Frederick Seidel - Career

Career

In 1962, his first book, Final Solutions, was chosen by a jury of Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz, and Robert Lowell for an award sponsored by the 92nd Street Y, with a $1,500 prize. However, both the association and the publisher rejected the manuscript for a variety of reasons; one being that, in their opinion, "matter in one of the poems libeled a noted living person"; and another being that the national head of the YMHA/YWHA expressed concern that some of the poems were "anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic," a claim Seidel considered preposterous. When Seidel refused to make requested changes to his work, the prize was withdrawn and the promise of publication revoked. Bogan, Kunitz, and Lowell also resigned in protest.

This incident, in which Seidel's poetry offended readers, was a defining moment in his career, and one that he would repeat in subsequent books by consciously trying to offend--or at least, to shock--his readers (although none of his subsequent books caused anywhere near the same degree of controversy that his first book did). Random House published the book the following year, but seventeen years would pass before Seidel published another work. His second book, Sunrise, was the 1980 Lamont Poetry Selection. His book Going Fast was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

His collection, The Cosmos Poems, was commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History to celebrate the opening of the new Hayden Planetarium in 2000, and he won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry in 2002. His collection Ooga-Booga was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the 2007 International Griffin Poetry Prize. A limited run of his most recent collection of new verse, Evening Man was published in 2008. The following year saw the publication of the career-spanning anthology Poems:1959-2009.