On a February day in 1821, the English poet John Keats died in a small room in Rome, with only his somewhat reluctant travel companion Joseph Severn at his bedside. He was just twenty five. He had come to Rome in hope that the warmer climate might slow the lung-curdling tuberculosis he’d caught during the London winter and to escape the series of poor reviews his poem ‘Endymion’ received, which had convinced him of his own incurable failure. He was put, inexplicably, on a diet of anchovies, and subjected to several intense sessions of bloodletting, but his condition did not improve. His spiritual malaise was such that his doctor feared the depression might be worse than the TB and had Severn discreetly dispose of the large stash of laudanum Keats had smuggled from London.
It was the tuberculosis that did it, however, and after he died everything in that little room was burned in an attempt to halt the disease’s wild contagion. A few days later, the young poet’s body was carried through the town and buried in Rome’s non-Catholic cemetery, but not before a death mask was cast of his face, which later hung on the wall in his death room, now a museum, where an exact replica of his death-bed lies empty in dusty afternoon light. In a poem called ‘Romantic Poetry’, Diane Seuss writes of her pilgrimage to this room: ‘I lifted his death mask from its nail,/ cradled it, closed my eyes and kissed his lips / until the plaster warmed, / and stained his face / with the lipstick on my lips. Red / as the cover of Modern Poetry.’ Modern Poetry is the name of a textbook Seuss credits with being her first introduction to poetry (‘this dog I’ve walked and walked / to death’), and whose title she appropriates for her latest collection, recently published by Fitzcarraldo Editions alongside a new edition of her 2021 work, frank: sonnets. The two books weave fragmentary elements of memoir with an astute attention to form, moving from Seuss’s childhood in rural Michigan to a pre-gentrification downtown New York City and back again. These poems are taut and careful glimpses into a life lived on the fringes but threaded with wildness; there is a constant sense that everything they contain might erupt at any moment.
Modern Poetry is a kind of picaresque, a bildungsroman with line-breaks, a treatise on the poet as autodidact, and, above all, a bewildered compendium of ghosts, poetic and otherwise. The most prominent ghost here is, of course, Keats, evoked throughout, ‘preternaturally / wise’ right up to the final poem, in which the speaker relates a conversation with someone who insists she would have hated the ‘Romantic Poet’, he who ‘brushed his teeth, / if at all, with salt’ and ‘lied / and rarely washed / his hair.’ Sure, he was self-absorbed and slovenly, but still, Seuss insists – ‘the nightingale.’ You can’t argue with the nightingale, which to Seuss, as to Keats, encapsulates the improbable capacity of poetry to redeem the otherwise irredeemable. Keats’s nightingale, the subject of his most famous ode, places the almost-mythical transcendence of the bird’s song alongside the death, decay and ‘drowsy numbness’ that beleaguers the poem’s speaker. Keats coined a term for this kind of juxtaposition: ‘negative capability’, the poet’s ability to dwell in mystery, to recognise uncertainty and doubt as necessary counterparts to the experience of beauty and the sublime. Keats is an appropriate spirit guide through Seuss’s poetry, where we encounter other men dying too young, other forms of disease (AIDS rather than tuberculosis), other addictions and overdoses, other cramped interior spaces and, most prominently, other manifestations of Keatsian nightingales: moments of ordinary transcendence, glimmers of relief among the endless doubt. Only, Seuss suggests, don’t call it beauty, which here is ‘a problematic word, / one to be side-eyed lest it turn you / to stone or salt’.
Seuss’s own capacity for negation threads through ‘Against Poetry’, a polemical high note of the collection, in which Seuss compares her recent tendency to wonder about ‘poetry’s / efficacy’ to ‘doubting / a long romance, or romance / itself’. Slippery as a nightingale’s song, Seuss decides that what elevates poetry from the ‘merely illustrative’ to art is the fact of its ‘uselessness’. ‘Filled / with its own mystifying absurdities’, this inherent ‘uselessness’, in Seuss’s hands, becomes a liberating space for the poet – to be useless is to be freed from restrictive capitalist parameters of value. She writes:
Maybe the body is the soul’s
metaphor. Maybe to escape it
is to escape the service
economy. To dissolve analogy.
Attain uselessness.
Beyond Keats, many other ghosts of useless poetry haunt this book. Recounting her ‘cobbled’ education (‘my unscholarliness, / my rawness’), Seuss gives us Gerald Manley Hopkins, who appears ‘fucked up’, ‘tongue // twistery and depressed,’ and reverently evokes Emily Dickinson as ‘A horse straining at the bit // in the direction of free verse.’ Then there’s Sylvia Plath, ‘a woman’ who is ‘blonde’, ‘smart, angry’, and an object of distrust. Seuss confesses: ‘I wanted to love Sylvia, but to love her would mean // loving someone who would have hated me.’ Later there’s Colette, but to explain the attraction of Colette, Seuss writes, would be ‘like rowing a heavy boat / across a cold lake whose far shore I can’t even / begin to conceptualize.’ The most restless presence in Modern Poetry, however, is that of the poet’s own parents. Seuss recalls a mother walking in on a naked ‘soon-to-be-Defrocked Catholic priest’ washing himself in the garage, and a father, who died when the poet was still a child and recurs only in dreams to say things like ‘you’re not what I expected’ to the adult Diane. The tense thread between humour and pathos in these resurrections is Seuss’s reminder that there is no comfort to be found in nostalgia. ‘The dead don’t love the living’. In ‘Weeds’, she writes, ‘the danger / of memory is going / to it for respite. Respite risks / entrapment, which is never / good.’ The past is always there, but it’s ‘Only instruction. Not a dwelling.’
If Modern Poetry is an unruly archive of instructive ghosts, then frank: sonnets is a portrait of the poet as wary necromancer. We meet Mikel, a now-deceased friend who, ‘covered in KS lesions’, once demanded the poet ‘see the beauty of a mass of chrysanthemums.’ Sometimes beauty fails us. All the speaker saw was ‘a smear of yellow flowers.’ To let love come streaming in like that, the poet fears, would put her ‘out of business.’ Walls go up. Those tiny rooms again. She put Mikel’s ashes in ‘a tributary without touching them’ but, echoing her urge to kiss the plaster of Keats’ death mask, Seuss yearns for embodied contact with what she could never fully embrace: ‘Now I want to chalk my fingerprints with them / but it’s too late. I want to hold them like he held me and touched my upper lip and called it / Cupid’s cusp, a phrase that made me wince. I felt love all the way then, and never since.’
Seuss’s speaker has gone through the underworld and can’t help but look back. The past infects the present; it always does. Aging, Seuss suggests, is realising that nothing can take the past away: it accumulates, it grows gradually around us, as John Berger once said, ‘like a placenta for dying.’ More than ghosts, these poems are full of body parts, dismembered, diseased, strewn, bleached bones thrown back out from the earth in disbelief. ‘I have wanted’, Seuss writes, ‘to dig up / the dead to see what’s left, would almost rather meet the shell / than the soul, break the frozen ground, burial vault, box they house / them in which could be reduced to bronze handles, hinges and screws.’ As Kamran Javadizadeh has suggested, the structure of a sonnet is not unlike a coffin, ‘regular, rectangular, a receptacle for passions gone cold, bodies out of reach. Like a coffin, a sonnet can seem cramped, the tightest space into which its content can be arranged.’ But a space like that can’t hold life, and if Seuss’s sonnets are coffins, their contents are burning, screaming, alive. Maybe more than a coffin, Seuss’s sonnets are sometimes a kind of reliquary: a place to keep safe sacred scraps. Sometimes they don’t feel like boxes at all, but more like small windows; the feeling is like catching a partial illicit glimpse and being unable to look away. Another frequent sonneteer, Edna St Vincent Millay, described the formal practice as the will to ‘put Chaos into fourteen lines.’ Yet it’s risky to speak of the poem as distinct from its container – as a professor once told me, the poem is always both the glass and the liquid inside. The liquid inside Seuss’s glass is ‘colorless and lethal.’ This is her negative capability again. Chaos won’t stay put: her receptacles are always already spilling over.
Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it.
Believe me, I didn’t want it anymore. Who in their
right mind? And then it came like an ice cream truck
with its weird tinkling music, its sweet frost. I fled
to the shore and saw how death-strewn, all the body
parts washed up and sucked clean like that floor mosaic
by Sosus of Pergamon, Unswept House. Seabirds
flocked and dematerialized like they do. Bees raged
at their own dethroning.
We can bury our dead, Seuss tells us, but the body parts will always wash up again. To let intimacy in is always a risk – but what good is a life without it? The unpaddocking of these poems is such that even the space of the book itself cannot hold them; when my copy arrived I thought for a moment that something had gone wrong with the printing. About halfway through the collection a page unfolds out, leporello-like, so that the space might be made wide enough to contain a particularly long-lined poem detailing Seuss’s discovery of two vulture-like crack dealers in her son’s basement apartment, where ‘they’d come to feast off of what was left of him.’ It’s the kind of experience that excommunicates you from ordinary time. It can’t be put inside something as clean as a sonnet, but Seuss warps the form and does it anyway, daring us to contradict her: ‘my will by then was / like a jackhammer or a god, or one of those queens who wears a dress made of stones, so don’t ask for my touch is what I’m saying, don’t ask me now to walk among the people.’
If autobiographical writing is an attempt to fix a life inside language, frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry are both convincing arguments for the absolute impossibility of ever really succeeding in doing so. Instead, they offer an alternative: debris, glimpses, constellations, ghosts. Suffering and all its attendant bewilderment is given the space it deserves, and pleasure, transcendence, and love are all given due space alongside it. Seuss writes, ‘The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.’ Seuss’s poems distill the memories that persist with a refusal to narrativise, to cohere. To narrativise would be too close to slipping into the romantic trappings of nostalgia, retroactively imposing the kind of clarity that lived experience always refutes. Rather, Seuss gives us lesions and limbs, ragweed and narrow beds, ‘Dish soap and dryer sheets and birdseed / and greeting cards from the dollar store.’ In this way, her ‘restless search for beauty or relief’ gets close to the reality of living, while never letting us forget that we are dwelling here in the ‘essential artfulness, / i.e., uselessness’ of a poem. There is no attempt to wrest easy conclusions or morals out of suffering or to salvage past mistakes into lessons. Seuss reminds us: ‘meaning, in a gale, is the first to go.’ These two gale-like and astonishing almost-memoirs are spiky and fractured, reflected in one of frank: sonnets’ epitaphs, a quote from Candy Darling: ‘This is my barbed wire dress. It protects the property but doesn’t hide the view.’
In ‘Poetry’, Seuss leaves us with the lingering question that animates both books: ‘what / can poetry be now?’ I am inclined to reiterate one of her own suggestions; that ‘we must go so far as to invent / new mechanisms of caring.’ Maybe, Seuss suggests, poetry could remind us that ‘there is such a thing / as the beauty of drawing near. . . to the bedside of the dying / world. To sit in witness’. Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets make a clear distinction between uselessness and valuelessness. Seuss’s desire to ‘Attain uselessness’ is a kind of refusal. It is also a kind of love.