INTERVIEW WITH
DIANE SEUSS BY: NICOLE TALLMAN
D
iane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Previous collections include Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, (Graywolf Press 2018) and FourLegged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
What does your writing life look like? Do you have a particular schedule, habits, or process? I have always written around my actual life, rather like a stream trickles around, under, and over rocks and fallen logs, i.e., the necessities of life. Working for money, cooking, cleaning the shack, caretaking, are the givens, and the writing is shaped by those concrete realities. I mean, this is no different than most human beings on earth—aside from the rich, but we needn’t speak of them! I have always written when I can and must. That often meant in the middle of the night, or between the divorce hearing and grading papers, but I managed to do it, partly because I learned early-on to write in my head, no matter what else I’m doing. The most wonderous grace were the three writing residencies I was fortunate enough to participate in. Residencies provided unimaginable blocks of relatively unburdened time (when I could push away the worries) in a landscape that woke up my senses. I wrote a good portion of my previous collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, at Hedgebrook, generated more work for that collection and designed the manuscript at MacDowell, and got a good start on frank: sonnets at Willapa Bay AIR. The pandemic has been a sort of dreadful residency, in its way, and I’ve written a draft of my next collection from within the confines of my house.
How do poems come to you? Do you have any specific muses? At this point in my life, poems are nearly always with me. That is, I get up in the night to pee, and I think lines in my mind. There is a very narrow gap between living and poeming, because my primary relationship at this point is with poetry. As a younger poet, I probably was more reliant on inspiration. These days, I tend to work with certain goals and obsessions in mind. Each poem builds on the last; a poem isn’t an isolated experience but part of a sustained relationship. I do consider each manuscript to be supported by a particular muse or series of muses. For Four-Legged Girl, it was Myrtle Corbin, a woman born with four legs, in 1868, who spent a good portion of her life in sideshows. Peacocks was haunted and graced by early still life painters, the female subjects of portrait painters, and the trinity of Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, and Freddie Mercury. frank: sonnets was guided, of course, by poet Frank O’Hara, but also Keats, Dickinson, James Joyce, and Chekhov, and my friend Mikel, who died in the mid-1980s of AIDS, and his living friend and lover, Alan, and my living son, Dylan, and my friend, composer Kurt Rhode, and my mother and sister. Without my mentor and friend Conrad Hilberry, I never would have published at all. Minus my muses, I’m a wet rag.
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