{"id":69438,"date":"2014-04-08T17:09:51","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T21:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=69438"},"modified":"2014-04-09T16:38:30","modified_gmt":"2014-04-09T20:38:30","slug":"arabia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/08\/arabia\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cArabia\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight, at our Spring Revel, we\u2019ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we\u2019ve been looking back at the work Seidel has published in <\/i>The Paris Review throughout his career.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"Zanzibar_Sunset\"<\/a>

A sunset in Zanzibar. Photo: hobbs_luton, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

When I first read \u201cArabia<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in our Summer 2011 issue, I was sitting on a rickety chair looking out at Lake Michigan. It was a gorgeous day in late June, a twenty-one-year-old cat was asleep at my feet, and I\u2019d just started to sweat in the sun when I read the poem\u2019s first lines:<\/p>\n

\n

I move my body meat smell next to yours,
Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours\u2014
Sex tropics as a way to not be dead.
I don\u2019t know who we are except in bed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This was before I\u2019d read much of Seidel\u2019s work, and these lines felt outrageous to me, especially that long row of monosyllables, \u201cas a way to not be dead.\u201d It was the perfect poem to read on a summer vacation\u2014as long as it went on, I was living in a kind of lewd Zanzibar of the the mind.<\/p>\n

With its ostentatious rhymes (Labia<\/i> with Arabia<\/i>), its nods and winks to the politics of the day (\u201cThe president of the United States \/ Is caught between those two tectonic plates, \/ Republicans and Democrats\u201d) and its flagrantly oversexed images (a cowboy sipping honey from a pair of sweet lips), \u201cArabia\u201d now reads to me like vintage Seidel\u2014the way it forces the visceral and the bodily to coexist with the elegant, the faint taunt that comes in a line like \u201cI\u2019m happy staring at what makes me stare.\u201d It also contains what you might read as an incidental summary of Seidel\u2019s poetics: \u201cIt\u2019s politics, it\u2019s tropics, and it\u2019s warm.\u201d (And it is, like sex tropics, a great way not to be dead.) After that first stanza, it continues:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ll tell you someone I\u2019m not happy with\u2014
But no I won\u2019t. I won\u2019t destroy the myth.
The president of the United States
Is caught between those two tectonic plates,<\/p>\n

Republicans and Democrats, the nude
Alternatives to naked solitude.
It\u2019s politics, it\u2019s tropics, and it\u2019s warm
Enough to arm the sunrise with a car alarm<\/p>\n

That\u2019s going off and starts the earthquake shake
And shiver, shiver, of the sobbing steak.
O sweet tectonic fault line and sweet lips
Exuding honey that the cowboy sips.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole poem here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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When I first read \u201cArabia,\u201d which appeared in our Summer 2011 issue, I was sitting on a rickety […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13168],"tags":[13479,712,7221,165,13048,2068],"class_list":["post-69438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seidelathon","tag-arabia","tag-frederick-seidel","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-revel-2014","tag-the-spring-revel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRead Frederick Seidel\u2019s Poem \u201cArabia\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 8, 2014 \u2013 Tonight, at our Spring Revel, we\u2019ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. 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