Bill Z’s note: Hughie here’s Louis
Oddly craving solace of his voice (decades unheard)
Day past the lashing New Years day rain (2003)
(Tape time: A-20 done, 4 to come)
Lines in my head all my adult life
Blown-dust texts pulled from shelves
Shorter Poems
("Hear her clear mirror"
"Come shadow come")
Bottom
A
Catullus
("Miserable Catullus" to "Miss her, Catullus?"
Paradigm of his speech/song poetics)
Barely and Widely
Almost "nerdy" (as one might today say)
Characteristic world-weary sighs
He was born very young in a world that was already very old
As far as dying is concerned
Nobody ever lives through that, said a philosopher
I did my work
I was married
I had a son
As if his riff is the most natural thing in the world
As if any would be as interested as he is in it
Objectivist?
That was forced on me
I had no program
It was all very simple
You live in a world
I don’t see how you can escape it
Even if you escape it
You’re still living in some kind of situation
You make things in it
You make it with the tools of your own particular craft
In this case words
I feel them as very tangible
Solid so to speak
Sometimes they liquefy
Sometimes they airefy
But those are still existent things you see
(Continues, New Stanza)
(And finally after over 40 years
I catch "little wrists"’ sexual "do")
The brain errs the eye sees
(As per revered Shakespeare)
The form is in that sense organic
All of one’s life and this is the life
And for the rest
Nobody else’s business
(Discontent? lament?)
It’s written in one’s time and place
It refers to other times and places as one grows
Whatever way one grows
Takes in
Hopes to survive
Say, well, like Bach’s music
It can go down it can go up
That’s the interest of it
And all to come through the form of the thing
To hold it together
I don’t know
The reader will have to judge
100-year-old World Wide Web face
(Would fame have amazed him?)
"Obscure" man/poet I loved
Total penultimate mesh of words ad infinitum pre silence
—Hugh Seidman
January 2004
NYC
