“Napalm,” Hugh Seidman

Has not enough time passed
to spread that jam again?
Sodium palmitate or aluminum soap
candying oil or gasoline.
Canned by the Saran maker,
now pro-Earth in ads.
That joke of: fire cleanses,
like monks washing in flame.
Spontaneous combustion on, say,
Saturday Night Live.
Or, yes then, like God
in the bush that burns.

-from New Poems, available at Ahadada Books.

You don’t hear about Hugh Seidman too often, which is a shame because his poetry is as concise as haiku and as wracked by the world as Ginsberg, clinically cool and unforgiving. Stanley Kunitz draws a comparison to Baudelaire and Glück praises his first collection, Collecting Evidence, as “immediate, absolute, (its) content-driven, disruptive boldness utterly distinct from the meticulous terrorism of most contemporary formal experimentations”.

I’m pretty keen on him too.

The World Doesn’t Need Another Lit Blog

It’s true. It doesn’t. According to wikipedia there are over 112,000,000 blogs around, which comes out to around one blog per sixty people in the world. Sure, by the time this sentence is done at least 60 new babies will have come squawling into the world, but is this really the lit blog for them?

When these chosen 60, be they Chinese, Peruvian, Chilean, South African, come of age will they find this blog, this blog, calibrated painstakingly to suit their taste in prose and poetry?

We say– yes.

When, in far-off 2024, a fresh-faced Parisian lad heads online to figure out whether Hugh Seidman is fucking awesome or totally gay, this blog will be there. When the president of Pakistan’s daughter runs off to marry the president of India’s son several decades from now, this blog will be waiting to advise just which Jesse Ball poem is best for conciliatory weddings. And when the bombs fall from the sky and the curtains fall on human civilization, we will be here to bitch about how lame McSweeney’s has gotten since Spring ‘47.