Michigan-based poet Diane Seuss is a powerful voice in American poetry who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for frank: sonnets, a collection that offers equal parts joyous and gritty depictions of life in the American Rust Belt. In anticipation of the forthcoming Fitzcarraldo editions of both that and her other recent full-length collection, Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss sat down for a conversation that leant valuable insight into her creative process, the perceived audience for her poetic voice, and her hopes for an extension of that audience into Europe. The following is a transcription of an exchange which took place in April 2025.
Why did you choose the sonnet form for the poems in frank: sonnets? Is there something particular about the sonnet form—fourteen lines that end in rhyming couplets—that felt appropriate for the subject matter that you were addressing or for the moment in your life when you were composing them?
I arrived at the American Sonnet form, as it’s called in the U.S., more through serendipity than design. I was doing a writing residency in Washington, on the Pacific, and I drove to a place called (of all things!) Cape Disappointment. By the time I made it there in my rental car, I didn’t have the energy to take the hike to the lighthouse on a cliff above the sea. I ended up crawling into the back seat to take a nap. When I woke and drove back to the little cottage where I spent my residency, I began narrating a poem in my head that described what I had just experienced—one increment away from present tense. I’d been reading Frank O’Hara’s poems, and he slipped into the poem, his presence and his influence, what he called his “I do this I do that” poems. Readers had expressed interest in my writing a memoir, but I simply couldn’t hear it in prose. The sentences and linearity didn’t sing for me. The notion of shorter poems under O’Hara’s kinetic, present-tense influence suddenly landed for me. I could hear the voice of the poem and could imagine that voice serving a memoir-in-poems. By the time I made it back, I got that first poem written onto my laptop. I realized, then, that the poem could easily be shaped into fourteen lines, and with a little adjustment, could contain elements of the sonnet—a kind of turn, or volta, and a couplet. The form provided me with the compression, the focus, the structure, the support, that I needed to contend with the project of telling my rather harrowing life story. I also became enamored with the form, as I explored its lyric and narrative possibilities. How much could it contain and not spill off the page? How might the white space that surrounds the form provide space for the unspeakable?
Was it challenging to compose these poems in sonnet form? Did you find yourself writing more than or fewer than fourteen lines and needing to edit down or shore up?
Honestly, I did not feel challenged in the effortful sense of that word, but in the playful capacities of the form, even when the subject might be heavy. I composed within the fourteen lines; I tend to edit as I go, and the boundaries of the sonnet kept me “honest” in staying true to the lyric intensity of the line. There are still poems in the book—many poems—that narrate. I wanted to explore the capacity of the form to contain narration, song, compression, verbosity, monologue, dialogue, and so on. In that sense, writing these sonnets was challenging, but more than that, an expansive playground for experimentation.
As many critics/commentators have pointed out, “Frank” is not only the first name of a recurring character in the collection of sonnets, but also an apt descriptor of tone, an ambiguity heightened by the typeset (“frank” appearing lowercase in the title). Is this “frankness” a deliberate feature of your poetic voice?
Yes, Frank/frank plays a dual role in the theater of the book. It refers to Frank O’Hara, a significant poet in the American literary landscape of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, in what is called the New York School of poetry and art, teetering out of Beat and into post-modern experimentalism. I wanted to learn from his approach to poems, as I said earlier, which is improvisational, conversational, queer, and often spare. O’Hara died young, hit by a jeep on Fire Island. The man-who-dies-young tends to compel me, as my father died when I was seven, and has been at the core of all my poems from the beginning of my writing life. And yes, frankness is a value in this book and has always characterized my work, I believe. I admire frankness in other human beings. I hope one can be both frank and relatively kind. I appreciate frankness as an aesthetic, but I also love poems that are elliptical, that swerve away from overtness, if well-managed. All humans have their strengths, and for me, honesty, at least apparent honesty in poems, is one of mine. When I say apparent, I am acknowledging the fact that the frank speaker of the poem may not be synonymous with me, Diane, the writer.
Do you have an imagined audience to whom you are addressing these sonnets?
You! I imagine you! The dedication to the book is “To—you know—you,” signifying, I guess, whoever is giving the book their time and attention, and perhaps more specifically, a you who has maybe lived some of what I’ve lived—being poor, being raised by a single mom, a tough, feisty single mom, being a single parent myself, a single parent of a drug addicted son, and so on. To you, whoever you are, who can find a portal into these poems via your own lived experience. On another level, that you may also be Mikel, the person in the photo of the book’s cover. We had a wonderful intimacy from the time we were in high school until he died of AIDS in the 1980s. There are many poems about him, or speaking to him, in the book. I imagined him reading this book, and I hoped he would approve.
Last week marked the first anniversary of Modern Poetry’s publication with Graywolf Press. Are there any modern poets, in the interim, that you have discovered or rediscovered and that you wish you had included in the pantheon of influences that appear in Modern Poetry?
I think the modern poets in the title poem, “Modern Poetry,” pretty much sum it up, from the pantheon of white, male poets that formed my first course in Modern Poetry in my first year of college (Roethke, Stevens, Williams, Hopkins), with Plath dangling at the end as the lone (white, dead) female poet, to the explosion of women writers I experienced in the course called Women’s Literature, which I address in the second half of the poem. “Modern” is used loosely here, as Hopkins was not a modernist, though wrote with experimental energy, and many of the writers we read in Women’s Literature were post-modern. There are tons of modern poets I find compelling, and more broadly, modernist prose writers. There is no end to my curiosity about Virginia Woolf, for example, and Rimbaud, and I could write a whole collection of poems under the influence of Gwendolyn Brooks. I’ve written a bit on Marianne Moore. e.e. cummings has impacted my post-Modern Poetry work. Anna Akhmatova. I need to learn more and more from her, though I could never achieve her darkly sparkling gravity. And Yeats. Yeats has influenced me, but not enough…
Have you been influenced by any pre-Modern (Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, etc.) poets?
Certainly, John Donne’s Holy Sonnets worked their way into frank: sonnets. I especially love “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” which I echoed in a poem in my first book, It Blows You Hollow, called “Batter my heart, three-person’d mud wrestler.” If you’ve read Modern Poetry, you know that John Keats is not just an influence, but an archetype, a holy ghost, and an interlocutor. I have explored his notion of Negative Capability throughout my work, and have taught myself, and taught my students, “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” which is everything a sonnet has the capacity to contain. “And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, / That I shall never look upon thee more, / Never have relish in the faery power / Of unreflecting love—then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” Keats’s hauntedness haunts me.
In Modern Poetry, you move between a variety of different poetic forms. Did you have a favorite form among those and if so, what made it your favorite?
Well, aside from free verse, I have a sequence of ballads, and a sequence of fugues, both experimental in their approach to the form, as the sonnet was in frank: sonnets. I love them both, but I wrote more ballads, so perhaps I am more smitten with them. I like the circularity of the traditional ballad form, the repetitions, the storytelling that follows that spiraling motion, the mystery that often accompanies the teller of the tale. My contemporary “American” ballads work, at times, within the tradition, and at other times, usurp it. My two favorite ballads are Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” from her first collection, published in 1945, A Street in Bronzeville, and Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” that paean to sex and death, written in 1819. I was lucky enough to hear Brooks read her ballad live, many years ago. Let me tell you, Brooks transformed what I thought I knew about voicing poems. Her reading embodied the courage it must have taken her to write so honestly, so transgressively, with both a balladic and jazz sensibility, in the mid-1940’s. I urge your readers to listen to Brooks’s ballad here: https://soundcloud.com/poets-org/gwendolyn-brooks-ballad-of-pearl-may-lee
Was it challenging to follow up a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, frank: sonnets, with this next collection, Modern Poetry? Did you compose the poems in Modern Poetry chronologically later than the poems in frank: sonnets, and if so, were you at all apprehensive that they wouldn’t be as warmly received?
Well, I knew that whatever I wrote next could not be frank II. That is why I took a very sharp turn in framing my next project, which broke through some truisms about what poetry should and shouldn’t do. For instance, much of the book is about poetry itself—my education in poetry outside of the academy, and the efficacy and value of poetry, and I’ve often been told not to write poems about poetry. Challenge accepted! The book is about Modernism, Romanticism, and romance, romance with poems and with poets. Several poems in the collection teeter on the essay form, and use a rhetorical voice, and argumentation, but I believe they do so in the service of the ineffable. I try not to be too comparative in my thinking, whether between my own books or my books and other poets’ work. It just never seems fruitful to compare. I want to do the next thing, whatever it is, rather than the same thing, even if it was successful, or popular. Writing Modern Poetry was extraordinarily difficult. I still haven’t recovered. I brought all of myself to it, in challenging conditions, and lived to tell the tale. That’s all I can ask of myself, and of poetry.
Why did you choose Fitzcarraldo to publish these texts? Are there other authors among the Fitzcarraldo catalogue that you admire and if so, who and why?
Two words, primarily: Rachael Allen. I love Rachael’s own work, her intellect, her deep, empathic, thoughtful, edgy understanding of poetry. I also love the clean, classic look of the books, which is so unlike the equally compelling design of my books published by Graywolf Press. I am proud to be among the first books published since Rachael came on board to launch Fitzcarraldo’s poetry list. My experience of everyone I’ve met at the press has been extraordinary—respectful, fun, egalitarian, smart as hell. When I first read through the names in Fitzcarraldo’s catalogue, I was bowled over. The bevy of Nobel laureates is captivating, of course, as is the international scope of the writers, the breadth of subject matter, and the wide range of approaches to language. What unites these writers, it seems to me, is intellectual and creative independence and inquisitiveness. I look forward to digging in and reading as much of the full list as my eyes can bear! I am thrilled to be among them.
As other critics/commentators have noted, your work belies an ambivalence towards the tradition that it engages with, and towards the brand of elitism ingrained in the literary establishment that threatens to exclude poets who don’t conform to a preconceived notion of who/what/how a poet might be. Do you expect the enthusiasm with which American audiences have greeted this aspect of your work to translate to European audiences?
I expect nothing, hope for everything. It is obviously true that ambivalence around elitism and class—both in and outside of literature—has existed in Europe for millennia, from oral storytelling to the contemporary era. Consider Chaucer, Shakespeare’s comedies, Flaubert—my god, Flaubert! —Austen, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Woolf, the Surrealists, Lorca’s entire body of work, etc. etc. Well, let me not reveal my ignorance of class nuance and elitism in the history of European literature, of colonialism, race, class, gender, and sex. It is too much for me to begin to address here. My hope is that European readers will open the portal to explore my notion of self-education, the rural gaze, and working-class matriarchies, to mothers who say “wish in one hand, shit in the other,” to the intensity of my challenge to poetry’s usefulness in a time of tyranny, both inside and outside of America.
How important is this nexus of identity—rural, midwestern American, female, economically impoverished, white—to your poetry? Do you feel that it gets overstated, understated, or appropriately handled in the discussion surrounding your work?
Oh, I don’t think it’s overstated at all. In terms of my demographic, my knot of experience, my “people,” that pretty much describes it, though the town I grew up in was not solely white. Of course, that is the point of departure for my aesthetic, but it is not the whole story. Those descriptors impact my relationship to language, as does my imagination, which grew up in a particular landscape, among certain cadences of storytelling, particular elders, who were mostly, but not exclusively, female. My image bag is filled with those things that composed the world I knew—milkweed, cattails, bogs, the village cemetery next door to our house, the barber shop and pole and tools, frogs flattened on the blacktop, wasps invading my sister’s underpants hanging on the clothesline. We all have our sources of image and metaphor. Those were mine. My life didn’t stop with childhood, obviously, and other places and sense-experiences streamed in. The poem in frank: sonnets, “[I have slept in many places],” references some of my adventures. I’ve written extensively of my years in the East Village in New York City. I’ve written about addiction—my NYC lover’s, who overdosed and died, and my son’s, who thankfully lived, but not without suffering. I was a social worker in domestic assault shelters, sold fudge on an island, played the spider in a haunted house, studied in Spain, taught for years, was a secretary, wrote romance novels for money. But none of these narratives and the images to which they gave birth are the marrow of my poems. I would say my bottom line has always been language, form, and hallucination.
Is there something that you want the general public to understand about life in the Midwest of America, and about life in rural Michigan in particular, that you feel gets commonly misunderstood?
All places are diminished by easy generalizations. The American Midwest contains multitudes. Michigan, where I live, is not Missouri. Kalamazoo is not Detroit, a city like no other on earth, and neither are comparable to the far north, where my son lives, home to moose and wolves and eagles, the wreckage of doomed ore boats in the Great Lakes, wilderness dotted with one stoplight towns, many of them former centers of copper mining, some, now ghost towns, but no more susceptible to easy summary than Liverpool or Barcelona. There is a thing I always try to get at in my poems that won’t quite bend to inference. The political forces over the last decade or more have warped and striated families and communities, which were already entrenched to one extent or another in racism, job loss, and poverty. It is difficult to stay, but where is there to go? There is no geographical cure. But the thing I want to express is something else—a lasting exuberance, a strange freedom, a feral energy that drives women to dance themselves raw on top of water towers, to create recipes by candlelight for Jell-O funeral salads, to pee in the weeds during eclipses, to read old fairy tales to goats, to bring wet lambs, half frozen, into the house and thaw them out with hair dryers. All places are places, and all places are strange.
Diane Seuss—Diane Seuss’s sixth collection is Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2021 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seuss is a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. Seuss’s seventh collection, Althea: poems, is forthcoming in 2027.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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