Arthur Seefahrt '14 Releases Debut Poetry Collection, 'Decay Studies' 

By
Donna Lee Davidson
October 22, 2024

In his debut poetry collection, Decay Studies (Six Gallery Press), alum Arthur Seefahrt ’14 extracts moments of silence out of beautiful noise. 

This collection was borne out of the pandemic years, a restriction that provoked, he says, a deep moral inventory, “a sort of funeral for [his] old ways of thinking and making—a more personal mode of poetic expression.” Many of the poems were birthed from multimedia experiments and resulted in various forms of concrete, lyric, comic, prose, and erasure poems. In the collection, Seefahrt studies the process of ablation, “the simultaneous elimination of a thing, a process of erosion,” and the residue that breakdown can leave behind.

In a recent interview with Forbes, Seefahrt discussed the collection as an “ablation of ego,” calling this collection a “threshing, moral act,” a process of shedding the idea of canon. From something like “a kind of Bible, a multi-authored text of great cultural significance,” to a scroll that includes all voices, “written or not.” 

Seefahrt credits the MFA Writing Program with giving him the skills and techniques of a somewhat singular voice. Professor Timothy Donnelly called Decay Studies a “breathtaking debut, and one whose ostensible focus might be decay, but whose achievement is decay’s opposite—preservation.” Fellow alum Meghan Maguire Dahn ’14 says Decay Studies “models for us a practice of looking so closely that edges, holes, absences, and ‘nothings’ provide a ground for full being where the ablative is a path to good.”

Ultimately, Seefahrt’s “tiny contribution,” as he sees it—what he wishes to leave behind–is “a moment of silence, a single inhale and exhale, a breath in the din.”

Arthur Seefahrt’s work spans a wide range of media, including writing, photography, sonic experimentation, multimedia installation, and live performance.  His writing has appeared in floorplan journal, Bodega Magazine, Strange Ways Magazine, and College Green, as well as in translation in the Leipzig based Fettliebe, and Word for Word/Wort für Wort journal.  He has acted as poetry editor, art director, and designer of DEATHHUMS Magazine and The Broadsheet Journal.  Arthur is the recipient of the Ed Ochester Poetry Award and the Trinity Visual Arts & Performance Grant.  He holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh (BA), Columbia University (MFA), Trinity College Dublin (M.Phil), and University College Dublin (MA). He currently resides in Dublin, Ireland.