From

THE SUN

Thursday, April 25, 2002
Baltimore, Maryland

N.Y. poet had Baltimore roots

The Pratt celebrates a New York poet whose roots are in Baltimore

By ROB HIAASEN, SUN STAFF

…With apologies to Baltimore, Eli Siegel was a New Yorker…of Greenwich Village, who wrote profound, often lightning-quick (and funny) poetry. True, Siegel did get his first library card in 1911 at the Enoch Pratt Library, graduated from Baltimore City College and used his Baltimore childhood as backdrop to some of his poems….

He spent 60 years writing poems, including what’s considered the shortest poem in the English language. “Meant most seriously,” Siegel’s poem “One Question” was written in 1924:

“The first time I read it, I thought, ‘How, in two words, did he get [to] the depth of the deepest question?'” says Devorah Tarrow, a consultant at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation,…the school of thought founded by the poet. Tarrow and others from the foundation will read from Siegel’s work at 2 p.m. Sunday at Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Wheeler Auditorium….

In notes about his work and in his lectures, Siegel ruminated on the “having-to-do-withness” inherent in Aesthetic Realism: “A person is a tremendous and concentrated drama of sameness and difference, isness and elseness .”…

“He had the desire to be completely fair to all things and people and to be exact about who people are and what things are,” Tarrow says.

Siegel was exact about cats. His self-titled “pussycat poems” collection included “Poem to a Cat”:

“How it has seemed cats have to do with so much!” Siegel wrote in his 1957 collection, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems.

The title poem showcased Siegel’s unspoiled and expansive sense of America and the human landscape. Moved by youthful afternoons spent in Druid Hill Park, Siegel in 1922 wrote the Bartlett’s-enshrined “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” having never stepped foot in Montana. His 99-line, free verse poem beat out 4,000 other entries to win a prestigious national poetry award in 1925.

The late poet William Carlos Williams was introduced in the early 1950s to Siegel’s then-obscure work. In a letter reprinted in the Hot Afternoons collection, Williams expressed astonishment that Siegel had not been published yet….”He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists,” Williams wrote in 1951. Six years later and 34 years after the poem was written, Hot Afternoons:Poems was finally published….

A Sun reporter visited Siegel in the early 1950s. Enclosed by wall-to-wall books, the erudite Siegel ran a Wednesday poetry group in his New York home. He charged 50 cents and lectured on poetry, art, history, science, economics….

Also in The Sun that year, Siegel made headlines when he stated Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes were better poetry than anything written by T. S. Eliot…. Siegel had written his first draft of “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” on the jacket of his copy of Eliot’s The Wasteland. Siegel, a critic by nature as well, was no fan of Freud, either….

In 1925, he wrote “Quiet, Tears, Babies” after walking in the 800 block of North Charles Street years before and hearing a baby cry “beyond heavy doors of an old house. It was 7 p.m. or so, and hot.”

(Those babies are now 77!)

In an unpublished poem written in 1970, Siegel recalls the Baltimore of his youth. It was October, warm, and the World Series was under way, and the 12-year-old Siegel was having a fine time selling newspapers on Charles Street:

Eli Siegel’s poems are online at www.aestheticrealism.net. “The Poetry of Eli Siegel: A Centennial Celebration” will be held Sunday, 2 p.m., Wheeler Auditorium, the Enoch Pratt Free Library. 410-396-5494.