TFT: I know McKinley and I have very different interests when it comes to poetics, but we kind of wanted to start with a fun hypothetical question, just to kind of get things going. McKinley and I are both educators here at GMU, and I was teaching an “Intro to Poetry” course last semester, and I was interacting with my students who had never written poetry or read poetry before. So, I was wondering if you had to start your poetic career over tomorrow at square one where would you begin? What craft would you begin with? What poets would you begin with?

DS: Am I, you know, 18, or 93?

TFT: Let’s say 18. It’s like we’re back at the beginning!

DS: When I was really 18, I felt my way. I didn’t have guidance, particularly. I did have a mentor who came along out of the blue. I went to a small rural high school, and there wasn’t a whole lot to offer somebody getting into poetry. But my mom was a teacher. She went to college after my father died and became an English teacher. So these books came into my house from the time I was 7, 8 years old, that compelled me. 

If I was wiser, or if I was 18 now, and was unnaturally wise, I would say read. And this sounds sort of stodgy, but read the old stuff, too. You know, read the new stuff to keep you engaged, but read the old stuff, too. Not because, “Oh, they’re the best, and it’s the right thing to do,” or “it’s how you learn,” but because it connects you to the roots of this thing that you’re embarking on.

And I love now knowing, for instance, something about John Keats, and what he was thinking about, all alone, dying of tuberculosis as a young man. What he was thinking about what I think about sometimes. So being able to reach back and make connections with the past, I think, is very important.

I would say to my 18-year-old self, if she were around now, “Don’t just read what’s flashy or what flashes in front of your eyes on the internet, but seek. Seek what you need.” And that’s not always easy to find. You have to kind of read some to know what you need.

And you don’t have to read everything. You can read selectively. One of the things I think that is missing for a lot of younger writers now is the solitude of their brain, of their mind. You don’t want to just crowd your mind with stuff. There should be a room for memory, and for the concrete world to come in. You can be selective in all ways about who you let into your life.

Your mind is a vulnerable place, and it has the need for solitude. 

TFT: And with your love for Keats, we have kind of a thread of poems about your relationship to the dead. But Keats has been your guy, right? In every interview with you, people bring up Keats. Maybe you’re sick of talking about him?

DS: No, never.

TFT: In one interview where you talk about a poem of yours where you kiss Keats’ death mask, you mentioned hoping that the poem “earned its leap.”

There’s kind of a thread in contemporary poetry right now of, “Do poems earn their leap to violence, or earn their disjunctiveness?” Could you talk about how you think about a poem “earning” something, or “earning a leap”?

DS: Yeah, that’s a great question, a great thought. So, for each book, I often have sort of a guiding spirit. In my book, Frank: Sonnets, it was Frank O’Hara, the late-beat kind of poet. I don’t know that we would have even gotten along. He wasn’t just “Oh, Diane, follow me!” He was probably a “poking at me” mentor in that book.

Keats stepped in for my next book, Modern Poetry, and, nobody wants to hear this word either but, it was the pandemic and being extremely isolated, with death, or potential deaths, a lot of death scenes happening around us, and with Keats experiencing tuberculosis.

Then somebody sent me his death mask. Not the real thing, a fake, but beautiful mask. I’m looking at it right now. I really feel that what earned me that intimacy was that I really looked deep, read hard, and developed a relationship with his work. An imaginative relationship with him. Through the poems, through sort of a sequence of poems developed a theory of him or a thesis. (I like theses in books and poems. I don’t think that’s a bad word.) 

So, by the time I kissed him, in the poem, I had really worked into a murky imaginative space with him. You can’t just be easy about it. You have to go through time. It’s like baking bread. You have to be able to stand the process of getting to know somebody, of contending with their ideas and their work. So, by the time I kissed him, I knew him.

And I think maybe that’s a good allegory for all of our earned leaps in poems. They can’t be off the cuff or easy. Our leaps have to be considered. 

When I was a young poet, any crazy leap I took, just because I was entertaining myself, you know? Now, probably, if I was her teacher, sometimes I would say, “Yeah, that works,” but other times I might say “You’re hot-dogging,” and “Take yourself and take the image more seriously. Take the moment more seriously. Take the subject a little more seriously. Spend some time with it.”

I was a talk therapist for many years, and I really learned from that practice to slow down—even though I’m a fast writer. The thinking that goes into the writing, it takes time.

The internet and social media teach us to have quick, quick, quick—quick moments, quick information. Let it arrive and let it pass, and what I’m really preaching here is the opposite of that. Maybe I’m just a dusty old broad, what do I know?

TFT: May we all one day be a wonderful, dusty old broad.

McKinley Johnson: I have another question that seems like it’s kind of building off of that, or at least off the idea of what kind of work goes into being able to write with or about the dead.

I was recently rereading your book, Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, and the poem “Memento Mori” stuck out to me. The opening lines begin 

All my life, I’ve been writing of it, but not from it, directing 

a bare lightbulb at its profile, so I may outline its silhouette

on tracing paper.

and I was really struck by the play that was happening with the “it” in that first sentence, with what it could be referring to. I think at first glance it seems like you’re referring to your life: “all my life, I’ve been writing of it,” but when you take into account the title and the rest of the poem, it seems that maybe it’s leaning a little more towards referring to death.

And in that same interview that Taylor mentioned, with Jennifer Franklin, you say “I encountered the possibility that the dead, too, evolve in their understanding… In art, they can then serve our purposes.”

Then later, you say, “probably I have always felt, as least since early childhood, like part of me belongs with the dead.”

DS: That’s a lot right there. That’s a lot!

MJ: Sorry, this is my first interview. I wanted to do my research! 

DS: Oh, you did… hey, man! I bow to your greatness.

MJ: Oh thank you, thank you! And I guess, in thinking about your thoughts on belonging with the dead, and of the dead’s understanding being able to change and evolve, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it feels like when you’re writing about the dead. I think when we’re writing about others, there’s always this pressure of accountability, and I’m wondering if you feel that pressure in writing about death, and if so, what form the process takes? Does it feel conversational? Does it feel collaborative?

DS: Boy, you know, you’re really hitting on something here, and that is my relationship with the dead, my interaction with the dead in poems has obviously evolved through my life. As I mentioned, and people are sick of hearing about, my father got sick when I was 3 and died when I was 7. Language, you know, and really the imagination, became the way that I contended with that.

I had a third grade teacher. I went up to her and said “I can’t do this assignment and fill in this blank about ‘what your father’s name,’ ‘what’s your mother’s name,’ because I don’t have a father.” And she said, she was very stern, she said, “You have a father, he’s no longer living, but you have a father.”

That notion, you know, even though I was young, that I could still have a relationship with a father who was dead really transformed my imagination.

And so, I think with my development as a person, my relationship with how to interact with the dead, how to portray the dead in poems, it was at one with my own evolution, my own development. For my earlier years, like adolescence and all, my dad was kind of—what do I want to say?—you know, he was kind of one-dimensional. He was what I lost. He had a relationship to my ego more.

Then as I grew, and as I wrote, the dead became more complicated in their own right, and Mikel—who is on the cover of Frank: Sonnets, and who was my, kind of, soulmate who died of AIDS in the 80s—with my poems of and for and to him, he wasn’t a person who would allow himself to be portrayed in service to somebody else’s ego. He had his own. So he began to sort of speak back, or speak through.

My dad was more of a ghostly presence. Then, when I finally got to Keats in Modern Poetry, and that’s a book where I’m really asking the question: Can poetry, given our politics, given the state of our climate, our environment, given COVID and people dying around us, and war, and everything, given everything, can poetry still mean? Does it still have efficacy?

I guess I turned to Keats to help me with that question. I learned from him. He became a different kind of guide in that way. I learned that even a man who dies at 25, that he, at least in my imagination, and the imagination that is the world, he continues to develop and evolve too, not just me.

And the poem in Modern Poetry that most sets that out is one about his love for Fanny Brawne, the love of his young life which changes after he dies. He [in the poem] no longer loves her in a romantic sense, but he sees the beauty, finally, of the objectivity that he now can hold her with. That objectivity becomes his definition of beauty.

He was so associated with writing of and from beauty, and whether that came from his work to me, or from our collaborative imaginations, or whatever, I don’t know, but that was just a real turning point in how I write of the dead.

I’m sure a lot of it is because I’m older, I’m getting closer and I’m more intellectually interested in what it means. How a soul, or how an intellect might change after death. 

You know, there’s a poem in that book, too, called “Pop Song,” and it’s about meeting my dad again after his death and he’s not all that invested in me, man, you know? He’s sorta, “ah, hey, nice to see you.” So, he has gained objectivity, he has gained distance. I’m no longer his little daughter. I’m this stranger.

So, I guess I’m just saying, you have to sort of follow the brush and see where it leads you, see where the death leads you.

Kevin Young wrote a great essay called “Deadism” in which he talks about not writing of the dead, but writing from death itself and I think maybe that’s what I’m talking about.

After a certain number of experiences of death and after getting closer yourself [to death], you write from death. That’s a bigger mystery than one individual death and its impact on you.

MJ: Thank you, yeah.

DS: You both have given me so much to think about. Thanks. Thank you for reading so deeply. I know that’s hard.

TFT: Oh, we love your work. I don’t know that it’s hard to read.

MJ: I have another line of questioning that feels like it’s building off of the Keats mention, and then I have another question that I more so want to ask just out of personal interest, but maybe I’ll save that if we have time.

DS: No, that’s fine!

MJ: In rereading Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (I adore ekphrastic poetry, so I think that’s the collection that I find myself turning back to most often of yours).

DS: I’m glad to hear that, because I really like that book, too, and sometimes it gets overlooked between Frank and Modern Poetry. Maybe it gets lost in there, but I have a special love for it, so thank you.

MJ: Oh well good, I’m glad! In that book, you quote Rothko, in “Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote,” saying: 

“I don’t express myself 

in my paintings, I express my not-self.” 

Then in your essay that you wrote for Poetry Daily, “I Know You Know: Diane Seuss On “Ballad,” Negative Capability, and the Duende” you explain Keats’s Negative Capability by saying “The poet has a capacity to efface themselves, for a time; to become receptive rather than to impose, to diminish the ego in order to become open to everything outside the self.”

So this idea of the not-self being so prominent in your mind was really interesting for me, because I think often your poetry feels like it is concerned with the self, and I think that is how people can talk about it sometimes. Later in that Rothko poem, you say:

A poem that expresses the not-self.

Everything but the self.

The meadow’s veil of fog, but is veil self-referential?

I was wondering if you could talk a little about your thinking with writing about the self and the not-self, and how the line between those two can surprisingly be a lot blurrier than we would maybe expect?

DS: You know, when I wrote quite a bit of that book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, I was on Whidbey Island in the Pacific Northwest. I had a, luckily, chance to be at a residency at Hedgebrook. And it’s so beautiful, and it’s so much of an Eden…There’s not even mosquitoes. I didn’t know what to do with that.

And then art and the aesthetics of visual art had become so interesting to me. I entered that book thinking about the subject versus the object, or you know, the portrait painter objectifying the person being painted. The gap between the painter and the subject. I think the book ends up finding that blurry space that you’re talking about between the not-self and the self, that maybe—in my spirituality at its best—I think they’re one and the same, you know, or I can, now and then, feel the relief of escaping the self into the not-self, you know? That’s what empathy is, even.

The last poem in that book is about leaving the island, the island of art, and even of beauty, and it’s for a class reason. My mother can’t be here. My sister can’t be here. This is exclusivity. The realm of art is exclusive and as much as I love it, and as beautiful as it is, I have to go back.

So, in a way that right there is the truth. The last lines of that poem, when I wrote them, I kind of sobbed. I wanted my mother, and that is why I left paradise. I wanted my mother, and that is why I left paradise. The mother is, yes, like, the mortal, the human, the class that I’m from, the working class, the “non-artified” sort of class. But also the mother is kind of both subject and object there, you know? The objectivity of art can’t hold everything: there wasn’t room for my mother in that. I’m still thinking about it, and I’m still living it. I’m still living it.

TFT: You have that wonderful line in your poem, “Allegory,” where you talk about, there’s a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope, and they’re always kind of wielding each other, and it seems like that’s what you’re touching on a little bit there as well. What poetry can contain, and the true self and the not-self, and the rage and the hope and all of that, so that’s really lovely.

DS: I think that’s what Keats called Negative Capability, that ability to sit with those strange polarities and not decide just to be, sort of, troubled. And being able to do that is poetry. You know, that’s where it comes from. So, my books raise questions, maybe more than answers,

Although, you know, the very end of Modern Poetry—and I’m really wrestling with the whole idea of poetry, really, through the whole book—but the end is directed to Keats, so it’s a very short poem: People say “You know, he was this, he was that.” My friend said, who was a scholar, is a scholar: “You know, he smelled bad, he didn’t wash, he was an asshole, you know.” And the last lines are: “But the nightingale, I said.”

That last line really does say, I think it does decide that there is something irrefutable in poetry even if you have to leave the island. Even if you have to leave Eden, and in fact, you must leave Eden. You must return to the mother in order to write the truth.

Blah, blah, blah, plus tax.

MJ: That was a beautiful answer, thank you.

TFT: Yeah, that’s lovely.

DS: Thank you. The opening poem of Peacocks… and the closing poem sort of bookends the whole experience that is the book. The opening poem is, if you read it this way, and I’ll let you do it, because a lot of listeners will be like, bleh, but it really is almost like a key to a map for the whole book, you know? It foreshadows what comes in the last poem. 

And, you know, we don’t know we’re doing those things. I can’t claim to know. That just was a poem I wrote that came out of being in Eden on that island, but later, as I put the collection together, into order, I saw that it contained everything that I would later deal with in the book.

That’s what I love about poetry. It gives you this stuff, I think, from your unconscious that my conscious mind doesn’t really have the stones to deal with, you know?

TFT: Absolutely.

MJ: Your discussion of leaving the island and the reasoning for doing so is really sticking with me and is also, thankfully, sort of pointing in the direction of my own personal interest question that I am trying to sneak in here.

DS: Sneak it, honey, sneak it!

MJ: Your poem “Folk Song,” was really impactful for me. I’m a writer from a small, rural town in the foothills of southern Appalachia. Obviously now, I’m just outside DC, a very, very different space, and it has been really strange, because I’m here, and I’m writing a lot more than I was there, but I’m writing about there.

DS: Yeah. Same. I mean, I’m really not that far from my place. But even driving there… My mother is still there. She’s 96. My sister is there, and her daughters. My dead are there, and I almost can’t take it. Like, the vibe is so intense.

From this distance, I can look. But right up close, it’s very hard. Do you feel that? You need that distance.

MJ: I definitely feel that I need it, and I also I’m very thankful for it, and then I hate it in a lot of other ways.

DS: I know, and then I think those of us from that situation, there’s no answer. There’s no good answer. It’s the conundrum, it’s the negative capability, and you’ll be wrestling with it your whole writing life. Your whole life. That will be the central question of your poems.

MJ: That’s great news for the thesis proposal I just wrote!

DS: Good, yeah! Not just one book, but 10, you know? It’s in your DNA. You know, there’s no shaking that snake.

MJ: Yeah, so I obviously found myself really relating to this idea of wanting to, at least earlier in my life, of wanting to eschew my “folkiness” and trying to leave behind where, and what, I’m coming from in a pursuit of what I’ve been told is better, in pursuit of what you describe in the poem as a litheness right? I think that feels like an internal battle for a lot of writers and artists from small, rural, working class areas. I think often you leave it behind, and then you realize that this attempt to turn away is either a mistake or completely impossible, right?

So I was wondering if you could talk a little about how your relationship to that, to your background, has evolved in your career, and how you see your attitude toward “folkiness,” in your work now, and throughout your career.

DS: Wow, yeah. You know, folkiness is a good term because it’s so dangerous, because you don’t want to be like, “Man, we made a quilt! Grandma butchered a cow!” even if she did. You have to be careful. Then, on the other hand, I always think about Faulkner, who invented or imagined this county, but it was really where he was from. And every human theme, every theme of God is in that small postage stamp of space, you know? And wherever you locate the frame of your camera, every theme is available to you, you just have to imagine it and see it.

For us, our metaphor bag arises out of a rural space, you know? Probably my first image that gave me the most trouble when I was a tiny child was this taxidermized two-headed lamb in the museum. One head-looking one way, one head looking the other, you know? That was a problem that I’m still contending with. But somebody born in New York has the same problems, but their metaphors challenge them differently.

I think about Frank O’Hara saying “I wanted out of the country as fast as I could escape.” A lot of that was his queerness. He couldn’t be there. And he gets to New York City and there’s, even then, in the 50s or whatever, there’s a world for him. There was art, there was the ability to be out in the world, out as a queer man. I get why he never looked back. It’s more complicated than that for some of us. 

Like, my niece died not too long ago. She was 49. She was a teacher and she died out of the blue and there was something in her that was wild and indescribable, really, by any language, more than any woman I’ve ever met. What she would have called herself I don’t know. But she was an untameable spirit. And that exists there in a way that I’ve never really seen anywhere else, you know? And, McKinley, I know you’re nodding because you know what I mean.

MJ: Yes, exactly.

DS: And so, it’s not so simple as, oh, the urban spaces are where the free people are, and then there’s “hicks,” who all vote the way we know they vote. You know, my family, who’s still there, they’re all extraordinarily leftist and then there’s tons of people who aren’t, and who I can’t even talk to anymore.

You know if you bring a frozen lamb in the house and thaw it out with a hair dryer, that’s a different universe than many other people have lived. There’s such a beauty in it, and such a strangeness in it. We can’t sacrifice it by pretending. That’s just not cool. We just have to figure out how to write about it, and not romanticize it, but also not make it disappear. It’s a constant conundrum. And it means, I don’t know if it does for you but, what I have realized it means to me is that I don’t belong anywhere. I only belong in the poem.

MJ: Wow.

TFT: That’s lovely. And the way that poems are able to kind of hold everything that we’ve talked about, right? The not-self, the self, all of our dead, and all of our insecurities, and everywhere we’ve come from, that’s so lovely.

DS: Yeah, that was Keats’s thing, and I wish he knew how valuable it was before he died, that in writing in a letter of Negative Capability, what poetry is, is that capacity to hold it all. Our job is to be able to stand it. To just endure it.

TFT: It also feels like another one of our jobs is making sure that maybe the visionary poets of our age know how much we value their ideas before they’re gone. Keats didn’t get that experience, but we can make sure we tell the poets in our life “This idea that you have is life-changing for me,” you know? We all have our mother poets.

DS: Yes. You know, Keats didn’t have that much. He did have a few people who saw him, but most didn’t, and you know, on his grave it says, what is it?…I always forget,

(“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”)

But it’s about, you know, being writ on water that… you know, just goes away. He didn’t have that sense of lasting, that he should last, and I hope, I hope he does now.

The last poem in Frank: Sonnets is about that. What, if anything, endures. At the end of that book, I say how I know somebody kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed Whitman. And who will say of me: I kissed her? Who will say of me I kissed someone, who kissed someone, who kissed someone, who kissed her?

That is our quest to be remembered. I mean, if really, it’s all gonna go to dust, then it’s hard to keep going. But for me to talk to you, to talk to McKinley, to know that you’ve read my work so deeply, it is a huge support, and honor, really. And to know that you’re going to keep going, and you’re gonna keep writing, that makes me feel very good.

MJ: Thank you.

TFT: I think we have just so much awe for your work, and the way that each of your books, as you mentioned, with where your camera is facing, and the way that each of your books, in turn, has kind of faced a different direction, but still carried the magnificence of poetry and the Negative Capability of poetry, each in their own way. We’ve got this last question for you, because it’s been almost 3 years since Modern Poetry came out: You mentioned in another interview after Modern Poetry that you were moving towards short poems, and I know it maybe hasn’t been officially announced, but you’ve got a new book that is forthcoming titled Althea: Poems. Did the short poem stay? What do we have to look forward to in this next Diane Seuss classic that is coming?

DS: Oh, boy, well, the short poem stayed. There are sort of two poem types in this book, and they’re all short. One of the types is almost a comic tone of social critique, believe it or not. There’s a lot of rhyme. There’s a lot of rhyme. And then there’s Althea who is a sort of mysterious presence, a character who evolves. She shifts in the book.

What’s strange is that I’ve realized, after the book was written (it’s now with my editor) my niece died, and I think Althea is connected to her in certain ways, to her mystery. One of the Althea poems was in The New Yorker: Althea is walking through the slop of winter and she sees roadkill and at the end it’s the stations of the cross—in the imagination of the poem, it’s called the gas stations of the cross. There’s this kind of strangeness. 

One of the poems is about when you stop bleeding in your body, there will be this daughter, or this girl to sort of take over bleeding for you. I say at the end something about “my daughters are dead, and the only one that’s still here is all in my head.”

So there’s a lot going on in there that does sort of foreshadow. They’re a little artful, I think, these poems. They’re almost miniatures in their artfulness. And they probably take some lessons from E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams, maybe Rae Armantrout a little in a contemporary way.

But they still got folksiness, McKinley. They’re still folksy. I talk about the glamour of the freight train rolling through, the grain elevator. So, the image bag remains.

TFT: That is lovely. I’m so excited to read the book when it comes out. Hopefully the editor can get through that so we can get to read it soon!

DS: I know, get your act together, man. It comes out next year in spring, so in a about a year and what I was gonna say is, let’s do a reading and conversation when Althea: Poems comes out.

TFT: Oh my gosh, lovely, yeah!

MJ: Would love to, yes.

DS: Let’s do it, man!

TFT: We will be following up on that for sure. 

MJ: It’s already…it’s in my calendar, I’ve got it.

DS: That will be fun! Let’s have it be one of the launch activities.

TFT: Lovely! For sure! McKinley, unless you have any burning, dying last questions, we’ve taken up so much of your time.

DS: Well, I had a great time!

TFT: Thank you so much, it has absolutely been an honor to get to talk to you and see the face and the voice behind the poems, right? We don’t always get that privilege, and so it’s been just so wonderful for us.

DS: And wonderful for me to meet you and to hear your great questions. I love questions where I really have to stammer, you know? And you took me there, so thank you.

TFT: Of course.

DS: Be safe, be well, stay sane.