An Interview with Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize judge Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss is the author of six poetry collections, including Modern Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, and frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She lives in rural Michigan.
Associate poetry editor Alex Watanen sat down with Diane Seuss to ask her a few questions about poetry, process, and rural writing.
Alex Watanen: What qualities do you look for in a poem to help you decide if you like it?
Diane Seuss: Good question. I worry less about liking a poem than admiring its approach to language and how elements of craft—for instance line and line breaks, uses of music, form and structure, speaker, tone—contribute to what seem to be their subject. My personal preferences, my “likes,” are broad. I have space for many kinds of poems, from language-centered, experimental poems to well-executed traditional forms to spoken word poems to epics. For me, the personal “I,” the lyric “I,” is often central to my interest in a poem, and that fine balance between clarity and mystery. I like poems that are true to themselves, that are not imitating whatever is the current thing.
AW: What poems have you read recently that you can't stop thinking about? Why?
DS: Oh, yikes. Difficult question. There are many that resonate for me for years, but I’ll stick to “recently.” Martha Silano is a poet from the Pacific Northwest who has recently been diagnosed with ALS, a terminal diagnosis. The poems she has written since her diagnosis are simply incredible—life enhancing, life enriching, and honest as hell. I can’t shake her recent poems on the Poetry Foundation website, “Self-Elegies,” an American Sonnet sequence, and “Is This My Last Ferry Trip.”
Read “Self Elegies” by Martha Silano
Read “Is This My Last Ferry Trip” by Martha Silano
AW: In your essay in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), you say “Poems are smarter than I am. Like dreams, they come out of the dark and lead me to uncanny arrivals.” Could you unpack that statement a bit? What is it about writing poetry that makes the process sometimes less about understanding and more about feeling?
DS: For me, the process of writing poems is both intuitive and not. I am at my best when I let the poem lead me rather than me wrestling it into control. I think human beings generally have access to both feeling and understanding via the imagination, if we can find a way. It’s best, I think, not to know where the poem is going. If you already know, there’s no mystery in the process. I am almost always surprised by where my poems end up, whether in the weeds or on the highway. I still apply what I’ve learned by reading, and through writing for a long time, and from having an incredible editor in Jeff Shotts, of Graywolf Press, to all my poems. But the writing itself is done in solitude. This is probably old-school, but I think silence and solitude support the uncanny arrivals and the deeper knowledge that comes into our best poems.
AW: Your poetry often marries high art with dirt-under-the-nails realities, collapsing the distance between beauty and grit. How do you think growing up in a rural Midwestern environment informs a writer’s sensibilities, and what do you think Midwestern and rural writers can bring to poetry that might be overlooked or undervalued?
DS: Great question. All places are places. We grow up where we grow up. Our details, images, and metaphors arise from our earliest experiences of place, I believe. For me, that has meant the rural Midwest—what is often referred to as “flyover” country. Legitimacy in all forms of art has often been restricted to the urban and the coastal, so it can be a challenge to be seen, heard, and respected if we live in other places. Many of Michigan’s best-known poets left Michigan for other places, Theodore Roethke, for instance, and Philip Levine, among others. You are right that my poems tend to marry “beauty and grit,” and to be centered in the diction, wisdom, absurdity, humor, and history of the rural working class. William Faulkner knew that all the great themes can be located anywhere. For him, that “anywhere” was a fictional county in Mississippi. For me, it’s Southwest Lower Michigan. For those who write from the rural, from the working class, from the disenfranchised, the danger is in sentimentality of the homespun. Sentimentality may enter in when we don’t look closely enough, and specifically enough, at our subject. At its best, writing from the rural, from the poor, from the hinterlands, has access to images we likely wouldn’t find elsewhere. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s fiction, for instance in her seminal short story collection American Salvage, offers details and situations that are absolutely true to the rural Midwest, but grapples with themes as old as time. No matter where I situate myself as a speaker of my poems, my goal is to not be the hero, as I am not heroic. The closest I come to a hero in my poems is my mother, a consummate survivor and truth teller.
Alex Watanen lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he’s an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University and an associate poetry editor for Passages North. He’s just happy to be here. When he isn’t writing or reading, he spends most of his mornings drinking coffee with his Nana and most of his nights doing vocals for the hardcore band Caving Grounds. You can find him on Instagram @gerkogerkogerko
