.C. may well have taught the young Seidman a lesson in both climate change and in the evanescence of all writing. The hieroglyphs on the obelisk that once stood at the gates of Heliopolis lasted eons in a desert climate but were fading from the stone of a more temperate climate. Zukofsky saw in his lifetime the second Egyptian revival in New York, inspired by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922. These buildings could not have gone unnoticed by Seidman: the Chrysler building with its Egyptian attributes, the Pythian temple at 135 West 70th Street between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, and the Fred F. French Building (551 Fifth Ave. and 45th St). Any student might pass one on his way up to Columbia. For Brooklyn Jews, it must have felt like Exodus never happened. (No doubt Norman Mailer, the author of Ancient Evenings, took note.)

“Element,” the last section of “Cult of Isis,” calls up the literary aspect of Egyptomania by way of Whitman’s profound absorption of Egyptian mythology and religious thought such as shaped major poems such as “Song of Myself,” “Scented Herbage of my Breast,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” his elegy for Lincoln, the American Pharoah who freed the slaves, and turned all America into Egypt. The explicit evocation of Whitman in “Element” frees the reader to consider Seidman continuing Whitman’s Egyptian inquiry: How can one be a poet of a global power, be the singer of a unified kingdom, be a singer, not just a scribe? How does the poet of a modern mythic Egypt write a poetry that criticizes the government, democratizes the chance for an afterlife, allows everyone their own “kha?” Whitman was onto Egypt early. He wrote journalistic accounts of the opening of the Egyptian museum which opened in Brooklyn in 1853, before it moved to 659 Broadway. According to David Reynolds, Whitman spent a good deal of time there. He studied the artifacts, the iconography, the hieroglyphs, he read the scholarship on Egypt available in his day. Seidman’s evocation of Whitman points directly, it seems to me, to this exact moment, to this origin point of an Egypto-Objectivist American gnostic poetics, where selfhood and poetic form are themselves aligned, aligned mere historical moments before the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Before Wilhelm Reich, there was Whitman to sing the epic of selfhood, a selfhood modelled on Pharaonic power. As Seidman puts it,
Dazzling and tremendous and frankly orgasmic:
Having been the dutiful Egypto-Objectivist in his rendering of the art-culture moment within which New York experiences yet another return of Egypt, Seidman now asserts the power of poetry to call into being not just a divinized selfhood, but with it a capacity to imagine and integrate deep time into the lived moment, as if Whitman, who turned to Egypt to intuit the poetics of deep time and wrote Egyptian cadences into his exclamations of endlessness and the immortal soul, were presiding over the conclusion of “Cult of Isis.” Seidman structures “Element” around the successive arrival of ever more previous temporalities. From the hyper-precision of the temporal foreground in previous sections, Seidman imagines temporal depths, incidentally recalling, by way of Egypt and its unimaginable ancientness, the long history of the mythologizing of the American continent. Across multiple levels of understanding, the King Tut exhibit, which I am assuming to be part of the inspiration for “Cult of Isis,” was the culmination of an American reality, returning an America older than the Old World to the contemporary moment.
There is something quite moving about Seidman’s relation to writing in his evocation of the glyphs, markings that are both indecipherable and revered. It is particularly moving as this comes from a poet who prizes the clear rendering of a discernible world, a poet singular among his contemporaries for his exhilarating exactitude, but locating, here, the origin of his art, that gift of Thoth, writing, in the copying out of already archaic script from five thousand years ago: “revered and inscribed.” Then, faced with such illegible antiquity, Seidman summons up another poet of Egypt and New York. Louis Zukofsky enters the continuum of inscription, a continuum beginning with nameless scribes repeating with reverence illegible glyphs, and proceeding to Whitman to Zukofsky, and finally to Seidman. Zukofsky’s italicized phrase, “above the years,” appearing like a magic syllable culled from a haiku. The phrase comes from Zukofsky’s 1950 essay “A Statement for Poetry”:
By inscribing “above the years,” Seidman explicitly links his poetry by way of ancient Egypt to that of his teacher, but he also delineates a clear separation, precisely around the issue of the intelligibility of the hieroglyphs. Zukofsky sees them as enduring conduits of poetry. His translation of a hieroglyph as it appears in “A-14” affirms the transmigration of his artform from antiquity to his present moment where New York has been turning itself into Egypt as if in anticipation of the completion of “A.” Seidman may be thinking here of the rendering of hieroglyphs in “A-14,” but what catches his interest is, I think, the question of how precisely does the indecipherable inspire reverence. Seidman’s scribe is not translating. He accepts unintelligibility. He expands the concentration of concern from “the human condition that survives the esoteric significance of these poems” to include reverence for the unintelligible. Seidman reconfigures that human condition that survives. He does so not by evoking scribes or craftsmen or laborers reproducing the sacred texts of “the passage of the soul.” Seidman retains only the “above the years” from the passage:
“Element” revises “A-14”, replacing the “human condition” with a divinized selfhood, recalling the consolidation of what we might now see as separate political, cultic and personal realms in the Egyptian invention of monotheism. Zukofsky backs away from the extravagance of these lines, from their religious cosmology and their exaltation of a divine perspective which Seidman clearly admires, or at the least sees as having an affinity towards his own poetics, where specificity and distance contribute to the force of the image. By way of Whitman, Seidman returns to Zukofsky’s German inflected Japanese, where the “Kuh” of haiku, the cow, becomes the “Khu,” the Egyptian word for the soul set free at death for its voyage on the solar boat of Re through the underworld in a twelve-hour voyage of purification. With enviable exactitude Seidman has placed his poetry in the visionary tradition that Jerome Rothenberg and particularly George Quasha were advancing in the anthologies of the period. Seidman acknowledges his own poetic lineage by quoting Zukofsky, but it is a Zukofsky who sounds suspiciously like Hart Crane, addressing a “You” who may be an ancient sun god but could also be an exalted self, a divinized addressee who shares the atemporal vantage of a divinity: “Millions of years shall come. You are above the years.” (Notice how carefully Zukofsky contains the possible meanings of these lines, assuring his reader that the paeon to the superhuman, that “You” above all time, has a benignly rational and philosophical meaning.) Seidman turns from a textual Egypt such as appears in “A-14” and toward an evocation of sacrificial violence, of omens, of the world of dreams an Egyptian fantasia, all while sleeping before dawn, in New York, around the time, perhaps, that Zukofsky himself entered the incalculable flow of years:
Wake up! It’s now over 5,000 years before the opening lines of “Element.” While I cannot fully gloss the mourning of the sleeper, or expound the science to be called She-Who-Martyrs-Egypt, it is nonetheless clarifying to observe the confluence of concerns that Seidman knots together: the state of dreaming, whether it is in Egypt or New York (the particularity of the time notation suggests the contemporary rather than the primordial), the state of sleeping, which is conflated with dreaming, as is religious ideology with science in the form of a powerful and cruel figuration of the feminine who puts Egypt to death. She seems, by the hyphens in her nomination, to be a recognized figure in an Egyptian pantheon, or at the least a godly cosplayer in a modern simulation of an ancient attribution of a god. This confluence of motifs allows the poem to push even further back into historical time, attended by an image of what I take to be sacrificial violence, the hawk with a snake in its claw, the union of the high and the low, the celestial and the chthonic. The clarity and the assurance of the single image is the means for the poet to conjure the feel of a profound symbolic coherence, as if at the earliest moment of empires and writing a symbolic logic was already well established.

The last four lines of “Element” align components of a moment: the travelling of Re through the hours of the land of the dead; some unidentified dreamer, possibly the poet, awake at 5 am.; the scribe in antiquity at the moment or writing, whether or not the scribe can fathom what is being inscribed. In the closing lines of the poem Seidman turns to the core narrative of the myth of Osiris and Isis, one which made of her perhaps the most deeply revered god in the Mediterranean. She offers rebirth, she famously gathers the scattered limbs of her brother and does not return him to the life in which he was murdered, but elevates him to the realm of eternal life. The possibility of rebirth is hardly a pressing concern in the larger poem. In “Element” though, Seidman comes close to the notion of transmutation, a notion dear to Whitman and the transcendentalists. The question raised by the poem’s last line, “Reborn or not under the sun,” is Seidman’s distinctive rendering of the promise of much modernist poetry, and of the wide variety of religious speculations that empower so much of modernism, and that makes the new old and the old new. Rebirth is to be imagined here, perhaps by the grace of Whitman, who so eerily resurrects himself from the dead in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and perhaps, should Walt need some help, by way of the elaborate fantasias of occult and hermetic thought that arise at the very mention of the word Egypt. Having precisely qualified his engagement with the more extravagant hopes associated with Egyptian magic and Egyptian lore, Seidman once again draws our attention not to the goddess but to her cult, which would seem to distance the poet from the goddess. But then the cult is packing in initiates all around the country in the America of the late seventies, thanks to that singular contemporary and occluded Pharoah, Henry Kissinger.

Where do we end up in “Cult of Isis,” if not reborn? Are we lingering among the Egyptian proto-proletariat, denied access to the mysteries carved in the coffin and on the walls of a tomb? Are we Freemasons with occult pyramids? Apostles of Nerval? Does Throne/Falcon/Eye continue the revelation of a postmodern art religion, a materialist goddess cult sprung from an occult reading of “A”? It is commonly said that the notion of an existence after death, of rebirth in the netherworld, was developed around the figure of the dead king, and codified in the myth of Osiris who becomes ruler in the underworld. As the legend of Isis and Osiris spread, the democratization of death followed fast. What at first held only for the Pharoah in his journey in the afterlife through the hours of the night onwards a second life in a divine realm, was becoming available to all. Thus, an Egyptian Whitman, fulfilling and evangelizing an Egyptian notion of selfhood, of the “Kuh” or “Khu” Zukofsky concealed in his poem “Hi, Kuh,” and which, at Zukofsky’s death, Seidman announced—an almost 10,000-year tradition of poetry, of what, even if indecipherable, especially when indecipherable, of the soul, “the passage of the soul.”

But what would any religion devised by Hugh Seidman be without a complex qualification? Consider the poem’s next to last moment. The last lines in high romantic mode offer a balance of alarm and wonder. Seidman wants us to think that the interweaving of myth, dream, writing, and rebirth is nothing we can ever be outside of. Within the Objectivist cosmos, we are closer to Oppen than to Zukofsky, closer by way of late Oppen to the guidance of William Blake. Exactly before this exact point, Seidman unveils the credal requirements of his New York Isis devotion:
“Anywhere” instantly universalizes the claim which up until now had kept a sharp focus on New York and ancient Egypt. “One breathes” restricts us to the world of the living, a significant delineation given that we are dealing with an early and elaborate mythology of death. The referent for “the secret” is not clear (How could it be?). The aura of secrecy is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Romantic, Modern, and postmodern configuring of all things Egypt, from Elihu Vedder to H.D. to Philip Lamantia and beyond. But is “secret” the direct object of “breathe”? Or does the second line of the stanza stand as an independent syntactic unit, a contradiction: the secret that allows for no other secrets, which sounds close to a notion out of mystical theology. Seidman is imagining Isis as an unknowable omniscience. Further ambiguities ensue: Is the “secret” a noun? Or is it in fact an adjective modifying “knowing?” The index of indecipherability surrounding the word “secret” triples. Is the “secret” an atmosphere all the living breathe, as they might an aerosol selfhood such as Whitman whiffs from Egyptian flowers, those lilacs in the dooryard to everyone’s beyond? Is the “secret” an agent capable of knowing, such as one might find in various apophatic literatures? Or is the “knowing” both secret and not, both occult and not, both hermetic and not, not secret, and so, as secret, almost negated?

Then Seidman unveils the exception. The feminine divine formally enters the speculation. Her presence might well be a form of Egypto-Objectivist gnosis. Are we mistaken in believing her to be the “secret”? Seidman, as is often the case in his finest moments, is on the edge of theophany, but ambivalent. Ambiguities make it hard to groove on the numinous. The god hangs back. We wonder what to make of the lines: “but / that to believe her as the secret is the exile.” Is the “secret,” once again the object of complex syntactic ambiguity, the poem itself, exploring the act of believing her to be the secret? Or is the poet raising a doubt about something she has communicated, as if she wants us to believe the secret is the exile, but the poet is registering his reluctance, or suspicion, or disbelief, while introducing yet another term so in keeping with various religious and mystical traditions, not the least of which the Judaic, where “the exile” is Egypt. As the poem concludes in 8,000 BC, the Neolithic Revolution in full swing, who knows what name the divine feminine, then, and so now, might take?

Joseph Donahue’s most recent volumes of poetry are Musica Callada and Near Star (Verge Books, 2024), volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida. Disinfluency: Collected Uncollected Poems (1973-2013) is forthcoming from Dos Madres Press. He teaches English at Duke University.