by Lisa Zerkle
December 17, 2024
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in Quartet, Heavy Feather Review, The Collagist, Nimrod, storySouth, LEON Literary Review and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she serves as an editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and a reader for West Trade Review/Iron Oak Editions.
Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss; Graywolf Press; 112 pages; $26.
Sitting as we are “at the bedside of the dying world,” what can poetry be now? This is the central question of Diane Seuss’ new collection, Modern Poetry. In these direct, dark, and often surprisingly funny poems, she talks to me, to you, to her younger self, to her dog, and to the dead about the business of falling in love with words and whether it can be of use in times such as our own. Seuss won the Pulitzer for her previous book, frank: sonnets, but steps further away from that form to title this new collection Modern Poetry after her “cherry-red” college textbook of the same name.
If we think of modern poetry as a response to the decline of Western civilization, Seuss has it: “May I take the murdered world in?/Sing of it again?” But it’s also modern poetry in a make-it-new, free verse, collagist kind-of-way. The poem entitled “Villanelle” is not one. “Monody” is an elegy, but one for the ineffectual role of the elegy in describing grief. The four, multipage poems that stand alone as sections: “An Aria,” “Allegory,” “Poetry,” and “Against Poetry,” read almost as lyric essays formatted in lines and stanzas. Their essay-like rhetoric wrestles with the physical cost of and use of making art and how one sustains the will to do so. Her ranging forms emphasize the need to use every tool available in confronting so large a theme. “There is poetry of rage and poetry of hope,” she says in “Allegory,” “Each fuels the other, looks in the mirror and sees/the other.”
Another topic Seuss explores, primarily in the book’s first section, is her own education in poetry and how well that education worked or didn’t, along with the paucity of diverse voices in the canon she encountered as a young poet (the photo on the book’s cover is a Polaroid of the author at 18). This collection’s titular poem “Modern Poetry” explores her own failings and imposter syndrome (“Who isn’t a quack at eighteen?”), alongside the limits of her instruction (“where the hell was Langston Hughes/in Modern Poetry”). It’s an instruction she soon takes into her own hands, a self-instruction paired with the kind of tenacity required to keep coming back to the thing you know you need even as its gatekeepers try to push you away. Hewing to that self-knowledge comes up again and again in this collection. In “My Education,” she says, “I knew what I needed,/and that the time to get it was now.” This thread of knowing is expressed in the particular influence of specific poets (notably Keats) to whose work she returns over a lifetime, but also in the recurrent mode of direct address across most of the poems: “You know the type?,” “You know what way.”, “What do you think/it means?,” “You know what?” “I know you’ve lived it, too.” The direct address invites the reader’s intimacy in an immediate fashion, reaching through the page in a conversational and disarming manner. The speaker brings the reader into the conversation, one that feels honest, vulnerable, and real. It’s also an acknowledgement of the value of self-knowledge and its necessary role alongside formal education.
Navigating the cross currents between the sometimes competing roles of body and spirit are another locus that asks, “maybe the body is the soul’s/metaphor.” This speaker recognizes and refuses, Dickinson-like, to sugarcoat death’s creeping inevitability. She refuses to lie to herself even as she makes an exception for the dog, “You’re not old, I say to the old dog./You’re handsome, and you will never die.” Seuss has written before about the sudden loss of her father when she was eight, Seuss continues to evoke the shock of that formative loss and how the rawness of it continues to provide her new “iterations until the ink runs dry.” This appears in “Ballad,” a recurrent dream of digging up her father’s casket at her mother’s behest, the speaker tries and fails to look away from “the casket just a drawerful of bones.”
The collection continues in this unflinching manner to regard the canonical writers who were, despite their art, like us, human beings housed in leaky, failing bodies: “we’re made/of the same meat.” The relics of a body that remain, whether her father’s crooked tooth, Colette’s “fat rope of hair,” or Keats’ death mask, are Seuss’s proof of humanity but it’s their own words that now animate them. Seuss kisses the death mask and catches not germs but poetry: “The disease you’ll catch—well,/it changes you.” Seuss includes the body’s stains, sicknesses, and “cast-off ovulations,” creating a fuller and more honest picture of the cost of art. Whether familial or literary ancestors, the dead speak to her from beyond the grave, as she contributes her own words to the record, “But the dead, in their vast/merriment, egg me on. Write the motherfucking /poem. See why I love them?”
The dueling forces between social status and what kind of opportunity that status allows threads through this collection. Seuss was raised in a small town near the border of Michigan and Indiana. After living for a time in New York City, she returned to rural Michigan. Squaring the rural locale and its blue collar realities with a literary life shows up again and again. Reading Colette when “The house had no running water. No power.” Her centering “Of the working class. My class. Its itches and psychological riches.” All of it is part and parcel of “the cobbled/landscape I was born to,” Seuss says in “My Education,” but “this is not/ a detriment and it is not a benefit. It only is”. The geography and circumstance of the rural area are their own character in these poems, “The unpaid water bill,” raccoons in the attic, a ramshackle drive-in. Living alone in this place is portrayed as both liberating and, at times, lonely. Expertise is taken for pretension in this rural setting where any whiff of perceived snobbery counts as “holding yourself above.” Better to keep your intellect and your dreams to yourself in this place where, “all dreams go up in smoke.” Or perhaps to write them down as missives to like spirits and to the future.
Some poets are poet’s poets. While true believers appreciate their work, others might be left cold. But Seuss is a people’s poet. This speaker’s warmth, intelligence, and wry humor make this book an excellent and engaging read. Even the poetry curious, like that “quack” Seuss herself was at 18, would find much to love here.
And what of Seuss’ initial question, the one that undergirds the entire collection: “so what/ can poetry be now?” That line break after ‘what’ emphasizes the cynicism embedded in the question itself. In “Against Poetry” the speaker asserts that art is “useless at its core,/ but not valueless.” Edward Hirsch says, in The Essential Poet’s Glossary, that the Romantic poets “had an unhampered faith in the imagination.” In one of the collection’s only poems written in third person, “High Romance,” Seuss writes from the point of view of Keats’ ghost. The ghost foreswears love, words, belief, but finds beauty in “objectivity itself—that was beautiful.” In the poem, “Poetry,” which reads like the thesis of the collection, Seuss notes that Keats’ gift to us was beauty and truth. Later in that poem, which contains the collection’s centering question, the answer lands on the side of “truth, unabridged” which “has become in itself a strange/and beautiful thing.” Modern Poetry begins with an epigraph from one of Keats’ letters. In it, he writes to a friend that, “This morning Poetry has conquered.”
The book ends with “Romantic Poet,” a list poem of sorts, spelling out all the reasons a scholar friend believes the speaker would find Keats lacking in real life. To which she responds, “But the nightingale.” And maybe that’s how we go on from here. Insisting on truth. Holding on to beauty.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“The Rhapsody of Things as They Are”: Unabridged Truth in Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Beto Santanna from Pexels
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2024 Iron Oak Editions
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
