Seidel's PEACHES GOES IT ALONE: Poetry About Nude Schoolgirls & More...

We profiled the poet Frederick Seidel in The Allure of Nymphets and he continues to write about nympholepsy and age-discrepant attraction in his latest book Peaches Goes It Alone .. 

For example, the poem “Miss Charlotte” is about “undressed” schoolgirls “lying on top” of one another in a dorm-room of an all-girls boarding school, which caused aristocrats to take “cold showers”:

Bring back the all-girls boarding schools for pedigreed girls

Where, morning and night, girls dressed and undressed.

Luxurious lawns and trees rode to hounds.

Horses the girls owned waited in padded stalls. 

Think of the cold showers these aristocrates took.

Think of the dorm-room mirrors which sometimes saw

A cold girl lying on top of a warm girl

While a pretty girl with a pimply face on her bed on her back watched

The scene in the dorm-room reminded me of a scene in the controversial National Bestseller The End of Alice where imprisoned Chappy shared a story about his teen penpal:

She writes of the memory of one particular afternoon [...] The story is of coming into the cabin to collect her tennis racket and finding the two little girls from Louisville, Kentucky [...] lying across the top bunk, head to toe, the brunette’s narrow foot sweeping back and forth across the strawberry blonde’s nipple, the blonde’s jumpsuit unzipped and parted to the waist. When the lovebirds sighted the girl and smiled at her, there was a flash of light like an explosion, as the sun, reflecting off the brunette’s metal tooth-braces [...]

And I was reminded of a story that Humbert related in Lolita about one of Lolita’s tent-mates:

Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. The tent-mate [...] instructed her in various manipulations. [...] I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions? “Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo [...] 

In 2016, Seidel was approximately 80-years-old; thus, his reference in the first two stanzas of “Thanksgiving 2016” to a girl with a “charming” face, a charming voice and a “beautiful ass” who could cure “depression” is revealing:

The girl with the face

As charming as her voice

Has a beautiful ass

Filling out her tan pants.

Depression doesn’t stand a chance

Confronted with this one!

What planet are you on

In your beret, singing?

“Near The New Whitney” is about the poet being “moonstruck” by Emily, a “gently lovely” maître d’, at a “charming restaurant” in the Meatpacking District. But after discussing the transformation of American art, the poet ended the poem with a desirable double entendre:

I drank an after-dinner tumbler of whiskey

Not far from the new Whitney,

A present from the maître d’.

Sweet Lagavulin single malt filled me with infinity

Sixteen years old, while the girl 

Smiled softly

Emily appears again in the fifth and sixth stanzas of “Worst When It’s Poetry”. This time she’s referred to as a “maiden” and “so young”:

There’s an Emily I met downtown recently.

Dante’s Beatrice suddenly appeared to me!

I don’t know her last name.

Dante famously never was the same.

A maiden I don’t know transfigured me

In one brief moment for eternity.

From one brief meeting with someone so young,

Dante translated to a higher sphere and left our days of dung. 

And the book is lightly peppered with stanzas that allude to nympholepsy. For example, in “In Late December”: She’s reading a paperback of Lolita, stealthily, behind the sign. And in “Abusers”: The little girl whose father invaded her/Became a woman who could not outgun/The little girl inside her who’s her father’s wife.

Lastly, here's one of the blurbs from the back of the book:

"There had never been a poet like this one before: the poet of a new contemporary form, a highlight reel-one spectacular feat after another [...]" - Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books

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.