Hugh Seidman: In Memoriam
A Restless Messengers Blog Symposium
A Restless Messengers Blog Symposium
Joseph Donahue
Michael Heller
Burt Kimmelman
Francis Levy
Andre Spears
Henry Weinfield
Antecedents
Sensei
Photo Portfolio
This Restless Messengers symposium is devoted to the life and work of the poet Hugh Seidman (August 1, 1940-November 9, 2023). Hugh was my friend, and when I learned of his passing after a long, increasingly debilitating illness, I knew that I had to honor him with this gathering, which is by far the largest which Restless Messengers has yet to present. The six essays responding to Hugh’s poetry are suffused with love, respect, and critical intelligence. Most were written by those who knew him personally, including longstanding friends and poetic companions. I am also pleased to present two previously unpublished prose texts by Hugh himself, and a portfolio of photographs selected by Hugh’s wife, the painter Jayne Holsinger, without whose help and encouragement I could not have put this symposium together.
Hugh Seidman was born in Brooklyn, attended Erasmus High School, studied briefly at MIT, and then completed his B.A. at Brooklyn Polytech, where he majored in Mathematics. He also received an M.A. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Minnesota, and an M.FA. in Creative Writing from Columbia. At Brooklyn Poly, he studied with Louis Zukofsky, an experience which proved fundamental to his entire poetic career. At Columbia he worked with Adrienne Rich, who became another crucial mentor, and Stanley Kunitz, who selected his first book, Collecting Evidence (1970) for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Hugh went on to publish six more volumes of poetry; his last collection, Status of the Mourned (Dispatches Edition/Spuyten Duyvil), appeared in 2018. He was a visiting poet at a number of universities, had residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, and received fellowships from the NEA and the New York Foundation for the Arts. But his background in mathematics, physics, and computer science remained a significant part of his life, since he also worked regularly as an independent technical documentation specialist and consultant. He married Jayne Holsinger in 1990. In 1998 he started training in Seido karate, and attained a fourth degree black belt at age seventy-six. In 1970, he moved to an apartment at Westbeth Artists Housing, one of the original tenants, and lived there the rest of his life. Such are the facts, and for more personal detail, I refer you to an interview that Hugh gave apropos of work and life at Westbeth in 2013.
I became aware of Hugh’s poetry in the late eighties or early nineties, partly through the recommendation of Michael Heller, who (as he tells us in his essay), was friends with Hugh since 1962, and partly because Ross Feld, the novelist, editor, and self-styled “recovering poet” urged me to read Throne/Falcon/Eye (1982), in which the poet’s fast-paced life in artsy Manhattan and his memories of a Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn intertwine with ancient Egyptian myth. (See Joseph Donahue’s inspired analysis of this uncanny masterpiece.) My first contact with Hugh was shortly after I reviewed People Live, They Have Lives (1992); I still have his letter (11 Nov. 1993) thanking me: “Always gratifying to know that someone I don’t know has taken the time to write so positively about the work and the book.” Two years later, when James Reiss of Miami University Press published Hugh’s Selected Poems 1965-1995, I arranged for Hugh to read at Xavier. He and Jayne stayed with me, and Hugh gave one of the most electrifying readings I have ever heard. As the years passed, I would visit Hugh and Jayne in New York, and in 2013, I had the pleasure of reading with him and Michael Heller at Westbeth.
Manhattan, 10 Oct. 2013. Left to right: NF, Hugh, Jayne Holsinger, Michael Heller.
What do I find so compelling about the poetry of Hugh Seidman? In my book Not One of Them In Place (2001), I wrote years ago about what we could call “second generation Objectivists”—Seidman, Heller, and Harvey Shapiro—and the ways in which they integrated the poetry and thought of their precursors into a startlingly edgy, wise, and unmistakably Jewish kind of poem. Here I would prefer to set aside critical categories and literary history, in order to get at Hugh’s unmistakable style. But Hugh is way ahead of me. Consider these few sentences from the micro-essay that appears on the back of People Live, They Have Lives:
Do these poems struggle? driven to the language that cannot change a life—until it does. Or as might be said: poetry doesn’t care about us.
At the same time, the syntactical object interests endlessly. At first an almost unbelievable order. Then one sees (hears) that it fails…
And so love, death, and rebirth are said over and over, as they have been said over and over, because the speaker knows nothing else to say…
The strange, existential dilemma of the poet: we are “driven to the language” because the circumstances of our lives demand it. But the poem is indifferent to us, however “the syntactical object interests endlessly.” Will we get it right? No, never. And yet we have no choice: we must go on speaking of “love, death, and rebirth.” Every poem of Hugh’s is suffused with this knowledge; in every line, one senses the struggle, as life’s disasters (which is to say, life itself) are shaped, often under enormous pressure, into the syntactical object. Thus the poem is made.
The ellipses, the enjambments, the syncopated rhythms, the off-kilter rhymes, the declarative sentences that collapse in upon themselves, the abrupt shifts in tone, the jarring urban imagery—these are the features of a Seidman poem. But perhaps above all, there is an enduring suspicion of what Hugh calls “The Great Ego of the Words” (in People Live, They have Lives), the title of a poem to a lost love:
I don’t know why we need the words.
Today I barely wrote one,
though you had been the dream of each.
Any were enough, if I could come home to you.
But I don’t know why for so many
nothing can be said but the words.
And I don’t know why so many suffer
in this world, though I know that this poem
has no right to name them.
The words can carry the dream forward, and that is the great ego of the words. Yet in the face of the suffering of the world, words are not enough. The poem can never contain this suffering, it cannot name the many who suffer, nor should the poet ever believe that it can. This idea, which I believe to be fundamental to Hugh’s approach to the poem, is akin to what George Oppen writes in “A Language of New York”: “Possible / To use / Words provided one treat them / As enemies…” Hugh does not treat words as enemies (neither does Oppen), but he does understand and respect the limits of language (Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”). The scrupulous care he takes with his words are in evidence in each and every poem, as he works from the beginning to the end of his career to achieve what he knows to be impossible: “The total life / in the nuance of a line” (“Tale of Genji,” from Collecting Evidence).
Hugh Seidman was born in Brooklyn, attended Erasmus High School, studied briefly at MIT, and then completed his B.A. at Brooklyn Polytech, where he majored in Mathematics. He also received an M.A. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Minnesota, and an M.FA. in Creative Writing from Columbia. At Brooklyn Poly, he studied with Louis Zukofsky, an experience which proved fundamental to his entire poetic career. At Columbia he worked with Adrienne Rich, who became another crucial mentor, and Stanley Kunitz, who selected his first book, Collecting Evidence (1970) for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Hugh went on to publish six more volumes of poetry; his last collection, Status of the Mourned (Dispatches Edition/Spuyten Duyvil), appeared in 2018. He was a visiting poet at a number of universities, had residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, and received fellowships from the NEA and the New York Foundation for the Arts. But his background in mathematics, physics, and computer science remained a significant part of his life, since he also worked regularly as an independent technical documentation specialist and consultant. He married Jayne Holsinger in 1990. In 1998 he started training in Seido karate, and attained a fourth degree black belt at age seventy-six. In 1970, he moved to an apartment at Westbeth Artists Housing, one of the original tenants, and lived there the rest of his life. Such are the facts, and for more personal detail, I refer you to an interview that Hugh gave apropos of work and life at Westbeth in 2013.
I became aware of Hugh’s poetry in the late eighties or early nineties, partly through the recommendation of Michael Heller, who (as he tells us in his essay), was friends with Hugh since 1962, and partly because Ross Feld, the novelist, editor, and self-styled “recovering poet” urged me to read Throne/Falcon/Eye (1982), in which the poet’s fast-paced life in artsy Manhattan and his memories of a Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn intertwine with ancient Egyptian myth. (See Joseph Donahue’s inspired analysis of this uncanny masterpiece.) My first contact with Hugh was shortly after I reviewed People Live, They Have Lives (1992); I still have his letter (11 Nov. 1993) thanking me: “Always gratifying to know that someone I don’t know has taken the time to write so positively about the work and the book.” Two years later, when James Reiss of Miami University Press published Hugh’s Selected Poems 1965-1995, I arranged for Hugh to read at Xavier. He and Jayne stayed with me, and Hugh gave one of the most electrifying readings I have ever heard. As the years passed, I would visit Hugh and Jayne in New York, and in 2013, I had the pleasure of reading with him and Michael Heller at Westbeth.
What do I find so compelling about the poetry of Hugh Seidman? In my book Not One of Them In Place (2001), I wrote years ago about what we could call “second generation Objectivists”—Seidman, Heller, and Harvey Shapiro—and the ways in which they integrated the poetry and thought of their precursors into a startlingly edgy, wise, and unmistakably Jewish kind of poem. Here I would prefer to set aside critical categories and literary history, in order to get at Hugh’s unmistakable style. But Hugh is way ahead of me. Consider these few sentences from the micro-essay that appears on the back of People Live, They Have Lives:
Do these poems struggle? driven to the language that cannot change a life—until it does. Or as might be said: poetry doesn’t care about us.
At the same time, the syntactical object interests endlessly. At first an almost unbelievable order. Then one sees (hears) that it fails…
And so love, death, and rebirth are said over and over, as they have been said over and over, because the speaker knows nothing else to say…
The strange, existential dilemma of the poet: we are “driven to the language” because the circumstances of our lives demand it. But the poem is indifferent to us, however “the syntactical object interests endlessly.” Will we get it right? No, never. And yet we have no choice: we must go on speaking of “love, death, and rebirth.” Every poem of Hugh’s is suffused with this knowledge; in every line, one senses the struggle, as life’s disasters (which is to say, life itself) are shaped, often under enormous pressure, into the syntactical object. Thus the poem is made.
The ellipses, the enjambments, the syncopated rhythms, the off-kilter rhymes, the declarative sentences that collapse in upon themselves, the abrupt shifts in tone, the jarring urban imagery—these are the features of a Seidman poem. But perhaps above all, there is an enduring suspicion of what Hugh calls “The Great Ego of the Words” (in People Live, They have Lives), the title of a poem to a lost love:
I don’t know why we need the words.
Today I barely wrote one,
though you had been the dream of each.
Any were enough, if I could come home to you.
But I don’t know why for so many
nothing can be said but the words.
And I don’t know why so many suffer
in this world, though I know that this poem
has no right to name them.
The words can carry the dream forward, and that is the great ego of the words. Yet in the face of the suffering of the world, words are not enough. The poem can never contain this suffering, it cannot name the many who suffer, nor should the poet ever believe that it can. This idea, which I believe to be fundamental to Hugh’s approach to the poem, is akin to what George Oppen writes in “A Language of New York”: “Possible / To use / Words provided one treat them / As enemies…” Hugh does not treat words as enemies (neither does Oppen), but he does understand and respect the limits of language (Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”). The scrupulous care he takes with his words are in evidence in each and every poem, as he works from the beginning to the end of his career to achieve what he knows to be impossible: “The total life / in the nuance of a line” (“Tale of Genji,” from Collecting Evidence).
—Norman Finkelstein