{"id":191,"date":"2009-04-13T18:52:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T23:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/13\/frederick-seidel-big-golconda-diamond\/"},"modified":"2009-04-13T18:54:08","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T23:54:08","slug":"frederick-seidel-big-golconda-diamond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/13\/frederick-seidel-big-golconda-diamond\/","title":{"rendered":"Frederick Seidel, &#8220;The Big Golconda Diamond&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image192\" src=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/frederick-seidel.jpg\" alt=\"frederick-seidel.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal, of the Bronx and Harvard,<br \/>\nIs Joel Arthur Rosenthal of JAR, place Vend&#244;me.<br \/>\nThe greatest jeweler of our time<br \/>\nHas brought to Florida from his afe<br \/>\nA big Golconda diamond that is matchless,<br \/>\nSo purely truthful it is not for sale, Joel&#8217;s favorite, his Cordelia.<br \/>\nHis mother in Florida can keep it<br \/>\nIf she wants, and she doesn&#8217;t want.<br \/>\nLove is mounted on a fragile platinum wire<br \/>\nTo make a ring not really suitable for daily wear.<\/p>\n<p>I wore the bonfire on a wire, on loan from Joel,<br \/>\nOne sparkling morning long ago in Paris.<br \/>\nI followed it on my hand across the pont des Arts<br \/>\nLike Shakespeare in a trance starting the sonnet sequence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As a recognition (or endorsement) of the cultural significance of the publication of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/0374126550\"><i>Poems: 1959-2009<\/i><\/a>, the <i>New York Times Magazine<\/i> ran <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/04\/12\/magazine\/12Seidel-t.html\">a profile of Frederick Seidel<\/a> 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 &#8220;the expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;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 <i>your<\/i> subjects. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost as if there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a moment when you decide, <i>Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way .\u00e2\u20ac\u2030.\u00e2\u20ac\u2030. well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s it.<\/i>&#8220;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Other Seidel poems include &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/fiction\/poetry\/2008\/10\/20\/081020po_poem_seidel\">Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin<\/a>&#8221; (from <i>The New Yorker<\/i>), &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/arjay.typepad.com\/vallejo_nocturno\/2009\/03\/frederick-seidel.html\">Prayer<\/a>&#8221; (from <i>Vallejo Nocturno<\/i>), and &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\/viewmedia.php\/prmMID\/20600\">Ode to Spring<\/a>&#8221; (from Poets.org). In addition, the <a href=\"http:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/author\/frederickseidel\">Macmillan page dedicated to Seidel<\/a> has several audio recordings of the poet reading from his work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Master Jeweler Joel Rosenthal, of the Bronx and Harvard, Is Joel Arthur Rosenthal of JAR, place Vend&#244;me. 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&#8217;s favorite, his Cordelia. His mother in Florida can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}