Reviewed by Mike Panasitti
Modern Poetry
by Dianne Seuss
Graywolf Press
June 2024, Hardcover, 112 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1644452752
Much of Diane Seuss’ oeuvre emerges from the cultural context and narrative practice of the “lowdown.” A Google search for the word yields two definitions: “mean and unfair” as well as “the true facts or relevant information about something.” While her previous Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, frank: sonnets can be considered a “lowdown about the lowdown,” an evocative quasi-documentary recounting of the cosmically-inflicted adversities of existence in hardscrabble America, Modern Poetry, released last March, is an immersion in the people, places, things, and actions, that have allowed Seuss to evolve into a literary figure of consequence. Many of the collection’s poems are sustained reflections on the arduous path Seuss has taken to become an archetypal Poet, one who rightfully belongs in anthologies dedicated to timeless literature. The book not only spotlights Seuss as a wounded healer bearing the gift of lyrical medicine, it also functions as scripture—sacred writing meant to propagate a strong belief that poets can craft a decent existence despite the shadow of indecency life often casts on their paths.
The origins of Seuss’ work, as she reminds us repeatedly in Modern Poetry, are proletarian. Her literary intellect has been assembled piecemeal from disparate elements, some Colette and Conrad here, a little Baudelaire and Morrison there. More importantly, her poetic prowess has evolved from a lifetime in lowdown trenches.
In the collection’s introductory piece, Seuss admits to passage from an ignorance occasioned by the physical as well as emotional and mental nomadism at times typical of poets in the primal, footloose stages of their careers: “Far have I wandered not knowing / …where my body was, nor what it called / itself, nor the nature / of my calling, nor what my scrawling meant.” These agnostic peregrinations have granted Seuss a well-earned authority, allowing her to question the “stale orthodoxies” of what counts as beauty by those who have navigated far straighter and narrower avenues, often leading them to petrified conceptions of what poetry should read like and how it should sound.
In “Little Fugue with Jean Seberg and Tupperware,” Seuss addresses the ingenuine emotions, the normative canned responses, we are taught to express when exposed to avant-garde art: “So much cinema, so much of it, / seemed like something I was supposed to like. / I oohed and aahed in all the right places.” The same could be said about responses to much published poetry today, about the canned oohs, aahs, finger-snapping and applause for verse that shies away from speaking unsightly truths in the name of literary beauty, accolades for poetry that opts, instead, for exclusive “artfulness.” The loftiest aim of such “artfulness,” Seuss claims, in “Against Poetry,” is to attain “uselessness.” But the poems in Modern Poetry are far from useless. Rather, the collection is useful for generating belief. Belief in the possibility authority can grow from insecurity. Trust that miraculous inspiration can evolve from adversity. The collection allows for faith in times when hope is not only hard to come by, but despair is served by various strains of institutional religion as the soup du jour, and cynicism is offered by much media and many political demagogues as the daily special.
Many of Seuss’ poems double as reliquaries and contain references to objects that have marred or embellished her life. In “Bluish” the relic is a blue knife. The poem ends with memorably musical lines: “The spinning light on top / of the ambulance is blue, / the color of a bruise. / Inside, Diane, you suffer, / and your suffering is you.” Seuss acknowledges, in other poems, that her woes might not be exceptional but they are unquestionably unique.
“Juke” is a lowdown mise-en-scène containing a reference to another artifact, this time unsaintly—a metal dishpan that a naked barfly priest uses to wash himself. “I’d later do dishes in that pan,” Seuss reminisces, “and wash my hair in that pan. We popped popcorn / … and ate it out of that pan.” References to sacrosanct unholy objects and characters such as these season much of Seuss’ work, and the priest, pan and actions are reminiscent of Flannery O’ Conner characters and stories in all but the American Gothic author’s fictiveness.
The affect, stature and aura of the poems in Modern Poetry are difficult not to feel, as one could feel the presence of a sculpture—they are not, however, monoliths like August Rodin’s imperturbably heroic and unquestionably masculine “The Thinker.” Seuss harbors a wish for material uniformity, and says as much in “Allegory,” “I wish I was less, a recipe composed of a single ingredient,” but Seuss is not less, and the material she fashions her work from is not homogeneous. Analogous to assemblage sculptures, nearly every poem in Modern Poetry is a form composed of heterogeneous elements, memories that could have been relegated to the dustbin of history for being “repulsive”—as Seuss writes in “My Education”—but have been assembled, like a Rauschenberg combine, “slipshod, spare parts welded / crookedly, crudely but cleverly,” and with care for the “project” that is the poet’s “life.” That life has not been sequestered either in tepid suburbs or in the ivory towers of academia.
Seuss, feels, at best, ambivalent, perhaps even adversarial, toward the aforementioned social settings. “I have oppositional / poetry disorder,” she writes in “Rhapsody,” a poem that while lowdown reads like nothing Bukowski could’ve written—even at the pinnacle of his arc as a post-Beat author. Seuss continues, “I want to express / my opinion about people expressing their opinions,” but the best poetry, even as outsider heroes like Bukowski know, resists expressing opinions. It is not about making judgments based on flawed facts or suppositions of complete knowledge.
The final stanza of “Rhapsody” deadpans, “I know / someone who saw a famous / lounge singer carried out / of a Vegas hotel / on a stretcher with a broken / light bulb in his ass.” Seuss, however, isn’t about to give readers the cheap satisfaction of explaining away life’s mysteries, reducing them to the shit luck of fate. In the last lines of the poem—which are rife with the sort of generative obscurity, or negative capability, Bukowski’s macho posturing and literalism rarely permitted—Seuss exhorts, “Be that guy. / Don’t be Jesus, be the Shroud. / Don’t be the savior, be the stain.” What on earth this can possibly mean for someone who, like Seuss, is “infected / with resurrection metaphors” as well as belief “in the integrity / of a good / line break,” is not only a question of poetic exegesis. It is a question of practical ethics. As anyone familiar with the New Testament or Reza Aslan’s book Zealot knows, being a messiah is a sorrowful, dangerous, ultimately mortal business. Seuss is not asking her readers to die on a cross. Instead, she demands that the reader of “Rhapsody” propagate faith as does the Shroud of Turin. Despite that relic’s questionable authenticity, the important thing is to keep the torch of faith lit.
If Seuss is an outsider of a higher poetic order, she is also a post-Romantic blessed with a tough set of ovaries. Although she threatens “If you call fucking making love, I’ll kill you in your sleep,” she is still compassionate enough to claim, in “Love Letter,” that she is “married to the world.” Seuss supplements this professed, practiced, and tempered “affinity” for the planet with an ironic respect for herself, thereby distinguishing her trajectory from the most infamous confessional poets, whose self-destructive and ultimately suicidal, histrionics still echo with absence of consideration for readers who admire them.
Seuss could be labeled many things—a profound Bukowski, streetwise Keats, or responsible Sexton for these unprecedented times, but “nihilist” is a tag she never earns. She fills her poems with so much empathy for the human condition that unrepentant condemnation of that condition, no matter how “lowdown,” is never an option for her.
With Modern Poetry, Seuss joins a communion of literary saints consisting of seminal figures who speak to, about and for the lowdown, but Seuss does so in a way that Beat or Confessional poets never could. Both Ginsberg and Sexton lacked a style as musically multifaceted as Lady Di’s. Neither was their fragility as heroic as Saint Seuss.’
In “Folk Song,” she admits to the exhaustion that accompanies being a spokesperson for lowdown: “I am too tired to hold up this heavy self / Of selfhood I worked so hard to earn…” She then adds self-deprecatingly “…Of work I worked so hard / to avoid…,” and later gives us the often difficult to see glimmering side: “…Of the working class. My class. Its itches and psychological riches. / Its notions and values and humble achievements.”
Humility is a thread that runs through many of the poems in Modern Poetry, but Seuss’ humility “does not submit. It can even appear / audacious…” Seuss’ ability to translate humbling experiences into imaginative verse have resulted in a stylistic clarity and lyrical mastery that some gatekeepers of the artform may find unnecessarily crass.
This may sound as if Seuss is advocating for a rift between a lowdown “me” or “us” and a higher-up “you” or “them,” but this is far from the truth, “There’s no sense / in telling you my particular / troubles” she writes in “Poetry,” “I’m more interested / in the particular / nature and tenor of the energy / of our trouble…” With these words Seuss moves from the personal to the shared, from the confessional to the collective. A person may not consider themself lowdown, but, God knows, we all experience lowdown moments and no one, no matter how upright or “high-up,” is spared them. Buffeted as our lives may be by the torrents and gusts of the lowdown, Seuss’s voice never wavers, never succumbs to despair. She is a torch, and her worst of times—times that recall the tribulations of a character in a Dickensian plot —have yielded what is possibly the best poetry of our times. Insightful scripture, therapy for the soul.
About the reviewer: Mike Panasitti is a published poet and exhibiting artist from Santa Ana, California, whose achievements include surviving more than 15 years of institutional confinement and publishing over 40 stories on Reedsy Prompts.