A Poet’s Reckoning with What Poetry Can Do

The poet Diane Seuss and I began a recent conversation by talking about the burdens of companionship—or, at least, how those burdens are manifested through affection for a pet. Seuss lost her dog Bear during the pandemic. When we spoke, by phone, she was at home in Michigan preparing her new dog, Stella—whom she described as “cool, interesting, complicated”—for a trip to the vet, by calming her with treats and showering her with affection. Of Stella’s many anxieties and complications, Seuss said, “After Bear, I really wanted to get a dog that was, like, a support animal.” Then she sighed and laughed lightly. “I didn’t get that.” Seuss, who turns sixty-eight this month, is a good poet with whom to settle into a conversation about comfort and endurance, about romance and love’s worth. The many accolades that have been attached to her work testify to her technical brilliance, her sharpness of language on a line-by-line level, how she can connect several ideas and images in a single stream. (In the poem “There is a force that breaks the body,” Seuss writes, “Joy / which is also a dish soap, but not the one / that rids / seabirds of oil from wrecked tankers, that’s / Dawn / which should change its name to Dusk.”) What has always drawn me to Seuss, though, is the crispness of her emotional acumen. She can be harsh—even, perhaps especially, to the speaker in her poems, but she isn’t unforgiving. She has excelled at finding a kind of dry humor that doesn’t diminish her weighty themes. She is a writer who seems unashamed to work through her thoughts as they come: thoughts about grief (Seuss lost her father when she was seven), about the limits of nostalgia and the value of the past and the romanticization of place. In the poem “Folk Song,” Seuss writes of “this town which inhabitants speak of with endearments / as if it were a child. As if it’s not like every other brat.” Seuss was born in 1956 and raised in Niles, Michigan. Her people were “barbers and […]

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