A Punk-Rural Aesthetic

Sometimes, when I hear folks discussing the huge reading honorariums that one or another fashionable young poet is commanding, I think of my email exchange with Diane Seuss.

This was a few years back, fall of ’21. I was teaching a graduate poetry class on the sonnet at the University of Mississippi, which, after going virtual the previous spring, had just begun to crack open the door to in-person teaching. I’d jumped at the chance to be back in the classroom with students. But while I detested Zoom teaching, I’d learned to value its singular magic: *presto* an envoy from a distant land could join our class without leaving their couch.

I emailed Seuss to invite her to read for my class because I was teaching her book, frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press). Duh. As in: of course I was teaching frank. frank changed the landscape of the sonnet, quite literally, with two sonnets containing lines so long they were printed on pages that fold back toward the spine of the book (they were charmingly dubbed “double-wide” by Han VanderHart in The Rumpus). I was entranced by Seuss’s voice, and by what I came to think of as her Hag Poetics, the way she—transgressively, delightedly—centers a female body past its recommended sell-by date. In “[Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some],” a poem that sparked many a conversation about toxic male poets abusing their power, Seuss evokes the New York milieu that left young women poets “feeling invisible or fucked.” “Finally,” she writes,

I took a turn 
and made myself appalling, like drag queens and anorexics, I 
     did 
not want to be acceptable, I wanted to be alarming, hulk, 
     colossus, 
freak, maybe not a great life plan but a step in the right 
     direction.

Her frankness is sometimes shocking (“I aborted two daughters, how do I know they were girls, / a mother knows”), and she seems amused at how shocking she can be. But her amusement doesn’t belie her vulnerability, or her commitment to clear-eyed truth-telling, especially the truths of the working-class poor. “Punk-rural” is how she answers an interviewer who asks her to define her aesthetic. “Roadkill,” she elaborates. “That’s my aesthetic.” All of this witchy power is both constrained and liberated by the sonnet form (Iambics! Rhyming couplets! Di, you sly dog!). Her work progresses partially through narrative, partially through images that seem literal but morph into metaphors or puns, and sometimes morph back into the literal.

So, as I said, duh, I was teaching frank.

When I emailed Seuss, frank had just been published. The buzz was merely a few of us worker bees; nothing like what was a-coming. I mention the timing because maybe after winning the Pulitzer, Seuss would have declined my offer. Though I like to think not.

It had been almost 20 years since I’d met Seuss, in 2003, when my first book, Open House, had won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, which came with a book tour looping a handful of, you guessed it, Great Lakes colleges. Seuss’s Kalamazoo College was one, and I crushed on her immediately, and after my reading we enjoyed a boisterous, boozy dinner and discussed poetry books and babies (I’d just published my first of both, and probably spoke like I invented them, though I hope not). At one point, Seuss mentioned a prose poem she’d written, “What My Son’s First Haircut Taught Me about Flying” (from her debut, It Blows You Hollow). I said that I’d love to read it, and she said she’d love to send it, which is a thing people love to say but don’t love to do. She did, and I kept that poem skewered to my bulletin board for years. I’d like to link to it now but can’t; a Google search turns up nothing. Imagine a poem that kick-ass being inaccessible by all-powerful Google. Or better yet, don’t imagine it, go track it down for yourself.

In my email, I reminded Seuss of all this and let her know I was teaching her book. I asked if there was any way she’d Zoom into my class for an hour-long Q and A. I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t think it was worth it, I assured her, explaining that we didn’t have much of a budget. I did not quote from her own poem, with its magical line break: “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.” I sheepishly confessed that we could offer 300 dollars.

“That’s enough to buy groceries,” she replied.

We scheduled the Zoom meeting a few months out, and in the interim, I started to hear more people talking about frank, including some colleagues. I began to wish that my entire MFA program, not just my class, could hear from Seuss. I emailed one more time: would she be open to extending the Zoom? After she did our class Q and A, might she offer a poetry reading for the wider program? But I understood if it wasn’t worth her time, I assured her, and sheepishly confessed we could only offer an additional 200 dollars.

“That’s enough to buy birdseed,” she replied.

So we agreed and she read and was genius and for the span of a night my students thought that I was genius, too, for arranging it. The end.

Except for one more thing I need to say. About the birdseed:

I’m not saying that Seuss didn’t deserve more. I hope she gets more, oodles more, now that frank won the Pulitzer Prize (or “the Bullet Surprise,” as a student once called it, an all-time favorite mondegreen) and now that her newest book, Modern Poetry, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award. Yes, when Seuss gives a reading nowadays, I hope the host drags burlap bags onto the stage, bags stamped with dollar signs, bags clinking with gold doubloons. I hope the host brings along a security guard handcuffed to a briefcase who carries it to Seuss’s podium and clicks it open and the audience aaaahhhhs to see the golden light illuminating Seuss’s cat-eye kohl liner. She deserves every doubloon, doubled. For that matter, so do those fashionable young poets; if they can get those large honorariums, bully for them.

I’m not saying that Seuss didn’t deserve more. What I am saying: Diane Seuss read for birdseed. First, she used her poetry earnings to secure her groceries, sure. When that was arranged, and she had the smallest surplus, she used it to nurture the creatures in her habitat—putting the honor back in honorarium, and leaving me with an almost-too-obvious metaphor.

For years now, for me and so many of her readers, Seuss’s poems have been seeds, fueling us through the long, white winters.

Thank you, Diane Seuss, for your wanton generosity. It’s been an honor to nibble from your hand.