And no, we are not referring to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, although, actually, I love those giant anthologies that Norton has made for decades. And Diane Seuss references the Anthology in her latest book of collected poems, Modern Poetry. This is a collection that ruminates on modern poetry as one of its main themes. This book has strong themes, a strong sense of place, and a strong and consistent voice. It is also the volume published hot on the heels of Seuss’s Pulitzer-winning frank: sonnets.

(Credit to my So and So Books book club for the discussion which led to plenty of these thoughts.)

At 109 pages, Modern Poetry is more than a chapbook. This is Seuss’s sixth book of poetry since 1998. She has also been published poem-by-poem in places such as The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Yale Review. And she has won awards, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN, and a Guggenheim fellowship. So we know she can write. Her books are:

• It Blows You Hollow
• Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open
• Four-Legged Girl
• Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
• frank: sonnet
• and now Modern Poetry

The poetry here is basically approachable, as long as you are in the “head space” to read poetry. If you don’t catch every reference or every five-dollar word, you just keep reading and you still understand some and feel a lot. It is also a bit dreary, but a sparse and beautiful kind of dreary. Ditto with gritty. Suess is conversational and direct, and extremely self-aware, more even than how aware we are of her in the poems. She addresses herself repeatedly and deals with themes including hurt creating gods, where we come from mattering, living in the present, the opposite of Capitalism (like a sort of depressed, Bohemian, rural Midwestern thing), and, most obviously, modern versus romantic poetry. Meta poetry. She repeatedly mentions: Keats, menstruation, pain, poetry, death/dying/funerals, Rimbaud, the impossibility of love, a long line of lovers, and animals (all of which appear in an abased, skeletal beauty).

So the main theme (just look at the title and the titles of the poems) is modern vs. romantic poetry. It would help before reading this to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts and history of each. Sure, they have historical time periods, but more importantly, romantic poetry is emotional and populist, while modern poetry is more cultural and political, elitist, and academic. Please don’t just take my word for it. Look it up. Seuss likes to see herself as a romantic poet. I think.

A few other things. If you are from Michigan, you’ll find a lot of Easter eggs in the work. If you are rural and/or Midwestern, you will relate to the poems, especially if you are of a certain age. I don’t see Seuss’s self-flagellation as false modesty. I saw it as honesty. And a certain kind of life that has been precisely gnawed upon, maybe we’ll call it rough living. Also, there are so many musical terms. Are these terms that are used in poetry critique, too? Or is there something I’m missing here?

My favorite poems in this collection are:

• “Juke”
• “Comma” (which is great for reading aloud)
• “Folk Song”
• “Threnody”
• “Coda”
• “Romantic Poet”

Followed by:

• “My Education”
• “Pop Song”
• “An Aria”
• “Weeds”
• “Cowpunk”
• “Bobby”
• “The Personal”
• “The Other”

I enjoyed reading this book of poetry. It is clearly skillful and thoughtful; meanings and rabbit trails are tucked in just about every corner. I appreciated the breaking of the fourth wall, and even the Grey Gardens vibes, the Grimm’s fairy tales meets trailer in the woods. Seuss is a mythologizer. She speaks to us with reality in one hand and fantasy in the other. The ground feels unsteady, but the vertigo doesn’t quite throw us to the ground. In other words, the dreariness and grit weren’t too much for me. I enjoyed Suess’s frankness, her smearing of everything in her world together. It was, actually, strangely beautiful.

Further reading recommendations:

• Kay Ryan
• James Wright and Franz Wright
• Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
• the Norton antologies
• frank: sonnets and/or Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
• Sylvia Plath reading aloud “Daddy”

I hope no one (read Seuss or her publisher) is too mad at me for how many quotes I included here. It’s nowhere near like a ten per cent (including of any one poem), but there were so many great quotes.

“You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made // or so I’m told.” (p6, “Curl”)

“You can’t stay vigilant and remain alive, / Or infinite vigilance is a kind of death, / Or you can’t be present tense. / That is, tense about the present.” (p10, “Little Song”)

“…Dickinson …. A horse straining at the bit / in the direction of free verse. A woman who drove / a motorcycle to Women’s Literature, wore a fringed / black leather jacket…” (p13, “Modern Poetry”)

“My project / was my life.” (p17, “My Education”)

“To a dead man, / a living adult daughter must be such an overwhelm, a real load, / and from death he had learned to prefer simplicity, the ephemera / of steam rising from a cup, birds, but he didn’t care what kind / of birds. He was wearing a humble but clean shirt. He wanted, / I believe, to keep it that way. I was like a cake / with too many ingredients that had overflowed its pan, spilled // into the oven, and smoldered there.” (p21, “Pop Song”)

“Are the gods mocking me for acting / in-the-know? This would happen back home a lot. / Anybody who tooted their own horn / or dared to sound as if they were an expert // on any subject were mocked and driven / into the next county. Never hold yourself above. / There is no expertise. There is only good sense, / earned hard and held close to the vest.” (p29, “Villanelle”)

“You know what? I want to be rich and lithe.” (p31, “Folk Song”)

“It matters how and where you are made, / and what // materials were at hand for the makers.” (pp33-34, “Folk Song”)

“The best poem is no poem.” (p38, “Coda”)

“A free show is never really free.” (p42, “An Aria”)

“My mind has grown wooden around love, // like a tree that has nearly swallowed / a garden / gate where lovers met at moonrise / when the air was thick with Hesperis.” (p42, “An Aria”)

“May I take the murdered world in? / Sing of it again?” (p44, “An Aria”)

“In their literature / they wrote of winter as their season of suffering. / There are worse things than winter, I wanted to say, / handing them money for bread” (p47, “Allegory”).

“But meaning, in a gale, is the first to go.” (p48, “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.” (p48, “Allegory”)

“Dictionaries then were musty and heavy and old. / You had to go to them. They did not come to you.” (p49, “Allegory”)

“You understand / that you can cross a hundred bridges, / but there is no way to go north again, / by which I mean it’s time to put to bed, / like the row of the giant’s children / in their matching nightcaps / our allegories of innocence.” (p51, “Allegory”)

“When I nursed my baby decades / back, moonlight poured in the window, / and starlight, / and I felt myself click into the template, / like a bone back into its joint, / doing what mothers do and have done. / Maybe I was painted on an urn somewhere.” (p64, “Simile”)

“…beauty… it is not something to work on / but a by-product, at times, / of the process of our making.” (p71, “Poetry”)

“Either way / please don’t tell me flowers / are beautiful and blood clots / are ugly. These things I know, / or I know this is how / flowers and blood clots / are assessed by those content / with stale orthodoxies. / Maybe there is such a thing / as the beauty of drawing near. / Near, nearer, all the way / to the bedside of the dying / world. To sit in witness, / without platitudes, no matter / the distortions of the death throes…” (p72, “Poetry”)

“I have oppositional / poetry disorder.” (p77, “Rhapsody”)

“I want to express / my opinion about people expressing their opinions.” (p77, “Rhapsody”)

“For love, for love. / What ridiculous things I’ve done, / I’ve said big dick when I meant small dick.” (p79, “Little Fugue with Jean Seberg and Tupperwear”)

“Women back then had to have cold // hearts.” (p82, “The Personal”)

“I miss the days when I had / a grandmother and no one personalized / anything I did.” (p82, “The Personal”)

“If I had an insight, / I’d keep it bottled up / until it disappeared, and I didn’t / have that many insights. Imagine / it. One pair of red shoes and no // slippers.” (p83, “The Personal”)

“Her house had always been a respite. / When she got sick it became the scene of the crime.” (p85, “The Other”)

“Maybe deep, deep down beneath / the hipness and provocations, he was a true believer.” (p87, “The Other”)

“Whatever grace you stumble upon, / don’t sit on it like a smug hen on its eggs. / Whatever you think of yourself, / think otherwise, Diane.” (p87, “The Other”)

“Maybe the body is the soul’s / metaphor.” (p95, “Against Poetry”)

“Maybe to escape [the body] / is to escape the service / economy. To dissolve analogy. / Attain uselessness.” (p95, “Against Poetry”)

“…and poems, / skinned free of poets, / like the favorite shoes of that dead / girl now wander the streets / with someone else’s feet in them.” (p99, “Legacy”)

“…stars as the poor see them, / who cannot afford glasses.” (p103, “High Romance”)