Frederick Seidel, “The Big Golconda Diamond”

The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal, of the Bronx and Harvard,
Is Joel Arthur Rosenthal of JAR, place Vendôme.
The greatest jeweler of our time
Has brought to Florida from his afe
A big Golconda diamond that is matchless,
So purely truthful it is not for sale, Joel’s favorite, his Cordelia.
His mother in Florida can keep it
If she wants, and she doesn’t want.
Love is mounted on a fragile platinum wire
To make a ring not really suitable for daily wear.

I wore the bonfire on a wire, on loan from Joel,
One sparkling morning long ago in Paris.
I followed it on my hand across the pont des Arts
Like Shakespeare in a trance starting the sonnet sequence.

As a recognition (or endorsement) of the cultural significance of the publication of Poems: 1959-2009, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Frederick Seidel last weekend; the magazine piece addresses, among other things, the long period of silence following his first publication, a silence he explains came about because he was afraid to confront “the expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.”

“Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you that are your subjects. It’s almost as if there’s a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that’s it.“

Other Seidel poems include “Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin” (from The New Yorker), “Prayer” (from Vallejo Nocturno), and “Ode to Spring” (from Poets.org). In addition, the Macmillan page dedicated to Seidel has several audio recordings of the poet reading from his work.

13 April 2009 | poetry |