Status of the Mourned: Taking Account

by Burt Kimmelman

Years before I met Hugh Seidman, I’d found his poems. They seemed to be what I’d want to do with words, if I knew enough about how to use them to render sheer elegance. Hugh became a kind of big brother; I relished his friendship, and his poems that contained a depth of feeling indistinguishable from their acuity of thought—embodied within that elegance. The intelligence of his work, moreover, was one with its moral clarity. As our friendship deepened, so did my critical understanding of the poetry that was integral to this person I’d get to hang around with sometimes.

Was his legacy a question Hugh put to himself, late in life, when he was assembling Status of the Mourned (2018), his final poetry collection? A poet’s late poems are normally not the career best. There are few exceptions, Yeats most famously. Hugh’s final public outing is another. Status of the Mourned was not just the next milestone in this poet’s long life. The collection looks back in an essential accounting of his entire life. It gathers the skeins of it together as a culmination of this poet’s verbal artistry, while its intention is to remember, sometimes to valorize those whose lives inflected his own.

How do his last poems stack up against those of his two teachers, Louis Zukofsky and Adrienne Rich? Their final outings left readers scratching their heads—a tepid reception of Rich’s Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, a nonplussed reaction to Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. I doubt, though, Hugh felt perplexed by his mentor’s accomplishment in this book. “L.R.” starts off with its own sets of five-word lines—a loving gesture in the mode of imitation.

Our usual expectations are turned inside out. Rich had abetted Hugh’s escape, at a certain juncture in his life, from Zuk’s influence. The ironic result, as Status of the Mourned demonstrates, is the student’s return of sorts to Objectivist poetics. The poet Bill Zavatzky has sent Hugh a recording of Zukofsky reading from his work; it becomes the catalyst for Hugh’s retrospection:
Hugh documents the experience of living within a conundrum. As the poem goes on, he arrives at an account of his early years, when Zuk was all the more impressive:
Another poet who emerges from the Objectivist tradition, Michael Heller, helps us to comprehend Hugh’s healthy skepticism about language. Hugh first met him when they each had realized that poetry was to be their life’s vocation. Language’s efficacy, including its limits, were a core concern for both George Oppen (Heller’s mentor) and Zukofsky. The able poet is aware of words’ limitations.

An insight into the nature of language, shared by these four poets, underwrites “The Great Ego of the Words” (in Hugh’s People Live, They Have Lives [1992]). The poem acknowledges a creative tension in which a word is tempered by alienation from it:
In asking “why we need the words,” the poet implicitly treats them as abject things, setting the tone for this dramatic monologue in which language’s power is characterized as residing apart from the language user.

In “Zuk Tape” (quoted, in part, above), the dramatic premise—Hugh’s listening to the tape, hearing the master’s voice from long before—lets us see the poem’s speaker stirred by remembrance; he becomes the acolyte once again:
What ultimately has Zukofsky imparted to him?
Words are the portal to becoming human. Shaped by language, Zukofsky leads the young poet forward. He encourages him to pare away what keeps us from seeing the actual, pure poem (he once advised him: “cut cut cut”).

Hugh’s relationship to Rich was of another order. She reshaped him in her image. In “In an Ill-Lit Formal Space,” the first poem of his diptych to her, he takes a different tack. He sees in her childhood a condition he knows personally: a parent’s unintentional or intentional neglect of a child. The experience of neglect haunted her later in life.

He’s studying photos of the adult Rich—she’s posing with her peers yet not being taken as their equal, having the effect of reviving her painful early years:
(The words in italics come from Rich’s writing—Hugh’s way of recalling her efforts to be taken seriously.) He sees his own image in hers. “Lava” pointedly evokes his mother:
The outrage over what is clearly this woman’s mistreatment of her toddler (as witnessed in a city park) hammers at us through brief, taut and pulsing lines. Psychological cleaving between child and parent places any hope of happiness out of reach. The poem’s jarring observations are palpable in their muscular rhythms (e.g., “Yet Mom spat: rotten brat”). They’re suffused with the grown son’s disgust and sorrow.

The counterweight to “Lava” is “Old Letter” (the opening poem in Status of the Mourned), which sadly remembers Hugh’s father (the son’s disappointment lingers throughout the book):
Can a poetry of remembrance, can any poem, ever heal the wound? He tells Rich, in the final line of his homage to her, “I labor because of you with the hope of poetry.”

Equally crucial, sometimes heartbreaking poems in this final testament are its many dirges and eulogies. There is a poem honoring Marla Ruzicka, whose selfless, suicidal activism Hugh admires: “nicknamed Bubbles in Kabul,” she was “immolated by a God car on the Baghdad airport road // her last outcry: “I’m alive.” The darkness of elegy completely suffuses a group of poems about Ed Smith, Hugh’s friend since boyhood, who suffers a horrific death, having lived a noble life. The idea of nobility struck down by death adds greatly to the book’s many somber remembrances.

“Grand Mal,” the Smith group’s linchpin poem, stages Hugh’s inevitable sense of helplessness in the face of Ed’s demise. The poem’s metaphysics is nearly intolerable. The speaker looks on at his friend’s death throes, in a despair that’s become heedless devotion—he’s helpless in the face of Ed’s outsized affliction. The speaker’s grief is the grief of the world:
A particular trope materializing in “Grand Mal” recurs throughout the book, first with the phrase “buckled metal,” which serves as the emblem of Smith’s defeat in the face of the world’s huge, elemental forces mimicking his primal fight simply to breathe. The fundamental condition of human struggle against vast natural forces—“convulsed ocean the metastatic sky”—is compared within a gruesome parallel drama: oceans have ebbed, flowed, and surged, well before humanity’s presence. A single human life may end with neither hope nor dignity. Human extinction is always possible. Hugh somehow would answer for his dear friend’s ordeal, as if responsible for his wretched end.

Hugh is never content with simply forging an elegant poem for its own sake. Especially in his late poems, we see him inserting the thinnest of needles through the flesh of the situation, and on into its marrow, bringing to light that rare percept, one the reader may find embarrassing and disturbing. The unbearable dilemma is expressed succinctly in “Frank Canned, Joe Upped”—another of the Smith poems—as a single, self-sustained line, and as a non-sequitur: “Rage: a steel bar to bite.” The line floats alone on the page between couplets.

Similar to the compression in “Marla Ruzicka,” its density is a figure of the existential atrocity at the core of “Grand Mal”; the “steel bar” becomes the “buckled metal” of the later poem (metal punning with mettle). The trope’s subliminal associations operate in like fashion in still another poem that also anticipates “Grand Mal,” titled “Melancholia”:
The “clamped, adamant jaw,” here, is the earlier poem’s “rage,” the bitten “steel bar.” The loss is irremediable. Smith’s death looms so large it becomes, in essence, the matter of the entire book, and its sense of loss will be irremediable. The poems about Smith’s fatal cancer remind us of our modern affliction. the ministrations of contemporary medicine becoming their own insults.

Suffering, which must result in death, becomes the speaker’s absolute zero. “I did not understand a good death until my friend died and I had no friend,” he avers in “Testament,” never looking away from the torment. Through loss, though, he holds himself and everyone within the human communion. Dying with dignity becomes paramount.

The final poem in Status of the Mourned is different in kind. Its declaration is an unalloyed avowal of love. The poems about Hugh’s parents, set pieces at the beginning of the book, represent an entrance into life, giving symbolic birth to the rest of the collection. In contrast, “The Longing of the New World for the Old World,” a symphonic paean to a life held within affirmed commitment, offers closure. Formalistically unlike the rest of the book, this last statement, coming late in Hugh’s life, reflects back upon his parents when they were no longer young. The lingering, last poem begins with what becomes a refrain that leads into an account of spousal faith: “I keep my post for you at the harbor of the new world. // I go down at dusk and watch the sun drop… // My father landed a hundred years ago from the old world. / Take care, come home, as they say, safe and sound. // I keep my post for you at the bend of the continent.”

He’s addressing his wife Jayne, who’s in Europe:
The conceit of this love poem poses a set of questions to Jayne as well as to the reader: “For what do people of the old world long? / Why do they show the American film in the park below the Ferris wheel in the Prater?” The answer here becomes a pledge of constancy: “I keep my post for you, my river post.” He looks out on the Hudson River, from Manhattan’s southern tip. His “body is breached by love.”

Burt Kimmelman’s recent books are Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha’s Axial Art (2022), Steeple at Sunrise: New Poems (2022), and Visible at Dusk: Selected Essays (2021). He is a distinguished professor of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Some passages in the present essay are modified portions from his consideration of Hugh Seidman’s career and late work, which can be found at the Jacket2 website, https://jacket2.org/article/dead-and-living.