Two poets
Archived article from Feb 8, 2002
Rutgers is rich in poetry with a strong cadre of well-regarded poets among the faculty and staff. Among them are Barry Seiler in Newark and Joseph Barbarese in Camden.
BARRY SEILER
By Douglas Frank
Barry Seiler remembers the moment when he became interested in poetry.
"I was leaving the Forest Hills public library in Queens with an armful of novels, and I ran into the smartest kid in my school. He asked me what I was reading, and when I told him, he said he never heard of any of them.
"But he had this one big book under his arm, and he said, 'I like to keep an anthology of poetry by my bedside.' And off he went."
Feeling one-upped, Seiler made his way over to the poetry section, where he randomly pulled out the collected poems of A. E. Housman.
"I started to read, and I knew immediately that I could do this. At first, I was terrible at it, but I felt I had the knack. It took me decades to learn how to do it. Literally."
So decades later Barry Seiler has just published "Frozen Falls" (University of Akron Press), his fourth book of poetry and his third in the Akron Series in Poetry. For his work, he was recently awarded a $7,000 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Seiler is one of only 161 artists chosen as a fellow from more than 3,200 applicants.
Seiler, an assistant instructor of English on the Newark campus, has been teaching composition and literature since 1984-85, his day job. He's well aware of the rigors of writing poetry in America.
Fellowships and published books aside, poetry, he acknowledges, is not particularly financially rewarding, unlike some other forms of artistic endeavor. "There is an old joke that there are more poets than there are people who read poetry, but it's the work I'm given to do, and I love the work."
His current volume, he says, refers to falls and falling: the season, waterfalls, falling on the street, the fall in the garden, "all sorts of falls appear in the book." He describes this latest as his "mid-life book, dealing with time passing and my increasing awareness of my mortality and trying to come to terms with that."
Seiler says he equally loves teaching and running a competition to encourage young poets. He describes the Rutgers-Newark New Jersey High School Poetry Contest as the "best thing that I do."
The annual competition, open to all high school students in New Jersey, attracts more than 600 entries containing some 3,000 to 4,000 poems, all of which he and two other judges read before selecting 20 winners, who read their work at a special reception.
"We know more about the inner life of New Jersey teenagers than anyone should be allowed to know," he says with a laugh. "But they're wonderful, some clearly at the beginning of poetry careers if they want to have it.
"And I'm just sort of shocked at how good they are. Better than I was in college. Some better than I was in grad school. The night of the reception when they read, it's just the best night of the year for me."
My Father's Body
By Barry Seiler
My father's body is in me now.
We are two awkward dancers pushed together,
locked in embrace until the song's end.
Since childhood we have hated each other,
danced the wary dance of father and son.
That voice that spun in his head, it spins
now in mine, that monosyllabic song
of wanting to be anywhere but here.
His gestures push their way through mine:
the way his fingers touch his forehead,
part headache, part disbelief,
the way he waves his hand dismissively.
His face claims a place in mine:
that glance of insufficiency,
that sideways glance of disdain.
Excerpt from Elections
By Barry Seiler
1
Stoned on Keats, we longed for
the dizzying glamour of early death,
a little. How quickly the poems came,
pastiches of the so-so, whose ranks
we desired to swell. Don't worry,
our professors assured us,
continued...
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