Sonia Arora (SA): I heard from my Literary Theory professor, Steve Kruger, there was a Twitter discussion about your use of sonnets and how someone was challenging the way you use the form. Tell us about your response to this exchange about your use of sonnets in frank: sonnets, which won you the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Diane Seuss (DS): Wanda Coleman coined the term “American sonnet,” and the jazz sonnet. Gerald Stern wrote a book called American Sonnets. His poems were not even 14 lines, but more likely 20 or so.

When I taught that book, my students and I discussed the ways in which he was making a claim in the title, a provocative claim. In his book, the American sonnet is 16 lines, or 12 or 23 lines and it does not rhyme, and it may not have meter. So how is it a sonnet? The reader is invited to consider that. My sonnets are more traditional than his, I suppose. There are books on the American sonnet. There are great critical essays on the American sonnet. What I was doing in frank wasn’t saying, I don’t know what a sonnet is. I can write Shakespearean sonnets, but few contemporary readers want to read 127 Shakespearean sonnets.

It was a chance to experiment with 14 lines and some moments of metrical patterning, rhyme, the volta and a vestige of the couplet and see how far a piece can go and still be called a sonnet. And I figured there would be a discussion of whether these could qualify as sonnets, especially among traditionalists. The middle fold out in the frank: sonnets. Is that a sonnet? Is there a volta? Is there a turn? I started thinking maybe a volta is not just a turn in thinking. But maybe a book can have a volta. Even in a poem there can be an emotional volta that is different from a turn of thought. I love the turn of thought in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the “therefore” or “however,” but maybe there’s an emotional turn in some of the poems in frank, and in several of the sonnets there is a turn of thought, a shift in an assessment of an idea.

SA: I’ve been thinking about form and how it relates to your most recent collection, Modern Poetry, in how you challenge conventional forms like the villanelle and how you challenge the sonnet in frank: sonnets.

I’ve been fortunate to have inherited from the Indian tradition, the Bhakti poets, and much of their poetry derived from mysticism. There is a poem by Kabir, Bhala Hua Mori Gagri Phooti, which translates, “I’m thankful my clay vase has shattered for I no longer have to fill it with water; I’m thankful my prayers beads have broken for I no longer have to pray.” It’s an ecstatic song/bhajan/poem about being liberated from the body. I feel as if you are trying to do the same thing with the some of the forms of poems.

DS: Yes, what a beautiful thought. And it’s not done lightly. It’s hard to break.

You know Modern Poetry is dedicated to the reader. That sounds simple but I don’t mean it to be. I entrust myself to the reader in my poems. I respect the reader. I feel that the reader completes the poem in receiving it. Just as other’s people’s poems are completed when I receive them. And receiving them is hard work sometimes. That interchange. It has a lot of privacy in it.

SA: I loved seeing references to Keats and milkweed everywhere in Modern Poetry. 

Laughter

DS: Milkweed has always been very important to me. Where I was raised milkweed was one of the primary playthings. The pods at their various stages. Even when they are green, you can pry them open, and there’s milk and wet seeds. I learned so much from noticing. I was lucky to grow up in a time when we took in the actual world rather than the world through a screen.

It’s so funny you brought it up. I was walking my coyote [dog] today and there was some milkweed growing along the sidewalk. They’re very gray and hard right now. There are still seeds and fluff poking out. The plants are probably waiting. I’ve been working on an image that comes out of that. The idea might be profane. The idea is the vulva at the end of life and it’s still waiting and it’s still producing. But it’s not beautiful or alluring to touch.

I love a long-term relationship with certain images. I never managed marriage very well or a long-term romance. But I do have long term romances with certain images.

SA: I love that!

I recently wrote a poem about the bee balm flower and the way in which dozens of bees create vibrations around itself and how that became a reminder to me of to hold onto that feeling as I pass through menopause. Also, I’ve been pressing flowers like Emily Dickinson and creating an herbarium.

DS: I love that! I wrote an essay, Restless Herd: Some Thoughts on Order, on organizing a manuscript. I focus quite a bit on Dickinson and her herbarium.

Do you have “Marbles on the Floor”? 

SA: Do I have marbles on the floor? My marbles? Maybe!

DS: Mine are definitely on the floor! No, not literally.

Laughter

It’s another anthology of essays on manuscript order.

Much of the essay is about Dickinson and how the herbarium is, in my estimation, a model of order for her poems and how she put them together into fascicles, which is a word used in botany. She wanted to be a botanist. People see her white dress as some nun or bride thing. But really, it looks like a lab coat, and she had big pockets sewn on there so she could put plant samples in there. The science mind was really part of her aesthetic mind.

SA: And aside from milkweed, Keats is everywhere in the collection.

DS: I just pictured little, tiny Keats in a milkweed pod floating down the river.

In every book, I have an interlocutor or a companion or a nettler. Or a few people who are all dead who keep me company and poke me when I’m not taking the next risk.

Keats became that in Modern Poetry, my newest collection. Well, I love him. The doubts he expressed at the end of his life about whether he would be remembered. He received so much crap from the literary establishment, he thought he would disappear.  How he died at such a young age and had such intensity about romantic love. Toward the end of Modern Poetry, Keats evolves in the next to last poem, (after he dies). He becomes objective about love. We meld in that way, and I learn from his ghost a way of thinking about love that is not entrapping or drowning. So much of my love life was entrapment or suffocation.  I don’t mean the other person was controlling me so much as I didn’t know how to have a self and still love. The fact that Keats evolves in these poems and can float above Fanny Brawne after he’s dead and not worry about her beauty. He could look at Fanny Brawne objectively and see that objectivity itself is beautiful. Probably more than any poem I’ve written that poem took me somewhere.

SA: It’s almost like a detached kind of love.

DS: Yeah, it’s intimacy with a capital I. That notion runs all through Modern Poetry. There is an early poem called Pop Song about meeting my father now, decades after his death.

All my poems about my father have been tender. In this poem, he reappears to me but he’s objective or he’s even disinterested. Nice to see you Di. There’s a distance.

SA: That reminds me of a recurring dream I have about my grandparents. I was not able to be there for them when they died. I’m approaching their house and I’m about to see them, but they don’t recognize me. It’s a very scary dream for me.

DS: It’s very scary to see loved ones detach.  I remember after going through divorce, for a long time, I would walk my dog and come around and see my shack and my cedar tree out front and think, “he left us.” And then one day I came around the corner, and said, “I stayed.” I was finally seeing the world from my perspective. I cannot do anything about him. But I stayed. And from then on, I could see him more objectively. The anger and the sorrow diminished.

Keats experiences that in my poem. Keats was probably saying to me, “don’t tell me how to feel.” Ha!

There is a poem called Love Letter in which I really take love apart and put it together in my own image. There are poems about poetry itself. There are almost like essays in tone and have a rhetorical shape.

To argue my way through my doubts and then find another place to settle. That was really important. I liked that.

SA: I wanted to ask you the age-old question about giving advice to emerging writers/poets. And I feel like you do that throughout this book, especially in “My Education” as well as “Poetry.” 

In “Poetry,” it feels like a response to all those fans of yours who look to you so you can grace us with your wisdom. But you give us an entirely different lesson. You say, “I’d rather be arrested than advised, even on my taxes.”

“But we must not languish soldiers, we must go so far as to invent new mechanisms of caring.”

DS: [Diane reads “Poetry” (https://poets.org/poem/poetry-7)]

SA: I loved that line, “Unlike Williams writing poems on prescription pads between patients, I have no prescriptions for you. I am more interested in the tenor and energy of our troubles.”

DS: I’m more interested in its tone, its energy, its chemistry than what to do about it. It’s evident to me that there’s no real fix to our troubles.

SA: It’s like a dynamic system.

You know, I’ve always admired people who can remember quotes from poems or religious texts. For me, I’m I don’t have the ability. I try to get what I can get from that moment when I’m reading. There’s this sense that quote is always going to help me. And it doesn’t always help you.

DS: No, sometimes it lays waste to you. There’s a Keats poem that he wrote in the margins of a longer work in progress, towards the end of his life. It’s called “Late Fragment” or “This Living Hand.”  It’s one of my favorite poems. Perhaps my favorite poem of his.  It’s not comforting. When I think about it,

Keats does such an honest job of describing his rage about dying. Putting the responsibility on the reader for keeping him alive, his memory, his work. It’s just 8 lines. But he’s holding his hand toward you through the page, just through the ferocity of the words. “See here it is – I hold it toward you.”

SA: I don’t know if it’s like your poem about lips: http://www.divasofverse.com/2022/05/i-hope-when-it-happens-by-diane-seuss.html

DS: Yes, that’s the last poem in frank: sonnets.

That whole sonnet asks, “Will I be remembered?”

Who will say of me I kissed her?

My quest in that poem feels like an erotic legacy, of touch and connection.  Keats is even more primal. Keep my life blood alive by giving my work your attention. I hear him saying, keep me alive.

Right here, next to me I have his death mask.

This connects for me to my father. He was not a writer.  As a child, I thought it was my job to keep him alive. Even if it’s my version. At the end of my poem “Poetry,” I write about coming close, closer, to the “sheeted edge” of the dying world. When my father was dying, the hospital didn’t allow children to visit. But right at the end, my sister and I were allowed in.

My mom pressed me toward him. I was very afraid of the shattering that we were talking about earlier. I had this painful lump in my throat, and I didn’t want to give in to it. There I was at the “sheeted edge.” We took each other’s hands. This living hand, so warm and capable, as Keats writes.

Ever since, it’s been very difficult for me to do that. To go to the edge of the sheeted world.

It takes bravery to sit with the sheeted edge of that kind of suffering. My sister kept herself buttoned up but ended up becoming braver.  I was 7; she was 11. She did not let herself feel. She ended up becoming a hospice nurse. She became this person who helped people die. She evolved into this person. Poems are the easy way out.

SA: Poems are hard too. I was writing something about Emily Dickinson the other day and I was thinking of writing a poem about the fact that she was facing death at every enjambment.

DS: That’s a great line: facing death at every enjambment.

SA: You also reflect on the process of making poetry, the knowledge in poetry in this collection.  Some of the poems in this collection are very intimate, where you put your name in the poem.  And some of them are more classical in nature where there is no intimation of self. I like how you mix up the two. Wondering if you want to say anything about this tension in poetry. Like the difference between “The Map” and “In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop.

DS: Auden heard Anne Sexton read, and when he walked out of the reading he said, “Who gives a crap about Anne Sextons’ grandmother?” Or something to that effect. And I wrote an essay about that, which basically says, “I do!”

You know, everything is a potential poem. A bird, an air conditioner, a death, a milkweed.

What became clear to me is that was a very gendered and raced argument. White male poets have written about their own lives for countless centuries. That is called history.  Women writing about their lives is called confessionalism, I think of writing developmentally. For myself, anyway. I needed to establish the bedrock of my experience in early poems before I could move forth into nuanced ideas. Those of us who were raised on the margins in whatever way need to attest to our own experience. It’s taken me a lifetime, to do what Keats did in my poem about objectivity, I’m not saying what we evolve towards is better. I’m not saying it’s more important. Spiritually, philosophically, I think it’s an evolution that all human beings go through. Not just artists, writers. Through time, you see things in new ways.

I write a lot about coldness. In Four-Legged Girl, which was my third book, I started determining that there was something cold in me. Probably a survival mechanism. It’s nothing I disdain. In fact, in frank, in the big poem on the centerfold where I wrote about my son’s drug addiction, I speak about some of the brutal realities of his life then.

I’m throwing these crackheads out of the apartment, which were basically parasites on him. In the poem, I describe myself as a stone queen, with an essential coldness. “Don’t ask me for my touch,” I write in the poem. “Don’t ask me now to walk among the people.”

To do what needed to be done, as a single mother of a child with a terrible addiction, I needed to become stone. At the same time, there is a kind of elevation, a rising into a regal quality. When I was a tiny kid, I was the tenderest of milkweed pods. At age 10, it was like a switch flipped and I said to myself, “This does not work.”  I found a coldness in myself. I found objectivity. Maybe that’s when I became a writer.

SA: I would love to end this interview with a poem that I think the students I teach at Queens College would love and enjoy, called “My Education.”

Diane dedicates her recitation of the poem to the students in the MFA program at Queens College:

My Education

https://massreview.org/sites/default/files/12_63.2SeussEDIT.pdf

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Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (Poetry Foundation) This interview is from before her collection, Modern Poetry, came out on March 6^th.