Diane Seuss, _Modern Poetry_

 I WONDER WHETHER the Pulitzer-winning success of Frank: Sonnets and Diane Seuss's subsequent appearance in high-profile publications that publish only a handful of poems (New Yorker, NYRB, New Republic) put her in a retrospective frame of mind about the formation of her calling and her relationship to poetry. Breaking through in one's sixties must feel odd...not that I would know, but so I would guess, and the breaker-through might well think back to early influences, classes and teachers, the anthologies one worked through, all of which get poems in this new collection. Her becoming a reader and writer of poems is presented both directly ("My Education") and indirectly ("Allegory").

Seuss is not particularly oriented towards looking back. "The danger / of memory is going / to it for respite. Respite risks / entrapment, which is never / good," she writes in "Weeds." Likewise, she is not oriented towards composing her own ars poetica. "Poetry," which could pass for an ars poetica, at first gravitates towards talking about beauty, truth, and wisdom, but seems immediately uncomfortable with such abstractions.

So, what
can poetry be now? Dangerous
to approach such a question,
and difficult to find the will to care.

Seuss seems a little more comfortable in the poem "Against Poetry," (as in Moore's "I, too, dislike it," I imagine), but even as she admits "Lately, / I've wondered about poetry's / efficacy," she taps on the brakes: "Fearsome, to doubt / your life's foundation."

Poetry is a dog--"this dog I've walked and walked / to death"--or shoes left behind by the dead ("Legacy"). It is "useless at its core, / but not valueless." 

Still, even though Seuss has misgivings about looking back and more misgiving about poetry, she ends the book by looking back to her early love of Keats, and Keats himself, whose commitment to poetry defined his brief life and has kept his poems in circulation these two two hundred years now. The incongruity of a poet in her sixties cherishing a poet who died at twenty-five, the diffident battered-by-experience modern poet celebrating the High Romantic one--the embrace of that incongruity in the book's final section is the volume's most Seussian moment. The incongruous is her happy place. What matter if the actual Keats, had we a time machine, would not quite be, umm, Ben Whishaw? Let me quote the book's final poem in its entirety.

You would not have loved him,
my friend  the scholar 
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. Wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

The poem is titled "Romantic Poet." But who is the Romantic poet, Keats or Seuss? Exactly.