“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.