For a group titled Modern Poetry, the newest providing from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss spends a good period of time communing with the previous.
In the title poem, named after a textbook she studied in faculty, she reminisces about how she and her roommate referred to William Carlos Williams as “Billy C. Billygoat,” and the way she managed to pretend her option to an A on a paper about Wallace Stevens regardless of “having no clue / what he meant by ‘The deer and the dachshund are one.’” That fake-it-till-you-make-it method has apparently served her effectively, as a result of she has not solely change into a extremely regarded poet, but in addition gone on to a two-decade-plus profession educating poetry to different younger folks with impostor syndrome.
While the spirit of the avowedly trendy ‘60s poet Frank O’Hara hovered over her final assortment, 2021’s frank: sonnets, which received her the Pulitzer, her guiding star for this outing is a poet who’s decidedly not trendy: John Keats. In reality, the ultimate poem of the amount, “Romantic Poet,” is directly an homage to Keats and a touch upon the modern pressure between loving an artist’s work and having combined emotions—or outright disdain—for the artist. After being advised the numerous causes she wouldn’t have appreciated the unnamed “him” on the poem’s outset, she rejoins with a easy “But the nightingale, I said.”
Ah, the nightingale, the chicken that sings. Seuss’ tune isn’t the A-B-A-B rhyme scheme that was pounded into our center faculty heads. It’s extra delicate, and evinces itself when learn out loud. “Rhyme,” Seuss mentioned at 2023’s Great Lakes Poetry Festival, “can just do a thing that nothing else can do; it appeals to our bodies, not our minds.”
In “Romantic Poetry,” Seuss writes, “I was twenty three when I sold off / Modern Poetry and sailed to Italy, seeking / Romantic poetry . . . and found my way to Rome, / and Keats’s death room. / His deathbed, a facsimile.” Feel it, in your physique, as you learn it? Twenty three, Italy, poetry, facsimile. It’s all there for the taking. To co-opt the famed slogan from the unsung McCann-Erickson advert company poet who created it for milk, “Modern Poetry: it does a body good.”
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