WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 6, 2024

If only I’d had Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry when I first encountered the bulky textbook by the same title! If only we all had Diane Suess back then—we might have been a little less scared of verse and how to engage with it. Luckily we have her now! Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, published today) is a gorgeous undertaking. While delving into issues of gender and class and who poetry is meant for, Suess acknowledges her deep love (and sometimes distrust) of it. Here she is channeling Marianne Moore in “Against Poetry”:

https://yalereview.org/article/diane-seuss-against-poetry

Congratulations, Diane

Comments

[Peter Fortunato]

Seuss is typically witty and incisive here. I especially like this near the end when memory and imagination lead her back into the body: “I could sit on the front/ stoop and the whole world/ came streaming in through/ the structure of my senses. / Maybe the body is the soul’s metaphor.” (Nice inversion in that last sentence.) My take away from the poem is energy for my own inquiry into how the unconscious (the world of the senses, the realm of inarticulate intuitions, memory, etc.) impresses upon the conscious mind the necessity to create “useless” works of art, and thereby express “soul.” The modes of expression are always changing, and in ways we can’t consciously anticipate.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Denise. I'm looking forward to this, having loved her Frank sonnets.

[leah umansky]

How wonderful!

[Earl Averill]

Excellent.