A Cobbled Mind

Diane Seuss has been giving me side-eye all week. Well, the photo on the jacket of her new book has, anyway. That photo. Taken when she was in her twenties, probably. Big brown eyes, already with her trademark heavy eyeliner. Quizzical, wary, defiant.

Why Modern Poetry? Because that was the title of the first poetry class she took (‘It was what I’d been waiting for my whole life, / but I wasn’t ready for poetry’). And because it was the title of the first poetry book she ever read, the cover ‘cherry-red and blossom-white’. And because choosing to call a book of her own poetry ‘Modern Poetry’ is deliciously, assertively defiant. That look, again.

Also because the question she’s asking in this book is what poetry can be now, what it can offer, now, to keep her – to keep us – alive. In ‘Against Poetry’, for example, she says, ‘Lately, / I’ve wondered about poetry’s / efficacy. […] Fearsome, to doubt / your life’s foundation’. She’s failed at marriage, love and even friendships, she says, but this is the one thing she has stayed with. Her life’s foundation: poetry, this dog she has ‘walked and walked / to death’.

Seuss grew up poor in a ‘desolate town’ in rural Michigan with a dirt main drag. She caught frogs and put them in jars, and made milkweed pods into cars for her dolls. Her house was next to the cemetery and this, coupled with the illness and early death of her father, led ...