The poetry and drawings of Robert Seydel’s imagined persona

S., another persona invented by artist and writer Robert Seydel, was a recluse who kept a great library which he suddenly abandoned along with a manuscript of poems and a slim stack of drawings. These poems--hypnotic, distilled, obsessive and playful--are written by Seydel as S., whom he devises as a naïf, suffering bouts of madness and apophenia. Seydel described S. in his notebooks as "a small ghost who lived alone in an apartment in a house in Amherst, on a gray street and around the corner from Emily Dickinson's manse on Main Street. He wrote prolifically--these small songs & in a journal & drew as well, small strange drawings of heads like hillocks that stare out from the small valleys of the Holyoke." Siglio and Ugly Duckling Presse have collaborated to publish the complete cycle of poems along with a full-color 32-page booklet entitled "Maybe S." that reproduces the drawings made by S. as well as handwritten excerpts from Seydel's notebooks that reveal the creation and revisions of this persona and the mysterious, permeable universe to which he belongs.

Afterword by: Peter Gizzi