I mean that the poem, and it’s like a lot of Seidel’s work, dresses his poetry in all the accoutrements of deliberate engagement with issues of class and color and need and responsibility, of inequity and iniquity, and all that equipment ought to be used. The speaker shows no indication that he knows what he’s talking about or why he’s talking about it. He notices a bunch of angles on ethics, but settles for a minimally competent aesthetics, when he could have had both. He’s a compulsively yapping set of dingy teeth.
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