Diane Seuss questions and challenges the utility of poetry in her new book, Modern Poetry. The poems in this collection examine poetry directly and indirectly. One poem, blunt in its title “Against Poetry,” speculates, “Maybe what distinguishes / art from illustration / is its uselessness.” 

Death and love crop up frequently throughout this book, as is fitting for a collection titled Modern Poetry. In the poem “Love Letter,” death is reality—“It’s clear we die a hundred times / before we die”—and love is imperfect: 

When I first read the word denouement
out loud, my ex-husband
laughed at my mispronunciation.
I include it here as an illustration
of the fact that love does not conquer
all. Now when I think
of love, it’s like focusing too hard
on the mechanisms of blinking or breathing.
You can be blinded or suffocated
By that degree of self-consciousness.

Through these poems, Seuss articulates the inadequacy and necessity of our human constructs, both in poetry and in life. The poet asks, answers, and prods the reader to contemplate this as well. 

Some of the poems are titled after poetry terms, and these poems cover poetic forms, movements, figures of speech, and grammar, such as the comma, ballad, aria, allegory, simile, rhapsody, and romantic poetry. The poem “Comma” demonstrates the punctuation and inquires, “See what a comma can do?” Another poem, “Modern Poetry,” looks back at the poets whom the poet read as part of their education, including “Williams, my roommate and I called him Billy C. Billygoat— / I knew something of wheelbarrows, old women, / and as I said, plums, but the prof showed us / how complicated it all really was….” These poets become friends or muses.  

Modern Poetry has conversations with poets and forms while also pushing back on them. The poet’s views on poetry evolve throughout the book: “I thought poems required a degree / of heartlessness, a running / away into the pines, to the streambed.” While “The song choices were limited, / so the grooves were dug deep” in the poem “Juke,” the poet keeps probing poetry. Once again, love surfaces, with another dose of reality, near the end of “Love Letter”:

Cynicism is a go-to I no longer have
the energy to resist. It’s like living
with a vampire. Finally, just get it
over with, bite me. I find it almost
offensive to use the word love  
in relation to people I actually love. 
The word has jumped off
so many cliffs into so many seas. 
What can it now signify? 

This collection—and Seuss—shake poetry to its core and find that poetry can take it. 

I interviewed Seuss about her time teaching at the University of Michigan, Modern Poetry—out now in hardcover with the paperback in January—and what she is writing next. 

Q: You were a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. How was your time in Ann Arbor? 
A: Hi Martha. Yes, I taught a poetry workshop for the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. I was driving back and forth from Kalamazoo in the dead of a hard winter, so that part was challenging. There was an ice problem that winter and the surfaces outside Angell Hall were like skating rinks. I had a leg injury and was on crutches. So, there were physical challenges, Martha. But the students were brilliant and kind. I had people who assigned themselves the job of escorting teachers by the arm to get to the classroom! They brought beautiful snacks, as it was a night class and people got hungry during the three hours. Their poems were distinctive and challenging. As I sat in my office, that I didn’t bother decorating, given that I was a guest, I thought about the people who had been students or professors there, including Theodore Roethke, a very significant poet to me as he was a Michigan writer who welcomed the foliage and roots and mud of our land into his poems, and Frank O’Hara, whose work and spirit had a big impact on my book frank: sonnets. Regarding Ann Arbor, I don’t think I’m hip enough for that city, though I aspire to be! 

Q: One of the blurbs for Modern Poetry describes it as “a full-frontal seminar on the subject.” Tell us about your book. Did you set out to write a seminar? 
A: I like that description! I believe my books write me, rather than my consciously designing them, at least in the beginning. At first, I write into the conceptual dark, until I become aware of where they’re leading me. With Modern Poetry, I knew I needed to take a sharp turn from frank: sonnets, and I made a contract with myself as to how to do that. I would write primarily in free verse, not in form, though there are some loose ballads in the book. I would ask myself to write longer poems, and to write past the apparent ending, to determine what else the poem had to give me. After writing what is the first poem in the book, “Little Fugue State,” it came to me that one “given” in the poems would be the use of many titles from musical forms—aria, ballad, pop, cowpunk, rhapsody, etc., and that there would be a connection, in subject and approach to language, to that musical form. It was a way of imposing a limiting impulse on the poems, even when they were long. I wrote the title poem, “Modern Poetry,” early in my explorations, and it set me on an examination of how I was taught poetry, and how I filled in all the gaps in my self-education. Most importantly, poetry itself became the central subject, metaphor, and allegory throughout the book. In terms of the emotional state that frames these poems for me, it arose from the isolation of the pandemic, climate grief, and my alienation from the national and global political culture. The question I carried with me into these poems was simple: Given all of this, can poetry still matter? My degree of doubt frightened me. In all my years, everything seemingly solid had been called into question—but never poetry. Modern Poetry works through that frightening doubt. I believe its conclusion revivifies poetry for me, but only as a biproduct of what I managed to confront in all the poems that led up to the final one, “Romantic Poet.”

Q: Let’s talk more about this doubt. It seems like these poems are in a wrestling match with poetry to see who wins or in a poker game to see who is going to call whose bluff first. One of the poems in Modern Poetry analyzes simile, so I am not sure whether the speaker would even like my first sentence leading into this question! What was it like to doubt something that had always been solid? Was it challenging to dive into this exploration of poetry, or did it instead feel natural or freeing? Or something else entirely?
A: It was entirely challenging, Martha, and scary, and plodding. I started writing poems when I was an early adolescent. Even before that, before I knew there was such a thing as poems, poetry was in my nature. In that transition between sleep and waking I’d sometimes hear iambic pentameter lines in my head, with the words just beyond my reach. All this to say that poetry had been with me through every loss, every evolutionary leap. When poetry came into question…well, for me, poetry is life. I didn’t know how to move through space, how to address myself and the world, how to live, if I could no longer sustain the belief that it had efficacy, if it, too, was absurd. The irony was that the only thing I could turn to, in this crisis of faith, was the subject of the crisis. Poetry. No book has been more difficult to write. The wrestling match, the poker game, are apt similes, Martha, and the stakes were tremendously high. I’d been told for years that one doesn’t write poems about poetry. I resisted that truism. By the time I completed the poems and arranged them into the book, I had come to see that the poem itself, poetry itself, is a metaphor for soul, for life. In writing these poems, I was fighting for my life. 

Q: You turned to poetry during this crisis with poetry, as the line in “Curl” says, “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made….” These poems demonstrate this unrelenting, irreverent interrogation of the genre that you describe in our last question. This questioning extends throughout Modern Poetry. The poem “Against Poetry” accuses poetry of “uselessness” with only a few pages to go in the book. How did you free yourself from poetry’s rules and beliefs to find new ideas or answers? 
A: If I have a talent, poetry-wise, it’s having been generally freed-up from being over-controlled by poetry’s rules for all the years I’ve been writing. Even when I have turned to given structures and forms, I have done so with a feeling of self-determination. By and large, poetry has not intimidated me. I believe this is because I had the luxury of not being taught much, nor aggressively parented, from an early age. Having dedicated my life to poetry since I was a teenager, I did feel permitted—maybe even obligated—to do a full body scan of poetry, which is really another way of saying, a scan of life, or the spirit, or god, or myself. When I discuss “uselessness” in “Against Poetry,” I speak of “attaining uselessness.” In that poem, and maybe in the book as a whole, what makes a poem purely artful is that it has no overt utility. It is not illustrative. Does not hand over easily attained wisdom. It is not made for a particular function. Keats might say it exists for beauty and truth, which are slippery. Lorca would say “duende,” even slipperier. Beauty, truth, god, the soul, duende, poetry—all exist without a purpose beyond themselves. They are not products. They are not “content.” A sublime uselessness.

Q: It sounds like you went through the dark wood in Dante’s Inferno to use another simile! You mention fighting for your life. This collection offers not only a hearty appreciation of the inevitability of death but also a recognition of death’s implications on life. How would you describe the way that Modern Poetry treats death? Since “the poem itself, poetry itself, is a metaphor for soul, for life,” what does death have to do with it? 
A: Well, poetry, too, is ultimately a metaphor for death. In “Pop Song,” I re-encounter my father in a poem, decades after his death. Poems can do that. You can maintain relationships with the dead, and those relationships can evolve and effervesce. In one of the Keats poems, he has become—after death—objective about romantic love, an objectivity that ushers in another kind of beauty. In my earlier books I was outraged by death. Rebellious. Bereft. Many of the poems were elegies, in one way or another. Having lost my father when I was seven and he was 36, and having been raised in a rural place, where death seeds the everyday, mortality was my jam, my central theme. Modern Poetry shifted that. Upped the stakes, the bare lightbulb swinging over my own head. I think these poems became more interested in the hereafter. Death as transformative, ushering in a kind of nirvana of objectivity. In that sense, the pandemic life, alone in my shack for months, years, became a kind of death—the death of my former life. And with that death my relationship with poetry was transformed.

Q: Keats makes several appearances from the dead. I remember seeing one of the Keats poems, “Romantic Poetry,” in The New Yorker, and “High Romance” and “Gertrude Stein” also were published there. These three are placed toward the end of the book. How did you go about arranging these poems in the book?
A: Order is such a nuanced part of making a book of poems. The writer is bringing them into a legible relation to each other, but the legibility often needs to be something more interesting than a chronological unfolding. Ordering is usually the fun part. For me it requires a theory of how the poems live in relation to each other, how they can become a body of work, as individual humans find a way to become more than the sum of their parts—a community, maybe. frank: sonnets pretty much ordered itself, as the sonnets were primarily arranged in the order of their making. I tried a range of ordering principles in Modern Poetry, but settled on untitled and unnumbered sections of varying lengths, marked by a designed symbol—in this case, modeled after my eyeliner in the early photo on the cover of the book—establishing a stage in my thinking-through the ideas and feelings at play in the book, but not necessarily in a sequential order.

For instance, the book opens with “Little Fugue State,” a poem that establishes the speaker’s state of being that will be at work here. A fugue. A kind of amnesia. A lostness of spirit. Other poems in that first section establish tropes that will be explored further as the book progresses, for instance, my “cobbled” education and rural upbringing, the objectivity of the dead, and an approach to poetry and life that is more feral than cultivated. The sections progress from there like movements in a piece of music, reflecting those music-centered titles. Some sections are composed of a single poem. Even though it might take up much less physical space than other sections, the poem itself has significant gravity. It needs its own boundary. Much of this, Martha, is intuitive. What I know is that it took all the poems in the book to find my way to the final section, which, as you say, is centered upon poems that have arrived at a particular understanding of love, poetry, and mortality. Keats represents all three. He is an interlocutor between life and death. The final poem in the book, “Romantic Poet,” a “small” poem, represents an arrival. In the very last line, poetry wins.

Q: What are you reading now? 
A: I’m mostly reading forthcoming books of poems so that I can write commentary—blurbs—for them. (I hate the word “blurb”!) Let me just say that readers of poetry have much to look forward to in the coming months. I will mention only one, because it’s urgent: Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal. It is a brilliant book of poems centered around her terminal diagnosis with ALS. I’m not sure I’ve read such a life-saturated book about encountering mortality. If anything could allow me to fully believe in poetry again, it is this book. I recently read Small Rain, a very new novel by Garth Greenwell. Its themes are also illness, mortality, and poetry, and it is likewise a brilliant excursion.

Q: What is next on your journey with poetry? 
A: I am working on short, lean poems that are driven—sometimes comically so—by rhyme. I believe they will represent the “new” in a volume of New and Selected poems that Graywolf Press has suggested we put together. Content-wise, these new poems handle personal material in a very new way for me, leaning into satire. 

Thank you, Martha, for taking the time to think so deeply about Modern Poetry.  

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.