Diane Seuss

Last updated

Diane Seuss
Born1956 (age 67–68)
Michigan City, Indiana
Occupationpoet, educator
Education
Notable works frank: sonnets
Notable awards

Diane Seuss (born 1956) is an American poet and educator. [1] Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022. [2]

Contents

She was born in Michigan City, Indiana and grew up in Michigan in Edwardsburg and Niles. Seuss received a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. [1] [3]

She taught at Kalamazoo College from 1988 until 2016. In 2012, she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College. [3] She has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan and Washington University in St. Louis.

Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast , The Missouri Review, Poetry , and The New Yorker , among others. Her book Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

Critical reception

Reviews of Seuss's work often note her technical acumen. Writing about frank: sonnets in the Women's Review of Books , Laurie Stone notes "More than anything, it strikes me, she loves the individual sentence and line." [4] Los Angeles Times reviewer Victoria Chang says that Seuss is "writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today," [5] and goes on to write

In an age where poetry can so easily be simplified into small one-dimensional sound bites to share on Instagram or Twitter, Seuss's poems aspire to complicate, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated things, flowing in and out and back and away from their initial triggers. [5]

Publishers Weekly called Seuss's writing "endlessly inventive with her language and feats of imagination." [6]

Four-Legged Girl

Seuss's third collection, Four Legged Girl, is "concerned with loss," including the deaths of her father and of a former lover, but also addresses "importance of living in the present," writes Marybeth Rua-Larsen. [7] She goes on "In Four-Legged Girl, Seuss not only turns the common associations of flowers as gentle and delicate things easily damaged into symbols of strength and aggression but does so with energy, inventiveness, and a wildness that is incapable of being tamed."

In the American Poetry Review , Margaree Little addresses the collection's title, which refers to Myrtle Corbin, a Victorian-era person who was born with four legs, and who appears on the cover of the book. [8] Seuss begins and ends the book with works taking inspiration from Corbin. [7] Little writes that Seuss's poems are "borne of traumas" and sees Corbin as a mirror of Seuss's self-identification "as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance." [8]

Writing for The Rumpus , Ellen Mack-Miller notes a sense of animism in Four-Legged Girl, writing "Seuss animates. Objects come alive, like toys springing from a chest when darkness comes." [9] Four Legged Girl was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; the nomination called the collection "a gallery of incisive and beguiling portraits and landscapes." [10]

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

Seuss's collection 'Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks' takes its title from the Rembrandt painting of the same name, and each section of the collection begins with an image derived from the painting. [5] Other poems references paintings Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O'Keefe, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock among others. [11] Reviewer Laurie Stone writes that the poems' use of painting allows them to "freeze time" and makes them a "lab for experiments with language, rough emotions, and the indeterminacy of feeling." [12] Los Angeles Times reviewer Victoria Chang describes the effect of Seuss's use of painting to frame her poems: "By the end of the book, we see how a painting (and the speaker's life) have become so much more because we have taken the painting (and life) apart and expanded each fragment.... art, in particular still life art, is anything but useless." [5]

frank: sonnets

frank: sonnets comprises 128 poems, all sonnets. Critic Laurie Stone sees Seuss's use of poetic form as a metaphor: "A sonnet is like a trapped body: all physical limits and nowhere to run but inside the lyrical imagination. Fourteen lines, again and again." [13]

Critic Meryl Natchez writes that

... in frank: sonnets, [Seuss] provides fresh imagery, calls out the male icons of the '70s and early '80s New York scene, and directly grapples with loneliness, addiction, abortion, and death. The language is often startling, the incidents pried open for the reader to enter and observe. The overall arc of the book is memoir: stories of grief, of questing, of trying to make sense of a complex life. These poems appear in the order written, with long sequences about Seuss's father, her lovers, her exploits and failures, and the death of a close friend. [14]

The Pulitzer Prize committee described frank: sonnets as "a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt." [15]

Modern Poetry

Seuss's 2024 collection, Modern Poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. [16] It was also one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024. [17]

One poem in the collection, "Romantic Poet," was featured in an article by New York Times critic A. O. Scott under the headline "Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did." In it, Scott offers a close reading of Seuss's poem, which itself considers famed Romantic poet John Keats. Scott sees in the poem an "unromantic, prosaic, crude" physical description of a "stinky, runty, manifestly unlovable poet" paired with praise for his "immaculate art." He concludes "Keats himself, made real in Seuss’s poem — a living, embodied presence she cannot help loving, in spite of whatever unpleasantness her scholar friend might reveal about him. That’s true romance." [18]

Selected works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Gilbert</span> American poet and writer 1925-2012

Jack Gilbert was an American poet. Gilbert was acquainted with Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg, both prominent figureheads of the Beat Movement, but is not considered a Beat Poet; he described himself as a "serious romantic." Over his five-decade-long career, he published five full collections of poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Smith (poet)</span> American poet (born 1955)

Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forrest Gander</span> Poet, essayist, novelist, critic, translator (born 1956)

Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Percival Everett</span> American writer and professor (born 1956)

Percival Leonard Everett II is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.

Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Phillips</span> American writer and poet (born 1959)

Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordie Albiston</span> Australian poet and academic (1961–2022)

Jordie Albiston was an Australian poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracy K. Smith</span> American poet (born 1972)

Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2011 collection Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.

Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, novelist, academic, editor, and essayist. He is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephanie Burt</span> American literary critic and academic

Stephanie Burt is a literary critic and poet who is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation". Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. She has published various collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and other publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monica Youn</span> American poet and lawyer

Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natalie Diaz</span> American poet (born 1978)

Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave American poet, language activist, former professional basketball player, and educator. She is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community and identifies as Akimel O'odham. She is currently an Associate Professor at Arizona State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danez Smith</span> American poet

Danez Smith is an American poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards, and Homie/My Nig. Their most recent poetry collection Bluff was published in 2024.

<i>Life on Mars</i> (poetry collection) Poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith

Life on Mars is a poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith for which she won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection is an elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.

dg nanouk okpik Inuit poet

dg nanouk okpik is an Inuit poet, specifically Iñupiaq. She received the American Book Award for her debut poetry collection, Corpse Whale (2012). In 2023 she was the recipient of a Windham Campbell Literature Prize for poetry and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

frank: sonnets Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss was the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry published by Graywolf Press. The Pulitzer committee described frank: sonnets as "a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt."

<i>Yellow Rain</i> (poetry collection) 2021 poetry collection by Mai Der Vang

Yellow Rain is a 2021 poetry collection by Hmong American poet Mai Der Vang. Her second book of poems, the book's title is a reference to yellow rain, a chemical that was investigated during the Cold War for its possible use in biological warfare against Hmong refugees and others. Nominated for several prizes, it won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2022.

<i>Modern Poetry</i> (poetry collection) 2024 poetry collection by Diane Seuss

Modern Poetry is a 2024 poetry collection by Diane Seuss, published by Graywolf Press. Seuss' sixth poetry collection, it won the 2024 Heartland Booksellers Association Award for Poetry and was designated a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.

<i>Still Life</i> (poetry collection) 2022 poetry collection by Jay Hopler

Still Life is a 2022 poetry collection by Jay Hopler. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Diane Seuss". Academy of American Poets.
  2. 1 2 "The Pulitzer Prizes". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved May 9, 2022.
  3. 1 2 "Diane Seuss". Poetry Foundation. December 2, 2022.
  4. ↑ Stone, Laurie (May–June 2021). "Women's Review of Books – May/June 2021 | Women's Review of Books | Wellesley Centers for Women". www.wcwonline.org. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Chang, Victoria (August 24, 2018). "The complex poetry of Diane Seuss refracts the speaker's life through what she observes". Los Angeles Times.
  6. ↑ "Fiction Book Review: Four-Legged Girl by Diane Seuss". Publishers Weekly. October 6, 2015. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  7. 1 2 Rua-Larsen, Marybeth (2016). Magill's Literary Annual 2016. New York: Salem Publishing. pp. 189–193.
  8. 1 2 Little, Margaree (July–August 2016). "Sundered Things—Diane Seuss's Four-Legged Girl". American Poetry Review. 45 (4): 23 – via EBSCOhost.
  9. ↑ Mack-Miller, Ellen (October 7, 2015). "Four-Legged Girl by Diane Seuss". The Rumpus.net. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  10. ↑ The Pulitzer Prizes (2016). "Finalist: Four-Legged Girl, by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press)". pulitzer.org. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  11. ↑ Scharper, C. Diane (April 15, 2018). "Seuss, Diane. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. Graywolf". Library Journal: 74 – via EBSCOhost.
  12. ↑ Stone, Laurie (September–October 2018). "Slitting Open the Sack". Women's Review of Books. 35 (5): 11–12 – via EBSCOhost.
  13. ↑ Stone, Laurie (June 2021). "Roadside Attraction". Women's Review of Books. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
  14. ↑ Meryl Natchez (2021). "Frank: sonnets". Rain Taxi (Summer 2021). Minneapolis, USA: Rain Taxi, Inc. ISSN   1943-4383. OCLC   939786025.
  15. ↑ Ulaby, Neda (May 9, 2022). "2022 Pulitzer Prizes in arts and letters go to 'Fat Ham' and 'The Netenyahus'". NPR.org. Retrieved May 9, 2022.
  16. ↑ Harris, Elizabeth A. (October 1, 2024). "Here Are the Finalists for the 2024 National Book Award". The New York Times .
  17. ↑ Staff, The New York Times Books (November 26, 2024). "100 Notable Books of 2024". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved December 18, 2024.
  18. ↑ Scott, A. O. (December 18, 2024). "Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved December 18, 2024.
  19. ↑ Pineda, Dorany (March 18, 2022). "Anthony Veasna So, Diane Seuss among National Book Critics Circle Award winners". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved May 10, 2022.
  20. ↑ "Modern Poetry". Graywolf Press. Retrieved March 3, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.