>> Laura Green: Thank you all so much for coming. I appreciate you being here tonight. How many of you [inaudible] visit for the time here at Hill Center? You first timers? Okay, good, good. We like to see the newcomers as well as the returning faces, so want to thank you again for coming. We appreciate it. So just a reminder, I'm going to ask you to silence your cell phone. I'll do the same once I'm done with my notes. Good, good, [inaudible]. Another reminder is that East City Books will be selling some of Diane Seuss', two of Diane Seuss' books over in this gallery over here, and she'll be signing after the, after the program, so get your, get your wallets ready for that. >> Diane Seuss: [Laughs] Yeah! >> Laura Green: Exactly. [Laughter] And I will put it on over to Anne Holmes, the Digital Content Manager at the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. [ Applause ] [ Laughter ] >> Anne Holmes: It's like a college reunion in here. Thank you, Laura. So I'm Anne Homes, Digital Programs Manager at the Poetry and Literature Center. Thanks to Dianna, Charlotte, and the rest of the Hill Center staff for hosting The Life of a Poet, and thanks as well to the Washington Post for their support, and to Ron Charles for nurturing the series. Before I introduce tonight's guest, let me just tell you a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. The Center is home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Tracy K. Smith is finishing up her tenure this month, and around this time next month, we'll be announcing the 23rd Poet Laureate, so stay tuned. The Poetry and Literature Center also hosts an annual literary event series with programs such as this one, just up the street at the Library. If you want to find out more about the Center and our programs, check us out online at LOC.Gov/Poetry. We'd also like to know what you think about tonight's program, and to that end, we've handed out surveys that you'll find on or near your seat, so after the event, please fill out and just leave on your seat, or you can hand it to me. Okay, now let's turn to tonight's guest. Diane Seuss. Start with a little biography. >> Diane Seuss: Uh-oh. [Laughter] >> Anne Holmes: Hopefully no surprises in here. Diane Seuss was born in Michigan City, Indiana, and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. She studied at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University where she received a master's degree in social work. She is the author of four poetry collections. Her most recent collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, was released in 2018 by Graywolf Press, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Prize in Poetry. Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015 by Graywolf was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open won the Juniper Prize, and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. A fifth collection, Frank: Sonnets is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2021. For almost 30 years, she was Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College where she received the Florence J Lucas Fellowship for both teaching and scholarship. She also served as the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the English Department at Colorado College in 2012. Diane Seuss lives in rural Michigan. My voice is shaking. I apologize [laughter]. >> Diane Seuss: You're so moved by-- . >> Anne Homes: I am! [Laughter] So it's an absolute honor for me to introduce Diane Seuss tonight as a lover of her work, and also as one of her former students. I met Diane as a painfully shy undergraduate student at Kalamazoo College, and she was the first person to really instill in me that poetry matters, that poets matter, and I'm positive that I'm not alone when I say that she is and continues to be the most fiercely generous and supportive teacher I've known. I see other classmates in this room which is pretty incredible! Hi! [Laughter] Diane's poems, too, are fiercely generous. They operate with remarkable empathy and an extended invitation to all the gore and gold of memory and desire. They invoke Dickinson's "I'm Nobody, Who are You?" by yelling, "Hey, come here!" to the nobodies, the freaks, the overlooked. In her poems, nothing goes unnoticed, and nothing is dispensable. "Having noticed it, why not say it?" says the speaker in a poem from Four-Legged Girls titled "I'm Moved by Her, that Big-Nippled Girl." [Laughter] In her most recent book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Seuss's poems regard and question the stillness of still life paintings, and punctures them to show us the underbelly of everything. What's beyond human control, where the idealized halts and the gut-punch of reality lives, in the grotesque, sublime, irreverent, and ecstatic, all of it. Her poems leave us part dizzy and [inaudible], part desirous and glowing, standing in a Walmart parking lot which is just as beautiful and complicated as anything. Please help me welcome Diane Seuss. [ Applause ] >> Diane Seuss: Thank you, Anne. [ Applause ] Hi! >> Ron Charles: That was lovely! >> Diane Seuss: Yeah! I'm all like, ting! >> Ron Charles: Thank you all for coming. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: I'm so glad you're here! Thank you so much for making the trip. >> Diane Seuss: Thank you, yeah, it was a harrowing journey. >> Ron Charles: I'm sorry about that. >> Diane Seuss: To get anywhere from Michigan is kind of harrowing, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Our sound okay? Everybody hear us alright? Okay. >> Diane Seuss: Are you on? >> Ron Charles: Am I on? Okay. In one of your poems, you write, "There are no symbols in hell. We cannot rub even two words together, not enough to [inaudible] a spark. Not enough to light a fire in a thimble, and this is the hell of it." >> Diane Seuss: I forgot about that. >> Ron Charles: I want you to read that poem for us. >> Diane Seuss: Oh, okay. >> Ron Charles: And I'll be listening for those lines. >> Diane Seuss: Alright. So this is called Even in Hell There Are Songbirds. Not just calling, but full trills. Music rising like swells on a windy ocean. Each bird a chip off of some brilliantly-colored abstraction. Beaks gold as trumpets reflecting yellow blossoms. In hell, birds are free, but they are not symbolic of freedom. There are no symbols in hell. The moon flowers open and close their mouths but have nothing to say. The bees sting the poppies' heart and carry away its black pollen, and we in our uniforms sit in our lawn chairs and watch. We take it all in. We let it pound us like breakers into the side of a tethered wooden boat. We receive beauty as a nail receives the hammer blow. And we remember our losses, and the gains we thought were gains but were really losses. But we cannot rub even two words together. Not enough to let loose a spark. Not enough to light a fire in a thimble, and this is the hell of it. [ Applause ] >> Ron Charles: That description of hell, a place where there are no symbols, words cannot spark a fire suggest by implication what language can do. Tell us about that. What is the great blessing of language, of poetic words? >> Diane Seuss: That's a really, really strong question. For me, it's been the difference between living and dying. And I don't mean just a physical death, but a spiritual death because from very early on, and I think this is true of a lot of people who write, language was what gave me a way to make some sort of order out of the chaos of experience. And I had early lost-- my father died when I was seven. He was sick from the time I can remember, and to be able to language that event, even just as I sort of, in my own head, talking to myself, before I could even write really, was the difference between sort of falling into the hole with him, and finding a way to move forth. Just from very early on, reading other people's words. I read very young. I was really bad at math though, so it's all cool. >> Ron Charles: Aren't we all? >> Diane Seuss: It was my one talent. I read at age three, and I was one of those who read automatically. Nobody had to teach me. And to read other people's words made me feel like okay, I'm not the only one. I'm not the only weirdo. Even reading Dick and Jane, you know, as un-Dick and un-Jane as I was. Ha, ha. It still, you know they were still children, and it, it felt, books felt like a home. So yeah, in that poem, I forgot about that, that, that hell really meant and means to me the inability to language experience. And-- . >> Ron Charles: When you use the word, "language" as a verb, what do you mean? >> Diane Seuss: I mean bring language to find the words for. Gregory Orr, a great poet. If you've not read him, do, both his poems and essays. He has an essay about he, he talks about that the first stage after trauma is rant. And the second stage is journal, and the third stage is poetry, the most removed from, from the sort of guttural rawness. And therefore, it, it's almost an artifact, like the Grecian urn. And there, and you can hold it and look at it. It's out here. It's not roiling around in here, so I think for me, poetry as a made thing, is something to make out of experience and be able to hold apart from myself. Just, I find that thrilling, and I find that healing, that my experiences-- . You know, my dad is somebody, for instance, who no one would really remember. He had, he had some students. He, he quit high school, went into the service during World War II, got a GED, and became a teacher. But then he got sick, and so he couldn't really finish, but I like the idea that I can memorialize him in language. That the stories my mother knows and tells from the little village where she grew up, that I can make those last at least as long as books last, hopefully a while longer. So am I running at the mouth? >> Ron Charles: Not at all. That's so much preferable to saying, "Yes." >> Diane Seuss: Yes, there's salvation in language. Next? [Laughter] >> Ron Charles: Why it's violence? That's so much an image. Same subject here. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. Do you want me to read it? >> Ron Charles: I do, please. >> Diane Seuss: This is-- . >> Ron Charles: I know. The Library does that to your books. >> Diane Seuss: Cool! [Laughter] "White Violet". Not so much an image of tenderness, as an image of a memory of tenderness. I am ashamed to look, I am ashamed to look at it this closely, but can't stop fingering its five sticky petals. Nebulous as water on the brink of becoming steam. Thin as a solo lingering for three days, threatening to reignite into flesh. Or a ghost climbing the body's bone ladder in order to abdicate the body's terms. This flower might as well be a girl named Violet with dew on her upper lip, who elopes through her bedroom window, leaving only her thing, yellow-white chemise behind. Its petals are that fragile. They lack commitment to the material world, their molecules ascending any minute now, evaporative, like a pretty infant bound and determined to fly back into the hands of nothingness. Or a shepherd dispassionate about the lambs, always looking off into the lavender beyond. The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it. That's the essential problem, how we must get out the jeweler's loupe and start dissecting, prying open the mauve sac at the base of the flower like a fox in the henhouse, looking for green ovaries spilling over with eggs, or Hawthorne's Aylmer, prying away at Georgiana's birthmark. I bring the torn flower to my mouth to confirm the myth of its honey, only to find it tastes gamey, green, like a hand that's held too long to copper coins. This close, its scent is not sweet but sour-I crush it to awaken its perfumes- acidic, unripe, puerile, stinging, tined. I remember a poet reading translations of Paul Valéry when I was young. I wore a white, gauzy dress with laces at the bodice, and the poet stood in a pool of heroic white-gold light with his shirt half unbuttoned, [laughter]. His silver hair curling over his ears. 'Perfume is what the flowers throw away, he read, quoting Valéry. Later he tried to pry me open, but I ran home barefoot through the rain under a foggy membrane of moon-that ventricular patch sewed between the chambers of night and day. That wispy peephole in the screen between supplicant and priest in the confessional booth, that rice-paper privacy screen, painted with a profusion of white violets, in the black bordello. >> Ron Charles: That's a beautiful poem. Tremendously complex. >> Diane Seuss: It is! Now I'm stymied. >> Ron Charles: It's, one of the things it's about is the way language connotes and suggests and represents much more than experience itself. >> Diane Seuss: It's just a violet. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: But the language pushes us far beyond that, and all those different examples where you're tearing things up and looking [inaudible]. >> Diane Seuss: Yes. When you were kids, did you used to tear open flowers? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Diane Seuss: It's really a cruel thing to do [laughter], but we must do it! And that's what language can do. It is the, the dissection to all. It does tear away the petals. It destroys the very thing it loves. >> Ron Charles: But it allows us to see, understand, and comprehend and experience. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, and it, that's where, you know, Williams wrote, or somebody else-- was it Stevens and then Williams copied it, no ideas but in things? >> Ron Charles: There are people who know. >> Diane Seuss: No idea, yea. So "no ideas but in things." And I think there's a truth to that. The thing itself in that poem is the violet, and I love the thing itself, the concrete, the head of the nail, right? But what the thing itself allows, it's not just ideas, but it's also a kind of playground for the imagination, and the imagination, well, in my work, it's maybe the most important thing. >> Ron Charles: Yes. You have several poems about writing poems. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Including a very funny one, a little too long for us to read, called The Crooked Goose. I recommend it. >> Diane Seuss: Oh, god. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's quite witty, and other times you just drop little self-critical asides in, like you say, "Like God. That's a terrible simile for me to use." "Like God, with his mirror, I use it." >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, so it's, it's both self-denigrating but also makes me God. [Laughter] Just, you know-- . >> Ron Charles: "All trees are trees. Death to modifiers," you say. >> Diane Seuss: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, the way you write a poem, and you're commenting on the poem, and the act of writing the poem in the same poem. >> Diane Seuss: And that, you know, because that's my world. A thing that worries me right now about real contemporary work is that people kind of, maybe because of social media or all kinds of forces-- they're sort of following each other rather than their own quirky boloney. You know? And I think the boloney is very rich. My world, let's call it braunschweiger, you know? [Laughter] My, I like my work best when I'm really being myself, when I'm not imitating anybody else. As free as I can be from imitation. >> Ron Charles: Well, let's talk about beauty, which is a big subject in your poems. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah! >> Ron Charles: An anti-beauty. >> Diane Seuss: Yes! >> Ron Charles: One of your poems, one of your recent poems says that art "is as useless as tits on a boar." >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: That should have gotten a bigger laugh. >> Diane Seuss: Well. >> Ron Charles: As tits on a boar. >> Diane Seuss: So that, that statement came from my mother, and from her father in the small town where she was raised, maybe you've heard this, they would say, "Oh, you know John. He's useless as tits on a boar." [Laughter] So a boar is a male pig, right? And somehow, in that poem, which is about all kinds of things around art and who has access to it, it ended with "art, useless as tits on a boar." Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Many of your poems offer explicit critiques of traditional beauty. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Pretty aggressive critiques. I would like you to read a poem called, "I'm Glorious in my Destruction like an Atomic Bomb." >> Diane Seuss: Oh boy, okay. [Laughter] I'll do it. I wore my skull pants just for this moment. Alright. I'm Glorious in my Destruction-- Like an Atomic Bomb. It's beautiful, like one of those balletic car accidents. Dead girl's indigo bunting face, father's teeth, scattered seed money. Lithe column of smoke rising from the ruin. Or not so lithe. My big body cinched by a tight dress. Funnel clouds spilling cleavage. My cousin picked me up at the Amtrak station in Kalamazoo, coming in from New York City. He'd not seen me since before breast buds. I'd just hennaed my hair. I mean, it was an oil refinery explosion, and he said, "You're more ravaged than I expected," and that was nearly 30 years ago. [Laughter] So what the hell am I now? I'd already been shot in the head and struck by lightning, but most of it, abortions, Kevin's heroin overdose, Mikel's AIDS, 48 hours of labor, divorce, poverty, roof collapse, assault, red bud trees sliced in half, legs snapped off at the high-water mark came later. I was 21, and he called me "ravaged." Even then my mouth opened like a bullet hole in a picture window. I was talking to a guy the other day, a guy like a mountain whose warm side I could lean against, maybe sleep for an afternoon. A mountain not meant for climbing. And he said, "Beauty is what has not yet been touched, the unsullied landscape of the body." And later another guy said of my poems, "I'm frankly more interested in her than her poetry." And I folded up like an ironing board, I mean he's right. I'm fucking fascinating. I'm a tangled, sullied wilderness, scarified with highways. My father was a Navy boy, dreaming of home when that big golden beehive teased up over Hiroshima beautifully, and he soon died of it, but first there was that kamikaze pilot's ravishing boy-girl face, plowing toward him as a beautiful black horse once galloped from way across the pasture and brush, its velvet against his bare chest. And the smell of manure on the new lawn in the early morning on the cusp of his dying, when it was just him and the rising zero of the sun. Him and the tragedy of his dismantled life. The sun and the moss roses in their garish refugee clothes, bare-knuckling it beneath the trees. This is why I can't be your lover. You want me beautiful, and I am only beautiful if you thought the bombing of Baghdad was beautiful. Or my father's face just before they shut down his eyes, whatever he was looking at, would you then call that beautiful? Ouch. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. It seems to me you're doing at least two things there. One, rejecting traditional standards of beauty, but then suggesting a different kind of beauty, a whole different standard of beauty, different definition of beauty. In one of your poems entitled, "Beauty is Over," you end by-- . >> Diane Seuss: That's pretty blunt. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, you end by referencing, "My titanium leg and screws, my stretch marks and wide Cesarean scar, my overt and covert baldness, my bad shoes, my bad ankles, my bad, bad, bad, bad poetry." >> Diane Seuss: Yep. It sounds different when you say it. [Laughter] >> Ron Charles: It doesn't sound as good. This literary rejection of beauty in the poems seems connected to a feminist argument? Rejecting patriarchal standards of beauty? >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, it's so damaging. I think Toni Morrison said in an interview that Western beauty standards are the most damaging thing on the planet. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Can you flesh that out for us? >> Diane Seuss: Well, I think for women, certainly, but for men as well, and for transgender people, and you know every being, human being on the planet, the expectation that one, that one's beauty is somehow attached to capitalism and control and whiteness and-- . You know, it's, I don't know for you guys, but for me it, it really took up most of my imagination and spirit until I was, you know, in my late twenties, trying on, trying to be beautiful. >> Ron Charles: It's an impossible and moving standard. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, it is. It's, you're not supposed to reach it because then you won't buy, you know, crap. And I remember, you know, my mom is very, to me, very beautiful, but she was very androgynous, and I remember being at a store or something as a kid, and some body said, "She doesn't shave her armpits!" And this is when no, every woman shaved her armpits, and I was so offended. You know, don't talk about my mother's body. And I feel that same offense now for myself and for all of you, that I mean, what, what we do to ourselves to, to be loved, to be loved, is just so horrific. >> Ron Charles: Brutal. >> Diane Seuss: Brutal. And I, I don't want that kind of beauty. >> Ron Charles: Which brings us to Sylvia Plath. >> Diane Seuss: Oh. [Laughter] Oh my. >> Ron Charles: Self-portrait with Sylvia Plath's Braid. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Listen to this. >> Diane Seuss: So Sylvia Plath's Braid is in a library at Indiana University, and people go to see it. I know, road trip! [ Laughter ] Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe. I didn't drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid roped over my hands, heavier than lead. My own hair was long for years. Then I became obsessed with chopping it off, and I did, clear up to my ears. If hair is beauty, then I am no longer beautiful. Sylvia was beautiful, wasn't she? And like all of us, didn't she wield her beauty like a weapon? And then she married, and laid it down, and when she was betrayed and took it up again it was a word-weapon, a poem-sword. In the dream I fasten her braid to my own hair, at my nape. I walk outside with it, through the world of men, swinging it behind me like a tail. >> Ron Charles: That's great. >> Diane Seuss: Thank you. >> Ron Charles: I love the swagger of that poem. The way you take Sylvia Plath's power and use it again in the world. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, and that's my love for her. >> Ron Charles: Killed her, but it's not going to kill you. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, well I hope not. So far, so good. I don't have, well I won't say that, yeah. No, I, I think, you know, I often think about if Sylvia had sisters like a lot of the people here in the room, she probably could have made it. >> Ron Charles: Or if we were just more attentive to each other's mental health. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, she went through so much. >> Ron Charles: It was a different age. >> Diane Seuss: It was a different age, and there wasn't, there weren't meds, you know? There weren't the kind of meds she needed. But I think she's brilliant and she's a model in many ways for me, so I love attaching her. That was from a dream. I did have the dream that I attached her braid to, to my own hair and swung it around. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, a tail. There's a persistent, strenuous resistance in your poetry to sentimentality, and schmaltzy-ness? Schmaltch? Schmaltzy romance? >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: You have a very caustic, witty line in here. "Why the poets lined up behind Desire I will never understand. See how I run through the Rolodex of metaphors in my head, trying to nail its array of suffocations?" [Laughter] >> Diane Seuss: Well, that is bitchy. [Laughter] >> Ron Charles: In another poem, you write, "Yes, I snapped desire over my knee, and arsoned it." Arsoned it. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, that's in Four-Legged Girl, and I think a lot of that book is really about finding my way out of that maze of, of beautiful, and finding another way to construct desire that isn't about being desired or desiring another. But desiring something constructed in my own image, and that for me is poetry. >> Ron Charles: It wasn't love, but love's template. >> Diane Seuss: Oh, you're always surprising. The face of dawn, secreted beneath a gold mask. Purple-furred dusk lifted its leg and marked the oily streets. Skyscrapers scraped the sky until it beaded blood. Silver light seeped through the needle marks punched in heaven's sheath. We walked to Chinatown, always after dark. Chinatown, but China, but China's wriggling offspring. So-called lovers fed off of it. Chopsticks deep into a whole red snapper. Chinese style, the menu read, though not Chinese. On the bowery, poets taking notes. Not so much poets as what passed for poets in those days. [Laughter] Bums warmed their hands over garbage ignited in burn barrels. The colors of poets and bums and lovers blazed, a tapestry of a mirage. Let's not turn it into an epic. Maybe a fairytale derived from an epic-derived myth, not love, but love's archetype, like the love that goes on in the afterlife, a state of being devoid of verbs. He was naked beneath an unbelted green robe. A party, hallucination, beauties bent over other beauties, gazing into them like coke mirrors. He wasn't hung, but precise like a drill bit. Soup, sex, and man holes gave off steam, cloudlike, but not clouds. Foggy shapes painted on a backdrop, inert as a reliquary. Inert as the idea of God, or God's idea of God. Being fractured like a bridge or a bone, releasing the marrow of plot. I was the heroine fleeing heroin. I left him frozen in the moment before euphoria strikes the heart. I visit him sometimes, like one visits a favorite painting in a vast museum. >> Ron Charles: That is an unromantic poem. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, it's all [inaudible] too. >> Ron Charles: Explain that to us. >> Diane Seuss: So there's no line breaks. The, the sentence ends, you know, at the end of the line. And so there's this kind of no-nonsense. I'm not going to mess with line breaks and be all curvy. I'm going to just you know make an inventory. >> Ron Charles: Right. As sometimes shockingly frank, sexually frank as your poetry is, I think class is the real taboo that you violate. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: That you force us to think about class in a way that we don't like to think about it, that we're not comfortable thinking about. I think it's more striking than even the most sexually frank poems that you write. Tell us about your own economic background. >> Diane Seuss: Well I thought he was going to say something about my sex life. I was like no! No! >> Ron Charles: No. Well, we all want to talk about that. It's economics, it's money we don't want to talk about, right? That's what makes us uncomfortable: money. >> Diane Seuss: Well, I'm from working-class people in rural Michigan, and people who worked really hard for not very much, and who were proud of that, you know? And my mom, after you know, my dad died, she was a single mother. She wasn't allowed to go to college when she was graduated from high school, so she went to college after he died. And we were penniless, always. >> Ron Charles: So no one was working during those years. >> Diane Seuss: No, no. >> Ron Charles: That's tough! >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, we lived on his Social Security which wasn't very much because he didn't work very long. So we got, you know, the donations, government cheese, as they say. But I didn't really notice it too much because the, the wealth was in what was outside the door. The, the bog, the milkweed pods, and the richness of place. >> Ron Charles: Nature. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, nature was the wealth. And there wasn't so much to want or buy then, you know? >> Ron Charles: Marketing wasn't as sophisticated, and, and invasive as it is now. >> Diane Seuss: No, and you know even beauty, you know there was one kind of tennis shoe, right? Some of you remember those days. >> Audience Member: You had a choice of color. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, right, red, white, or you know black maybe. Yeah, there was what? A couple kinds of shampoo. You weren't trying to like gear the shampoo to your certain kind of hair quality! And so I didn't much notice. My mom did a good job of hiding her worries. She hid a lot, I think, just to keep us going. At my dad's funeral, she said, "Here's a hankie." She gave one to my sister and one to me, "but try not to use it." And I didn't. Neither did my mother. Neither did my sister. Everybody else did, though. But we, we kept it in. And I don't blame her for that. I understand what-- I think she was hanging on by a thread. Our tears would have killed her. So you do what you must. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. "I went downtown and I went down." >> Diane Seuss: [Laughter] "On the We Buy Gold guy. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. Read that for me? >> Diane Seuss: Okay. >> Ron Charles: Little raw for this crowd, but I think they can handle it. >> Diane Seuss: You can handle it. I got my eye on your guys. I went downtown and went down on the We Buy Gold guy. I have a thing for debauched hucksters in ape costumes. Before that I loved the girl who holds the sign outside Little Caesar's advertising the 2 for 1 pizza deal. Tragic life and long tresses. She was ghostly, the way she beckoned to oncoming traffic. Then, the birthday clown. Nothing worse than jamming a rubber nose over your nose for a paycheck. Myself, I've been a fetish shop cashier, a fudge worker in Vacationland, played Spidora in the haunted house, my head sticking out of the poison gland of a tarantula suit. Wrote dime store romances. Was paid a dollar, once, for a pornographic haiku. [Laughter] My first payment as a poet. [Laughter] Waxed the big slide, Windexed the jukebox glass, supervised the shooting gallery. Toilet worker at the sugar factory, which once involved scooping a wedding ring out of the loo. The best was cleaning splooge off the walls in the peep show gallery and laundering Trixie's thong. Some of us claw our way to the bottom, transcend downward. There at the hub of the drain, we swirl. [Laughter] Thank you. Thank you. >> Ron Charles: That is some bad jobs! >> Diane Seuss: I know! What a [inaudible], and I didn't mention all of them. That's only some of them, yeah. >> Ron Charles: In the preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth wrote, "The principle object proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life. And to relate or describe them throughout as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men and women whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." It seems to me you are in great sympathy with that. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, I am. >> Ron Charles: In his effort to scrape away what he thought of as artificial poetic language, and subjects, and instead to describe ordinary things and ordinary people would produce extraordinary poems. >> Diane Seuss: In extraordinary ways, or and not by lying about them, but just by seeing them really clearly, seeing them for what they are. You know, even, you know, I lived in New York for a while, and I was the, the sort of rural person in this urban landscape, lost, really. No horizon? What the hell? And even there, I saw things specifically and with particularity. I still saw like a rural person. Including junkies who, you know, are, had been a big part of my life. >> Ron Charles: Several of your poems mention that heartache. >> Diane Seuss: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Death, tragedy. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah. In my next book I, I talk a little more about my own son who became a drug addict. >> Ron Charles: I didn't know that. That's not in the poems. >> Diane Seuss: Not yet, but, but it will be. >> Ron Charles: It's tough. >> Diane Seuss: It is. >> Ron Charles: At least he's still alive. >> Diane Seuss: He's alive and he's clean, but he struggled a lot, and it's been, you know, it almost killed both of us. So we must, I mean, to, to go there, I go with his permission. But it's the hardest work I've done because you know you don't, once, you really don't want to think about it. But if I'm in keeping with my spiritual belief as a poet, I need to go there. And I see great nobility in his struggle. So I want, I want-- there's a whole-- I have a whole bunch of sonnets in my next book that are spoken by him. And they're pretty much verbatim from conversations we've had, yeah. So I want to give him the stage as much as I can. >> Ron Charles: It's a kind of love to see ordinary people's real struggles. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, yes. Yeah. You know, that's what I liked about Still Life Painting, which is in my most recent book. That, you know, what is still life? It's bowls, it's peaches, it's women's spaces, often. It was often used for practice for painters, you know? But the big subjects were history and God. Well, I like bowls. Yeah, and I like the lives of people who, who are like bowls. >> Ron Charles: Who have been forgotten, overlooked? >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Let's stand up, and then sit back down. Sounds okay? Okay, that's it. Not an intermission, just stand up. Resettle yourselves. Death and grief are prominent themes in your work. Toward the end of your latest collection you say, "All my life I've been writing of it. But not from it, directly. A bare lightbulb at its profile, so I may outline its silhouette on tracing paper." Sometimes you treat death and grief in very suggestive, symbolic ways with the amazing opening of The Toad. The grief, when I finally contacted it, decades later was black, tarry, hot like the yarrow-edged side roads we walked barefoot in the summer. Sometimes we've come upon a toad, flattened by a car tire, pressed into the softened pitch, its arms spread out a little like Jesus. As it was now part of the surface of the road, part of the road's story. That's a metaphor of grief that is so perfect and bizarre. And instantly recognizable. We've all seen that toad pressed into the part of the road like that. >> Diane Seuss: Wasn't it freakish to see things like that when you were a kid? I mean, I think if you draw on that, you're all poets, you know? Just don't forget those things. >> Ron Charles: That's what poetry does is it teaches us to see. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, yeah. >> Ron Charles: I wonder if you'd read a poem called, "The Mewlings and the Snippings of Baby Birds"? This poem, listen to the way this poem slips from life to death. >> Diane Seuss: I've heard them somehow, like the sound of stitches being removed from an incision. The sound of hope and the sound of suffering, the same music played on the same instrument. Though one in the early morning and one at dusk. One when the blossoms are bunched on tree limbs like gathered silk along a seam. And the other, late in the day, after a hard rain, when the blossoms lay on the sidewalks like stars as the nearsighted see them. Yawning, tinged with pink, like single-celled animals on microscope slides in high school biology. We were young. We loved death. Even those of us who pretended to have a moral problem with slicing into fetal pigs and chose the alternative terrarium assignment, we loved being near it. The slicing and the giggling, the music of scalpels releasing the dark air inside the body. We thought spring was about love and the end of school. We thought we were about to be released from prison. That feeling, the last day of school, and walking off the bus into the arms of sunlight and birdsong. And maybe we are released, though now it's soul from body. The long slice of the shears, to liberate the silk from the belt it's tethered to. Then off to the seamstress with pins in her mouth, and off to the wedding chapel, and off to the maker of shrouds. Same lady, same quick needle made of silver light. >> Ron Charles: It's such a slick move from the wedding dress to the shroud. Spooky. Emily Dickinson, realizing where the horse's heads are pointed. >> Diane Seuss: I, I got married once, and when I was in my sort of wedding dress-- it was actually a swimsuit cover. >> Ron Charles: What? >> Diane Seuss: A thing you wear over a swimsuit? You know, it cost ten bucks. And I, I looked in the mirror, and I was, you know, poufing my hair like you do. And I looked in my eyes, and I knew it was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake, and it was a big one, but it felt like it was too late. I know. >> Ron Charles: But you got your son out of it? >> Diane Seuss: I did. >> Ron Charles: Well then it was not a mistake. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, I guess. [Laughter] I mean, no! I mean he is [inaudible]. But I wouldn't have had -- . >> Ron Charles: Let's cut that from the video. [Laughter] >> Diane Seuss: I mean I wouldn't have had to do the legal thing, but yeah. No he was the good part. >> Ron Charles: Sometimes you treat the sense of grief and sadness with surprising wit. >> Diane Seuss: Somebody has to! [Laughter] >> Ron Charles: You know where this is going, eventually though? >> Diane Seuss: Uh-huh. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. I'm Full of Sadness. >> Diane Seuss: Oh. I'm full of sadness. As full as a refrigerator on payday. My nights are packed with dreams, jam-packed as a husband leaving suitcase. And did I leave him, or dream I left him? I dream of a red room and wake to a blue room. In the blue room, a man is offering me a $30,000 diamond ring. His bare ankles poke out of the ends of his pants. "Wear some socks," I say, looking down at my own bare ankles. Like a small tree strung with too many windchimes, my false hope drags [inaudible] music through the neighborhood, a neighborhood on the decline. My house, teetering on an incline. I am bursting with femaleness, like a decapitated saint whose throat spews light the color of straw. I know I'm female. In the nursery, they put a sad bow in my hair. I gathered evidence of my girlhood like a recluse, obsessed with berry-picking. Look at my apron, stained purple, my empty tin bucket, my purple lips, purple shits, like the shits of a bear in late spring. Sadness overruns me. I'm bee balm, a swarm at my center, pollen heavy on the wires of their back legs like gold-velvet pantaloons. I'm the Xerox boy, tackling the biggest copy job in the history of copy jobs. Reproducing original sadness, toner cartridge running low. When asked at the ticket office what I am, I can only answer, "I'm what is speaking this, or its homonym, or its sobbing antonym." >> Ron Charles: I love the way the wit of that poem pushes against its sorrow. >> Diane Seuss: We must, right? >> Ron Charles: Some of the poems embrace the sorry. >> Diane Seuss: Uh-oh. [ Laughter ] Uh-oh! >> Ron Charles: Yeah. Yeah, that's next. [Laughter] In other poems, you are very specific about the central source of grief in your life. Would you read a poem called "Crucifixions?" >> Diane Seuss: Oh, wow. Oldie. My first book. I was 40, my first book. I'm older than I seem. [Laughter] Crucifixions. There are many crucifixions. Some are quiet, graceful, filigreed. I watched my father die for six years. False hope, morphine, desperate experimentations with a blue extract from the periwinkle plant. I was seven years old, watching him from the dark hallway as he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His fading looks, ears poking out from the skull, painting his tongue where he's accidentally bit it. And later, when he was on the telephone, I watched him use his free hand to catch the spinal fluid that dripped out of the unhealing incision on his back with a paper napkin covered in swans. >> Ron Charles: So what can you tell us about how the loss of your father affected you and your family at that time? >> Diane Seuss: Well. He was, yeah. >> Ron Charles: That was 30 years later you wrote that poem. That still feels like yesterday. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, it, for the family, it, we had to improvise from there on out. We were no longer what you were supposed to be. And widow women where I was from and back then were kind of suspect. They were seen as sort of powerful and dangerous to the social order. I know, weird, right? So it was sort of that weird widow woman and her two daughters. We were always, my parents were always kind of playful people. They were, they were in love. They never got past that part, and he was very beautiful and very kind. And I, we were very connected in a non-verbal way. The last time I saw him, kids weren't allowed in hospital rooms until the very end. Isn't that healthy? And so we were brought up there. My sister was four years older, and she was very angry, and she just sat in a chair and wouldn't look at him. But he beckoned, and I use that word "beckon" a lot in poems. He beckoned, and I went and I sat on the edge of the bed. And I felt, I mean, this lump in my throat that was bigger than the Hindenburg, but I knew not to cry. And really that moment is you know from that center, everything else has swirled and spun. I mean, I remember being at his funeral and looking really closely at a rose somebody handed me, and a little ant crawling across it, as if it were an answer, you know? To see and to remember concretely what was happening around me. It was all mysterious. I didn't understand what was death, right? Who knows that at seven? But I knew there was an absence, but again, I knew there was also a presence of all the things in the world and also my mother. You know, she was somewhere to go. That's a different journey than a path to a father. So really, my, we still meet at his grave and have picnics on it. I mean, he's very much a part of the family still. And you know, he's still very present in his absence, and that's what poems can trace in a way that nothing, I think nothing else can. >> Ron Charles: You know that poem is powerful because of the precision of the language, your observations. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, and to be a child witness, and to be able to be precise about it. And even, you know it's in four-line stanzas, and I like that. Again it's that Gregory Orr thing. There's this madeness of the clarity of observation even from a child's devastation. And that is something poems can do that locks in something that, that helps you survive. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Thank you. I know it's not easy to read things like that. I appreciate you being willing to. I want you to read a poem from your, your latest book that combines well, Still Life with Turkey. It's the painting and the grief all woven together in a very beautiful and complex way. >> Diane Seuss: So yeah, there is a painting called "Still Life with Turkey Hanged," and the editor wanted me to take "hanged" out. Isn't that funny? To me "hanged" is part of it. I mean, it's crucifixion, right? But it's a beautiful painting of a dead animal, and I think it's very linked to what you just asked me to read. The turkey is strung up by one pronged foot. The cord binding it just below the stiff trinity of toes, each with its cold, bent claw. My eyes are in love with it as they are in love with all dead things that cannot escape being looked at. It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my father was there, in his black casket, and could not elude our gaze. I was a child, so they asked if I wanted to see him. "Do you want to see him?" someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother? Some poor woman was stuck with the job. "He doesn't look like himself," whoever it was added. "They did something strange with his mouth." As I write this, a large moth flutters against the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass. "No," I said, "I don't want to see him." I don't recall if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me, but thought that no was the correct response, or if I believed I should want to see him, but was too afraid of what they'd done with his mouth. I think I assumed that my seeing him would make things worse for my mother, and she was all I had. Now I can't get enough of seeing, as if I'm paying a sort of penance for not seeing then. And so this turkey hanged, its small raw-looking head, which reminds me of the first fully-naked man I ever saw when I was a candy striper at a sort of nursing home. He was a war veteran, young, burbling crazily. His face and body red as something scalded. I didn't want to see, and yet I saw. But the turkey, I'm in love with it. Its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated feathers, the crook of its unbound foot, and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread, as if it could take flight but down, downward into the earth. >> Ron Charles: The completion of aesthetics and grief in that poem, it's so fascination. It could be read several times. The way you want to see but you don't want to see. The way death fascinates us and repels us. >> Diane Seuss: Yeah, and how, when I got to this book, I see each collection as a step. I don't want to write the same shit over and over. And each collection is a step, and in this one, that step was the glorious salvation of seeing, even seeing that, you know? >> Ron Charles: Right. When you read your books in a row, as I did today. >> Diane Seuss: Lord. >> Ron Charles: [Laughter] No-- . >> Diane Seuss: Poor dude, we'll get you a drink after this. >> Ron Charles: No! It was wonderful to see them build on one another, how they speak to one another. How they echo one another. Particularly those two poems from the first and the last. >> Diane Seuss: You know, I never thought of that, so thank you. >> Ron Charles: God is very prominent in your first book. He shows up explicitly in several of the first poems, like the whole first section, actually. He fades away in the later poems. Does that reflect your own faith experience? It would be a different kind of faith now than you did as a child? >> Diane Seuss: As a child, I tried to get saved over and over and over again. I was saved like at least seven times. >> Ron Charles: It wouldn't stick? >> Diane Seuss: I wouldn't stick, baby! Yeah, and I would, I would wander the village and go to churches and try out their version of salvation. So I think I was doing a very serious thing then. So I never, I, I don't think I ever really believed in God, in that way, in that Christian way, but I did have a, I did have my own personal Jesus. I did have a thing for Jesus, and the connection between Jesus and my father, I think, the crucifixion thing, and the story of suffering. But now I just think that those metaphors kind of faded away. They just broke away from the spaceship, and now I'm exploring other things, like art. Which is really for, in this book, art really is a kind of religion, although it's not one I'm critical, I'm critical of it, too. >> Ron Charles: But it provides transcendence, clearly. >> Diane Seuss: Yes, yes. >> Ron Charles: You say in one poem, "I want, I want a direct God hit, no shrapnel." Makes God sound like an assassin there. In another poem called "This Year," you describe God as a bear in the spring, "when god comes lumbering out of the woods, nose to the air. He looks sleek. He pays us no mind. He's eaten hardly this winter, the black coat well oiled. He heads straight for the roadside to set his claws into the red ripples-- ." >> Diane Seuss: Nipples. >> Ron Charles: "Nipples of thimbleberries." >> Diane Seuss: Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah, I think my, my early God was Old Testament, wasn't he? [Growls] Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Very Emily Dickinson. Those paws in the forest, yeah. >> Diane Seuss: And I'm both fascinated and repelled, you know? As one should be, I think, yeah. >> Ron Charles: I want you to end by reading "Cross Back." >> Diane Seuss: Oh my gosh. >> Ron Charles: A relatively brief poem. >> Diane Seuss: I think, some of you remember the show, "This is Your Life"? I feel like that's happening right now. [Laughter] >> Ron Charles: This is not long, so you have to pay attention. >> Diane Seuss: And here's your kindergarten teacher! My kindergarten teacher stifled me by-- because I was singing, "Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham," at the top of my lungs, and she clapped her hand, and I felt it go "voomp". And the song went right down in my gut, and I think that's poetry, right? [Laughter] Crossing Back. The harbor is smooth as bone. The River Mary flows east, pushing against the gray muscle of Huron towards the island. She's always at cross purposes with the grand design. Gulls jackknife into the water. Look at the buoy, inert as a church spire. The ferry lowers the plank. A new ferry master, much less skeletal than the old motions me aboard. Could it be that something still waits for me, open-armed on that other shore? >> Ron Charles: Yes! Thank you so much! >> Diane Seuss: Oh my gosh! [ Applause ] >> Ron Charles: Now all these people want to talk to you and buy at least one of your books in the room right outside there, alright? >> Diane Seuss: I'll sign it. I have lipstick. I'll even kiss it! [Laughter] >> Ron Charles: Thank you all so much for coming!