Diane Seuss, _Frank: Sonnets_

 I WAS IN Seattle last October, and whenever I am in Seattle, I get on over to its excellent poetry bookstore, Open Books. This book was prominently displayed, and I had seen it praised in a few places, so I went ahead and bought it. A few months pass, and it wins a couple of major prizes (the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle), so it lands right at the top of my summer reading list. 

All this while, though, being unfamiliar with Seuss's work, I had been assuming she was on the younger side--say, under 40. Then, on p. 26, I read: "My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok, not the actual guy but the guy who played him on TV, Guy Madison, who died of emphysema [...]". What?! I too was a fan of the TV Wild Bill, and imitated his unusual practice of wearing his holstered sidearms backwards, handles pointing forward, with my toy six-shooters. But that show was on TV in the 1950s...how old is Diane Seuss?

Born in 1956, she is just two years younger than I am, in turns out. She went to an excellent midwestern liberal arts college, just as I did. In her early twenties, she had an up-close brush with the eruption of punk rock, and in her later twenties with the eruption of AIDS, right when all of us born in the mid-1950s did. My oldest daughter was born in 1985; her son was born in 1986. She is now a college teacher and so, it happens, am I. 

This all became clear over the course of Frank, a sonnet sequence with significant autobiographical content. Not that Seuss and I resemble each other all that much--she has lived a lot closer to the edge than I have, and sometimes gone clean over the edge, it sounds like, and more power to her. But I was haunted by the idea that we could easily have been at the same Ramones concert, or the same panel presentation at MLA, or had kids in the same playgroup...that sort of thing.  I couldn't put the book down.

Is being unable to put it down a virtue in a book of poetry? It seems more like the kind of thing you would say about a thriller or Harry Potter. After sixty or ninety minutes with a poet, you should probably just step away for a while lest they completely rewire your circuitry. But it's hard to step away from Frank. It's one of those conversations where you think, well, it's late, but let's just open another bottle and/or another pack of cigarettes and see where this goes.

Frank put me a bit in mind of Alice Notley's Alma in its combination of intimacy and headlong rush, which naturally put me in mind of Ted Berrigan (sonnets, etc.), but I found the form was reminding me less of him than of Berryman and the Dream Songs. Why? Something in the utterly personal associative logic of the movement of the poems? I'm just guessing. I don't know. I found myself reminded of Berryman repeatedly, though.

Is the book's title a tribute to Frank O'Hara (mentioned in the final poem) or Amy Winehouse (who furnishes one of the epigraphs)?