On "I Do Not Know Myself": A Poem by Hugh Seidman

by Henry Weinfield

(originally published in Poetry [Feb. 2001]; Somebody Stand Up and Sing [2005])

---

“I Do Not Know Myself” is, in one sense, a completely transparent or even naked poem and, in another, one that is completely opaque. This paradox is at the source of its mystery and its resonance. Although the poem is naked, it is not at all “confessional”; it has nothing to confess because what it arrives at and attempts to articulate is, precisely, an opacity. It reminds me in some ways of the poetry of William Bronk, but, unlike Bronk, who also writes poems of unknowingness, Seidman is not interested in making (and actually unwilling to make) philosophical declarations that pertain to humanity. Nor does he speculate on whether the self exists: he simply asserts in the opening line, “I do not know myself.” The lack of punctuation (which in the hands of so many poets is a mere convention or cliché) in this case signals that we are in the open.

The poem’s language is as stripped down and spare as it could possibly be. I am struck, for example, by the a-grammaticality of “But not enlightened” or “And remember dream.” In the first of these lines, the missing word is “am”; here the verb would supply a positioning somewhat on the order of the Cartesian cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” but the poet has no interest in locating us in these terms. In the second, it is the article “the” that is omitted; here the omission has the effect, it seems to me, of making the dreamer inseparable from the dream. Omissions or elisions of this kind often do violence to the language, but not here: here the awkwardness (if awkwardness it is) becomes eloquent.

The poem contains a good deal of word-packing, but in a way that is entirely unobtrusive. For instance, “dark” occurs four times: twice in the second line, once in the middle of the poem, and then as the poem’s final word. And notice the subtlety of the rhymes, including internal and slant rhymes as well: “I do not know myself / I go to dark and am of dark”; “Year on year it is on . . . It would never be done…Once I was a son…

“I go to dark and am of dark”: Is there an echo here of Prospero’s speech at the end of The Tempest when he says of Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.275-76)? What Prospero says of Caliban is true of us all, but Seidman doesn’t need to say so. Yet “I Do Not Know Myself” is a poem that not only concerns darkness and ignorance, but also love. “If I lived / Till the end of the world,” he writes, “It would never be done.”

HENRY WEINFIELD’s most recent collections of poetry are As the Crow Flies (2021) and An Alphabet (2022), both published by Dos Madres Press. His translation, The Labyrinth of Love: Selected Sonnets and Other Poems by Pierre de Ronsard, appeared in 2021 from Parlor Press. He is currently working on a translation of the selected poems of Giacomo Leopardi. He is Emeritus Professor of Liberal Studies and English at the University of Notre Dame and lives in New York City.