Interview With the Poet Frederick Seidel, the Author of “So What”

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

There isn’t one. The true answer is in a comfortable chair.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

I’ve learned everything and not very much. Not recently, but when I began writing poetry the two poets who taught and influenced me the most were Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell. In the case of Pound, the incomprehensible music of it, the reach and the size of the ambition, and the way the poetry finds moments of great simplicity and sweetness. In the case of Lowell, so many different things I learned and imitated from him. And otherwise it’s been many poets, everybody.

What books are on your night stand?

I like that — “night stand” — old-fashioned. Right now: Yukio Mishima’s book “Patriotism,” a silly piece of work; “The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz”; the essays of Frank Kermode. Around as well are “Voyage in the Dark,” by Jean Rhys, and Joseph Roth’s novel “Flight Without End.” “The Little Auto,” a children’s book by Lois Lenski. “The Rest Is Noise,” by Alex Ross, and Louis Menand’s “The Free World.” “Skyfaring,” by Mark Vanhoenacker — I have a thing about speed, about flying, motorcycles, Formula 1, but especially motorcycles. I’ve written a lot of poems that I suppose are unusual for including motorcycles in them, with the emphasis on Italian ones, and a particular joy in the beauty and vast speed of them. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bologna near the Ducati factory, which made a racing motorcycle for me.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

I must have as a boy. I remember very much enjoying Maurice Girodias’s banned books in Paris that included Henry Miller and other distinguished authors. Girodias was himself a naughty delight. He printed the unprintable.

What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

I suppose Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” My favorite of his novels, a work of genius. I’m not a big reader-laugher.

The last book that made you furious?

“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz” made me furious, the thought of his tragic life. The first poems are marvelous, and how much trouble there is with the enormous rest of the book. Such a gifted man, and so terrible a life.