Diane Seuss
On postponing the inevitable, and isn't that what all life is? Plus a phone conversation with the great poet Diane Seuss on women and writing.
Everyone has to remember to be happy. A way I can do this is to praise the poet Diane Seuss. She’s become famous with tons of earned awards. Awards don’t always go to the people with her ability and output. Do you know her books? Here are some titles: Four-Legged Girl, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Frank.
Quickly in other news. I asked Richard, “If I were going to get a tattoo on my inner arm, what should it say?” He said, “Do not write here.”
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Reading the poems of Diane Seuss
is like being in a conversation with her, except she’s doing all the talking. Also, she’d just as soon be talking to herself.
Always, there is sex. Sex in her memories of red shoes that tipped her balance, a captured toad so scared it peed in her hand, and the dark mound in the center of a brown-eyed Susan that reminds her of “a nipple bitten black.”
Her poems float between Downtown New York and things that get stuck to screen doors. In every poem, there’s a now and a before that are lived simultaneously in sleepless, horny sadness. All the nightgowns she wears are “war-torn.” Even death looks like a bad boyfriend you want never to get over. There is sex especially in the scratch and sniff of words. “Thoughts are puppets, dangling from their tangled strings,” she writes in a poem titled “Free Beer.”
Why are there only sonnets in Frank—128 to be precise? Why do you decide to walk in a blizzard? Why do you see how far you can swim underwater on one breath? A sonnet is a trapped body—made up of physical limits and nowhere to run but inside the lyrical imagination. Fourteen lines, again and again, postponing the inevitable. Remind you of your life?
The title, Frank, is for Frank O’Hara, the great New York School poet who worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, invented (again) a confessional, conversational style of writing poetry that sounded right there in the minute, and who in 1966 was freakishly hit by a jeep on a Fire Island beach and died at 40. The title is for a close friend of Seuss’s, who died of AIDS. The title is for the voice of these poems, where nothing that happens to the body is out of bounds or really even shocking.
Stories recur. A childhood in rural Michigan and states of wonder in the natural world. A beloved father who was sick and who died when Seuss was a kid. A resourceful mother. A period of chaos and glamor in New York. A son who developed a heroin habit. Sex arriving like a weather condition. Solitude as a companion. The need to pee on the side of a road because she’s on the run and because everyone dreams of being caught naked outside. Nowhere in this book does Seuss reference her accomplishments as a writer and teacher and the numerous awards she’s won. The established literary world doesn’t prompt what she writes.
More than anything, I think, she loves the individual sentence. She loves the individual sentence so much each one is required to build a world that is there and at the same time includes its opposite: her dead father in the coffin of Emily Dickinson; artists she met who were famous and left her with a sense she was invisible; a blizzard producing a ceasefire between sisters. You don’t feel the poems arrive whole like memories or anecdotes. You feel line one pulls behind it line two like an ant carting along a breadcrumb. In each poem, the fourteen little stories build a collage that buzzes with tension. And joy.
This is a writer whose pleasure in building language-bombs sets off pleasure in you, even if she’s talking about illness and moldy things under splintery floors. The comma is her beloved punctuation mark. The comma as a form of and and in place of other conjunctions that argue an understanding. There’s no resolution and little consolation in these poems, apart from the residue of desire. Even plucked from different poems and arranged as a list, as I’m about to do, a Seuss line produces a monologue that’s uniquely her sound—intimate, rapturous, deathy, and wry.
Here she is on the road:
“Once I took a Greyhound north across an icy bridge . . . a bridge lined with stars unscrewed
from the sky and fastened to the cables and the towers with black
electrical tape, bus windows fogged-over from all the human breathing,
lovers, masturbators, numb frostbit moon going black around the edges,”
Here she is in another maybe less safe vehicle:
“I had no squeamishness, I’d eat alligator, rabbit
with the head on, fish eggs, eyes, hitchhike playing
the mouth harp, got into a helluva jam, sitting in the cab
of a truck between two nasty bumpkins, saved when
a turkey vulture crashed through the windshield into
my lap,”
And on that time she met those famous men:
“Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some, Richard Hell,
Lou Reed, Basquiat, Warhol, Burroughs, Kenneth Koch,
. . . I hope you are not titillated by it, their loathing
of women was indisputable, sometimes leaving genuine bruises,
more often just a sneer or no eye contact, the eyes wandering
off like dogs looking for something worth peeing on,”
And on the way her mind works in oppositions:
“Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions. That all at its essence is dove-gray.
Wipe the lipstick off the mouth of anything and there you will find dove-gray.”
“They cut me stem to stern and out came a little
drug addict.”
“My favorite scent, is my own funk, my least favorite scent, other
people’s funk and this, my friends, is why we cannot have nice
things.”
And on poetry:
“Even poetry, though built from words,
is not a language, the words are the lacy gown,
the something else is the bride that can’t be factored
down even to her flesh and bones.”
“Poems are someone else’s clothes I slipped
into so I could skip town,”
And on attraction:
“All desire should be illicit, its
fulfillment transpiring in wet, blue-shadowed places where a life like a shirt comes
undone,”
“but you know how coyotes are,
that high laugh cry that throws salt into your wound at the time
of night you’re already bedded down in your loneliness,”
“The world today is wet, the world is wet, trees
not so much dripping as exuding, walnuts dropping,
bouncing off the roof, sound of a 100 small skulls
thwacked with a bat, . . . love stops, let’s not say
otherwise, out of the blue it arrives, chuffing black
smoke then departs with a scream like Spanish trains
in the ‘70s, jump on, eat a bocadillo, blow a wet harmonica
with a guitarist you’ll never see again who plays Dylan’s
version of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’,”
And on dreams that are your life:
“I dreamed of it again, my dad’s body lost to us again but finally
found again, we set him in Dickinson’s coffin, . . . I could see the stitches holding my dad’s eyelids shut, but lo
and behold his eyelashes, so long they tangled now and then, were
still intact, and at his throat, like Emily’s, a nosegay of violets, . . . I don’t
know why I miss Emily so, and him, why die, why dream?”
The life that emerges from these fragments, though often reflecting on disappointment and sorrow, is outwitted in each poem by the exuberance of creation that comes flying at us. It’s part of the paradox of writing and reading that we lose ourselves both in the making and consuming of literature. Frank is a great book to steal from. “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do without,” writes Seuss. All the fun of writing is in finding out what doesn’t need to be there.
Learn as much as you can from what she’s doing. Break it down. You won’t be able to imitate it, but try. Even if you’re not a writer, your brain will shake itself out and walk around with more juice. Reading Seuss, you enter her. You could be her. You could never be her.
From a phone conversation with Seuss in 2018.
There’s a sweetness in her voice that reminded me of something she told an interviewer about her time in New York in the 1970s, when she was hanging out on the edges of cool and living with a guy who turned out to be a heroin addict. She said, “I wasn’t tough. . . . I wasn’t hard enough for that situation. . .. A lot of women weren’t. A lot of women got impaled on it.”
In our conversation she said, “I got out of a shitty relationship. Who’s ever in love with somebody who isn’t shitty? I left with my manual typewriter and my dad’s briefcase and escaped.” Back in Michigan she met a man “pretty quickly,” and they had a son who in time also became addicted to heroin. When we spoke, Seuss had just returned from a visit with her son that had gone well. “He’s clean,” she said. She plans to stay in Michigan for the time being, to be close to her mother, whom she adores. Otherwise, she said, “I would go anywhere where they would take me, Canada, Iceland. I love solitude and wouldn’t mind being cold.”
We moved on to talk about how she makes poems. She said, “I stuff all the parts of an experience into a gunny sack, then I slit open the sack and the language falls out.” I said, “What’s a gunny sack?” I imagined burlap but wanted to be sure. She laughed and said, “A sack you carry potatoes in or kittens you are planning to drown.”
She wrote many of the poems in Still Life with two dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018)—a collection based on paintings and the lives of visual artists—at the artist colony Hedgebrook. Nearby was a place called Cape Disappointment, and one day she drove there. She said, “I mean, how could I resist? It’s a lighthouse up on rocks, and you had to hike out to it. I just didn’t want to. I thought I was maybe passing up the opportunity to jump, but I climbed into the back seat of the car and took a nap. Afterward I thought about how the outing was like my poems, where nothing much happens on the outside. It had been a long drive, and I had had to piss, and I’d just squatted and pissed, so that had happened. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf, where a shawl falls off a wall, and she decides, ‘I better write about it for 100 pages.’ I was deciding to live pretty much for the sake of language, and I think that has been part of my whole life. Even at my dad’s funeral, I remember someone handed me a rose, and there was an ant crawling on it, and I liked having the words to describe it to myself.”
Every original voice teaches you to hear its sound as much as what it’s saying. At a recent conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), Seuss was asked to be on a panel to talk about poetic personas, and when it was her turn to speak, she recalled an incident from her time as a graduate student. The poet Galway Kinnell was a visiting writer, and Seuss’s mentor suggested she read some poems to the star. Seuss was sitting on the floor by his feet. It was that kind of scene. She read two poems narrated by what she called “monsters,” who spoke in the syntax she had heard growing up. Kinnell had sat listening with his eyes closed. When she finished, he opened his eyes and said, wearily, “Why don’t you write in your own voice?” At the AWP panel, she said she had been embarrassed and shamed and had not answered him. She said, “Now, I would have told him, ‘That is my real voice’.”
She continued the thread, “Where I grew up, there was this woman who carried everything she owned in a dress form. Another woman refused to die. Her body was done, but she just wouldn’t stop living. There was a wildness and erotic rawness that people don’t get about the people I’m from. The other day my niece said to me, ‘I danced til my pussy was raw’.”
Back at AWP, there were three other panelists with Seuss, all younger than she was, and after she finished speaking, each one told a story about how wonderful and inspirational Kinnell had been to them. It was like the experience with Kinnell was happening again, forty years later, and Seuss told me, “I thought if I don’t speak up now, I’m going to drive off Cape Disappointment. I threw my water bottle on the floor and said, ‘Come on, you guys met Kinnell after his dick fell off. That night with me he had his eye on somebody else. They all came to the college and fucked students. Sometimes I was the girl. The writing world was extraordinarily dangerous for a young woman. The danger was to her psyche, never mind her body. The feeling was of being erased, and many talented women stopped writing.” The audience encouraged her to keep going, and she did.
Before we rung off, I asked Seuss what she was working on. She said a memoir in sonnets. She said she was pretty happy, then laughed, adding, “There is no thought in my head that does not eventually find itself to death, no relationship that is free of death, even with living people, the few that are left.” She said, “People see poetry as such an emotional process, but I view it, even when I write about difficult things, I see it as an intellectual process, as a problem to be solved. That’s what I love about these sonnets. You have 14 lines and that’s it. To get all of that stuff in that little sack. It’s teaching me about what you don’t need about life. It’s such a pleasure, even the hard stuff is so sweet.”
I think the word “everyday” is a good replacement for what I think you mean. The word ”banal” carries a judgment of trivial and dull.
Among the most exhilarating writers I know, for the reasons you articulate here (love the ant metaphor. I also love her discerning advocacy for other poets, especially women, and the erudition she wears so lightly. She has inhaled Keats and exhaled him in words and rhythms that couldn’t be more different from his or anyone’s.