Diane Seuss

I am not particularly vain, but I do get a twinge when I don't enjoy things that are lauded by most. a feeling that maybe I don't know what I am talking about. That is a bad feeling, and so I went into reading Diane Seuss' Frank: Sonnets with trepidation. This memoir in sonnets won both the Pulitzer and the National Book award. I struggle with both poetry and with things set in the southern part of my home state of Michigan, a geography very much not beloved by me (though I love northern Michigan still.) So what would others think if I did not like this book with multiple imprimaturs of excellence? I need not have worried. Holy Moses this is great!

I am not well schooled in poetry, but I have read a good deal of Frank O'Hara, mostly because I am interested in O'Hara the man/curator of my favorite museum and I immediately recognized a similarity to O'Hara in Seuss' work. It turns out that I am not the only person who recognized that and that I sort of fell ass-backsword into sounding well educated. I just read a piece about this collection in McSweeney's and the piece, an interview with Diane Seuss, the intro starts thusly"

If Frank O’Hara were a salt-of-the-earth, lightning-struck woman with a master’s in social work who’d grown up in the middle United States and wrote sonnets about childhood and addiction and friends dying of AIDS, she would likely compose lines like the ones that run through Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets. But “frank” also means candor, and her variation on O’Hara’s sound soon turns wholly her own, and you mostly forget that Frank is in the background.

What she said.

I don't know what to say about this except that it is perfect in the way it defines a particular life, a particular historical moment (Seuss is a few years older than me, but all this is familiar.) She graduated from Kalamazoo College, I think a year before my brother did, so we are practically sisters. :) For anyone who thought sonnets were dead. read this. Seuss deconstructs and resurrects the form. In one poem she says: "The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,” And so it apparently does. Spare yet missing nothing. A life told. I am ending this with the last poem, a meditation on death and legacy, and hoping it whets all my friends appetites and sends them scurrying to find this book.

[I hope when it happens]
By Diane Seuss

I hope when it happens I have time to say oh so this is how it is happening

unlike Frank hit by a jeep on Fire Island but not like dad who knew too

long six goddamn years in a young man’s life so long it made a sweet guy sarcastic

I want enough time to say oh so this is how I’ll go and smirk at that last rhyme

I rhymed at times because I wanted to make something pretty especially for Mikel

who liked pretty things soft and small things who cried into a white towel when I hurt

myself when it happens I don’t want to be afraid I want to be curious was Mikel curious

I’m afraid by then he was only sad he had no money left was living on green oranges

had kissed all his friends goodbye I kissed lips that kissed Frank’s lips though not

for me a willing kiss I willingly kissed lips that kissed Howard’s deathbed lips

I happily kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Basquiat’s lips I know a man who said

he kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Whitman’s

lips who will say of me I kissed her who will say of me I kissed someone who kissed

her or I kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed her.… (mehr)