Return to High Romance: On Diane Seuss's Modern Poetry
Graywolf Press (March 5, 2024)
Last year, several of my undergraduates were swooning with crushes on John Keats. Yes, John Keats, the Romantic poet, tubercular, and so short, Diane Seuss writes of him in Modern Poetry, her divinely cobbled sixth collection, 鈥淸t]he top of his head would have barely/reached [her] tits.鈥� Many of Seuss鈥檚 poems refer to Keats, and my students鈥� stories starred Keats as protagonist, stories so sacred they didn鈥檛 want me to critique them. 鈥淟ook,鈥� one said, pulling up a sepia-aged sketch on a Google image search. 鈥淛ust look at him.鈥�
I looked. There the poet was, drawn by his friend Joseph Severn, and looking every bit the sort of romantic to stare longingly into a distance as he contemplates truth and beauty. I looked, and, as Seuss鈥檚 speaker writes in an earlier poem from frank: sonnets, 鈥淚 lied that I could see the beauty there.鈥�
鈥淚 barely remember what it was like to have intense crushes like that,鈥� I said, and the class looked at me in a generation-gap horror. But perhaps I have not completely lost my capacity for fervent devotion, since I find it difficult to write critically about Seuss, whose collection is haunted by the ghost of that feverish Keats. I will endeavor, at least, not entirely to rhapsodize.
Many of Modern Poetry鈥檚聽 jauntily rhythmic or rhythmically woeful poems skip with internal rhymes and take poetry back to song鈥攎any of these are ballads, jukes, pop songs, and folk songs. One finds oneself in a wood; it is cold there, and it is winter, but the sounds seduce, as in 鈥淟ittle Song鈥�: 鈥渉eedless/in your posh knee socks, your ritzy lamb, your/lush pop beads, your lilac jam, your breathless, / deathless, feckless little song.鈥� One desires to rid oneself of complexity, the heft of a lived life: 鈥淢emory a tree so loaded with fruit and birds the tips / of the branches rake the ground鈥� (鈥淔olk Song鈥�). One longs for a place, like 鈥渢he north,鈥� where 鈥渁ll forms stood for themselves. / There was no need to fill them with anything鈥� (鈥淎llegory鈥�). One wants to dump over-used words and overdetermined metaphors, preferring jukeboxes with only three songs, and mouths with only three teeth. In 鈥淐oda,鈥� the speaker claims that 鈥淸t]he best poem is no poem.鈥�
But no. 鈥淚鈥檓 copious, and so are you,鈥� is repeated in 鈥淐owpunk,鈥� and these poems are 鈥渢he rhapsody of things as they are鈥� promised by Wallace Stevens in an epigraph. In 鈥淩hapsody,鈥� Seuss writes,
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 ...Some poet wrote
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 that he adores economy and requires precision.
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 I actually looked for antonyms:
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 extravagance, ignorance, imprudence, negligence, squandering.
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 I felt like a poor kid who finds a quarter and gorges
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 themselves on penny candy. From then on, everything
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 I created or promoted would be rococo.
Modern Poetry offers us the world as plainly and as copiously as it can, and the best poems in it, if a broken romantic may make a bold assertion from her weedy desert, are the ones about poetry. The collection offers a poetic education, dedicated to 鈥渕y Reader,鈥� which this particular reader鈥攚ho walks around over-educatedly but very innocently asking how she can know whether a poem is any good鈥攇ot when she needed it.
In 鈥淗igh Romance,鈥� very near the end of the collection, Keats鈥檚 ghost loses his grip on concepts and meaning: 鈥淲ords, he now knew鈥攁nd he鈥檇 once been / such a devotee鈥攄idn鈥檛 matter.鈥� Poetry must be useless. Diffuse. Must exist on its own behalf. And what is beautiful is not the object but the gaze鈥攖hat鈥檚 the beauty / truth thing: 鈥淗is gaze / was too objective to find her beautiful, / but objectivity itself鈥攖hat was beautiful.鈥� It is high romance to turn away from romance. In Modern Poetry, the word 鈥渓ove鈥� is not enough for those who love.
Since so many of Seuss鈥檚 lines are concerned with questions of cynicism and romanticism, it is appropriate that I spent Valentine鈥檚 Day floating in them. I was like the poems from an anthology of modern poetry the speaker in 鈥淩omantic Poetry鈥� imagines sliding from the book鈥檚 spine into the sewer:
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 down where my uterine lining, my blood
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 and cast-off ovulations, cast-off fetal
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 tissue swims, below the city.
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 The microdead ride modern poems
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 like swan boats in the park.聽
Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry; frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seuss lives in Michigan.
is a Canadian living in California and the author of the novels The Amateurs (2018) and Strange Loops (2023). Her award-winning stories, essays, and poems have been published at the CRAFT, the Globe & Mail, The Walrus, Best Canadian Stories, The New Quarterly, Hazlitt, Image Journal, and elsewhere.