Modern Poetry

A post-Romantic lyric autobiography, Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry, in reinventing the 19th- and 20th-century poetic canons, deconstructs how poems and poets are made, and what poems mean.

                                                                  I was beginning
to understand, but barely. To ask a pertinent question
now and then, like where the hell was Langston Hughes
in Modern Poetry? Dickinson, in Nineteenth Century
   American Lit?

The landscape of Modern Poetry, rife with dogs, raccoons, goats, skulls, and unpaid water bills, poses an alternative history to Romanticism. “May I take the murdered world in? / Sing of it again?” Seuss asks, and simultaneously answers, in riotous, colloquial, first-person poems that deploy the song tradition (“Ballad,” “Pop Song,” “Folk Song,” “An Aria,” “Rhapsody,” and “Ballad That Ends with Bitch”) to upend a history of female subjectivity used as symbol or projection. With deadpan hilarity and perfect pitch, Seuss focuses her lens on the working-class: “There was only foraging for supplies, / many of which were full of worms or covered / in dust, like apples on the orchard floor, / and furniture junked on the side of the road.” These excavations of the unconscious consider the harsh realities of poverty, theft, addiction, and death, forming a “cobbled landscape” born of “unscholarliness […] rawness” that resounds with ragged lyricism and emotional truth:

Let me resurrect beyond the bracken
fronds and the three-legged stool and catgut guitar
and this two-ton song from the mouth
of a wax museum troubadour.

The apotheosis of this epic duende is a return to the reader, to whom this book is dedicated—“my true ally,” the apostrophic “you”:

                                                          I have
an affinity for my parents. An affinity
for you. I will make sure you are fed
and clothed. I will listen to you
endlessly. I will protect your privacy
even if it means removing myself
from the equation. Do those sound like
wedding vows? Are they indiscriminate?
Well, then, I am indiscriminate.
I am married to the world.

 

Seuss, in turning outsider consciousness into high art, posits poetry as a living thing, inextricable from the roots of existence and an authentic life: “I’m talking about a time and a place. / All I can say of it is that it was real.”