by Hugh Blanton

When the Pulitzer committee awarded its 2022 Pulitzer for poetry to Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, they said it was “a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America.” Often the Pulitzer for poetry comes with a pat on the head and a sendoff to the cemetery of obscurity, poets fading away until only a Wikipedia entry remains. Two years later, Diane Seuss has published another collection of poems, this time leaving the sonnet form behind. She seems to be aware that writing in formal calculation loses the hot immediacy of writing in free verse and the poems she gives us here are stronger than her prize-winning ones. She’s definitely not taking her Pulitzer and riding off into the poetic sunset.

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A finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry, Modern Poetry is the sixth collection from Seuss. She apparently titled it after Maynard Mack’s anthology Modern Poetry, one of the books she sold to a used bookstore years ago before taking off on a trip to Italy. (Seuss mentions her nostalgic feelings for the book more than once.) This collection of poems follows an autobiographical arc: her early schoolgirl years, her love of poetry (she refers to poetry as a dog she’s walked to death), her marriage and divorce, the birth of her son and being a single mom, looking back on it all now through the lens of poetry. The book’s cover is a Polaroid of Seuss at eighteen, found after being in her mother’s purse for forty years. Her love of eyeliner persists to today.

Her poem “My Education” tells us we must be willing to self-educate but also warns us of the pitfalls of being an autodidact: “But your poems, with all of their/ deficiencies, products of lifelong observation/ and asymmetric knowledge, will be your own.” Throughout the book Seuss’s enjambments are clumsy, a problem poets have when they overthink and over-revise.

Of course there is more to take.

I’m copious and so are you.

My pipe. My roses. My stubborn

mule. My burbling

brook which must be traversed

to get to the island of blue lawn chairs.

That’s a verse from “Cowpunk,” the lyricism slightly diminished by the poor choice of enjambments.

The rhyme schemes Seuss uses are so natural they can hardly be called schemes. Rhymes have a tendency to hop up off the page and bop us on the nose; Seuss’s rhymes flow freely keeping the reader engaged to the end of the line. The opening to “Little Fugue State”:

Far have I wandered not knowing

the names of where,

long have I woven this dress

of human hair, here

I have pitched my tent here and there

Here’s a case where her line break choices do not hinder and in fact gently aid in the subtlety of the rhyme.

Seuss said in an interview in Interview Magazine that this is the funniest book she’s ever written. The surfeit of humor here is supplied by the lack of pretension which often happens when formal poets unbend. She writes admiringly of Keats, but there’s no brooding presence of Keats in her poems and she’s much too rowdy to be called a Keats acolyte. About her own powers of seduction, Seuss says in the poem “Another Ballad”: “Let me say I wielded it effectively enough/ to draw in a baseball player, a football player/ twenty years my junior, a used-car salesman,// a pimp, a smelly old boss, a cardiologist” – Kim Addonizio must be seething with jealousy.

Many of the poem titles represent musical terms: there’s “Monody,” “Pop Song,” “Juke,” and then we get “Ballad From the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar,” “Ballad in Sestets,” “Another Ballad,” “Ballad That Ends With Bitch,” and then finally “Ballad.” Robert Lowell in the throes of mania thought he was Milton; Seuss in her sanity thinks she’s Janis Joplin. Pedants will argue that these poems do not meet the form rules of what constitutes a ballad, but if Poe’s “Annabel Lee” can be called a ballad, then so can these. Reality is always muscling into Seuss’s poems; being picked up from school early for a death in the family, working class life; “The what? The bill. The unpaid water bill. Out of the spigot/ streams a thirsty noncompliance. An antisong.”

Readers exasperated with poems that noisily proclaim their importance will like Seuss’s self-deprecation and intelligence, although she’s asking for trouble when she calls poets “soldiers.” She flouts the conventions of taste: “When I was still bleeding, I changed my tampon/ in the woods behind the monastery and left/ the used one behind like the scat of a wild animal.” While Keats’s influence was felt in frank: sonnets, the free verse here seems more reminiscent of Roethke—she and Roethke both hail from Michigan and she admiringly expresses her appreciation of his greenhouse poems. Seuss believes that beauty is something to be side-eyed—not something to be worked at, but a byproduct.

The longest poem in Modern Poetry is a five-pager titled “Allegory.”

There is a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope.

Each fuels the other, looks in the mirror and sees

the other. Or wields the other. Isn’t it funny

to imagine hope, not much more than a toddler,

wielding rage in its fist like a cudgel?

(Seuss says she had to look up the word cudgel in a dictionary when she was in college.) The book is imbued with the fraternal twins rage and hope—we find rage over the French writer Colette being locked in a room by her husband and forced to write; hope that poetry can deliver truth with clarity. She certainly delivers truth in her poem “Against Poetry”: “Art,/ useless at its core,/ but not valueless.” Freed from the prison of sonnets, she’s ravaging the countryside and burning the cities.

Editors’ Note: Modern Poetry was winner of  the 2024 Heartland Booksellers Award for Poetry; a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2024; A New Yorker Essential Read of 2024; and A Library Journal, Literary Hub, and Electric Literature Best Poetry Collection of 2024.