Famous Ephebophile: Poet Frederick Seidel

Poet Frederick Seidel

I wrote in The Allure of Nymphets that according Wyatt Mason of the New York Times, a favorite subject of poets for centuries has been man’s attraction to young women. Poet Frederick Seidel is no exception.

In Ooga-Booga (2006), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, was a Griffin Poetry Prize finalist, and a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice, Seidel wrote in the poem “Climbing Everest”:

But this young woman is young. We kiss.

It’s almost incest when it gets to this.

This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.

In Poems 1959-2009 (2009), Seidel wrote in “Do You Doha?” about breast-less little girls that posed seductively:

DANDELIONS, VIOLETS, ROSES: Little girls in various poses.

Titless teases and their diseases.

  

Somehow I got a half-priced paperback copy of, Nice Weather (2012), Seidel's latest book of poetry, at Strand yesterday. According to Amazon and the girl at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, the paperback wasn't due out until the 10th. 

Keeping with his ephebophile ways, Seidel wrote in the first and last stanzas of "School Days" Pretending to Translate Sappho:

The mother of the woman I currently

Like to spank, I'm not kidding,

Was my girlfriend at Harvard.

The mother looked like a goddess

And as a matter of fact majored at Radcliffe in Greek

When I finally got the goddess 

Into my student bed,

The beauty of her nineteen-year-old body

Practically made me deaf, so loud

I leaked, My arrogant boy burst into tears. 

In the first stanza of  "Victory Parade" he wrote:

My girlfriend is a miracle.

She's so young but she's so beautiful.

So is her new bikini trim,

A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim.