To mark her latest book, 'Modern Poetry,' Diane Seuss talked to us about the power of eyeliner and the punk spirit of the Midwest.
is Diane Seuss’s parody of a textbook, though both textbooks and poetry books tend to avoid putting their authors on the cover as of late. When I asked Seuss about the cover ofshe explained that it was a polaroid of her at eighteen, kept in the billfold of her mother’s wallet for some 40 years.
JEFFERS: This whole book feels like a Cowpunk book, in general. It feels pastoral at some points. There’s a much greater focus on these places that you lived that were not in cities, and you get these motifs of lambs, apples, attics falling apart. One of my favorite images in this book is the speaker recalling performing these childhood plays in a field, and this sense of that landscape giving permission or license to suffer in public.
JEFFERS: I think there can be. But one of the things I appreciated about this book is it does make a lot of real assertions. As you were writing, was there any sense that you were definitively right in anything that you were saying?, the world was very different than the world I wrotein. It wasn’t that long ago, but we were contending with sort of a form of fascism, which we still are, and environmental crisis, the pandemic, isolation. I have had a lot of aloneness that is unbroken.
JEFFERS: I loved when you talked about poetic education as this cobbled-together, happenstance thing. Poetry is something you can study, but the poets that are important to us are important to us because we conflate them with the context in our lives in which we read them. Things come to us when we are ready to understand. In your poem about Colette, there is the sense that you have to be ready to receive it.
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