A review by laura_sackton
Modern Poetry: Poems by Diane Seuss

This book is incredible and I will need to reread it because wow. Wow. First of all, Seuss’s language is stunning. I have this feeling, when I pick up her books, that I am now in the hands of someone who is a master, and not in a weird way, just: she makes such beautiful sentences. That's all. She plays with language so beautifully. This book is sparse and spare and sad and wry and it’s mostly about poetry, about language, about making language, about reading and loving reading, words and loving them,  the weirdness of that. There's a poem called "Modern Poetry" and another called "Romantic Poetry", one called "Poetry" and another called "Against Poetry", and they are all brilliant poems about the life of a poet and the life of a human but mostly what they do is hold this contradiction: Why do we make art? How do we keep making it? 

In one poem she talks about uselessness as the essential definition of art which I can’t stop thinking about. It really resonated with me. I think too often people try to make art useful. Throughout this whole book she is poking fun of herself for loving words and books and poetry (she keeps asking what is the point, “a poem can’t love you”). She goes over all of these poets who have made words and what has any of it done? And she goes on doing it. She goes on loving it. She doesn’t resolve the contradiction.

This is also a beautiful book about aging. She keeps talking about how she’s done with love, she’s over that part, and it’s not like I don’t believe her, exactly, but there is this wryness in her tone that feels earnest. I don’t know how to describe it. At one point she talks about how she’s a cynic, but the last poem in the book is called "Romantic Poet", and it’s about a friend telling her she would not like Keats at all, he was horrible and smelled bad, and the last line is “But the nightingale, I said.” 

The whole book is held in that one line. So many words, so many beautiful arrangements of words. There is one poem about a comma and about the sounds of sentences that took my breath away. There are all these poems about living in the world but wanting to be far away from the world, about the poets she has loved and how strange it is to go on loving them. But she does not reign herself in. The proof is the writing. She’s sad and a little lost, maybe, hardened by the world, maybe, but here is this book. But the nightingale. We live in this impossible tension and there is nothing to do about it but go on living in it—or don’t. 

I thought a lot about the Mary Ruefle book about poetry I just read while reading this, the sensibility feels similar, in that both of these poets have this dry humor, they're skeptical of poetry as a disipline, they make fun of themselves and are a bit prickly, and yet they are also earnest. And I think there is something important here about earnestness, because it isn’t just pouring your heart out, although that's part of it. Seuss has a different kind of earnestness. She acknowledges that poetry is useless but she’s still into making beautiful sounds. Which is to be interested in the futility of it, which is to think about the artifice of it, which is to understand what the world of poetry and words and letters and books will never ever bring you, and then, still, to write a line like, “But the nightingale, I said.” The more I think about that line the more it floors me. It cuts through every other thing in the book.