Pleasures of the Lowdown

Frank is a guy; frank is an adjective. According to Nameberry, one of the world’s largest databases of baby names, Frank was also “a Top 10 name from the 1880s until the 1920s.” The name “has fallen from favor but still has a certain warm, friendly real-guy grandpa flavor that could come back into style.”

Denotatively, frank means marked by free, forthright, and sincere expression, from the old German, meaning free (not servile), without hindrance, exempt from. While frank implies open, openness might connote a hint of timidity, whereas frank suggests a measure of boldness.

In her stunningly funny and sad fifth book, frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), a memoir-in-poems, Diane Seuss’s use of F/frank evokes all of those associations, but above all the spirit of Frank O’Hara, whose unorthodox life and discursive style are guiding inspirations for Seuss’s own lyrical and digressive storytelling, as well as her ebullient mixing of high and low culture; in her poems, music and painting blend comfortably with Cheetos and Scattergories. In the first of the book’s 128 sonnets, Seuss declares, “I’m a little like Frank O’Hara without the handsome / nose and penis and the New York School and Larry / Rivers.”

Every author has their official bio, that brief third-person paragraph for the back of book jackets and little magazines, or for grants and residency applications. Seuss’s bio goes something like this: She was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan; she taught for many years at Kalamazoo College, where she received her BA; she has a Masters in Social Work from Western Michigan University, and she spent much of her career working in domestic assault, community mental health, and a woman- and queer-centered private practice. Her previous collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the collection before that, Four-Legged Girl (2015), was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. In her more personal author bios, she notes that she was raised for most of her childhood by a single mother and “is herself a single mother of a son, Dylan.” She adds that “Her people are nurses, teachers, small farmers, veterans, pipefitters, barbers, rural mail carriers, rabble-rousers, and storytellers.”

frank consists entirely of sonnets that hopscotch back and forth across Seuss’s life. She was raised in an aluminum “rectangle” in a community of trailer homes—a milieu in which her mother’s best friend “made a particle board lid for the crib / so she could go out on the cement slab and drink highballs, unimpeded by kids, who all / turned out fine and loved her madly, though half of them died young in motorcycle wrecks”—and eventually left for Manhattan where, “For a couple of nights, I was the new thing. Then just a thing.” She recalls the days when she ran “a vintage clothing store, sat at a card table with a cigar box for a cash / drawer, the place too small for more than a couple of racks of old dresses / and tuxedos.”

Each of the sonnets’ titles are essentially their first lines, and some of the poems deliver the expected nods to rhyme, meter, and concluding couplets, whereas others operate more like flash nonfiction essays in 14 lines. (One of them, “[I hoisted them, two drug dealers],” appears in the recent anthology The Best of Brevity, a book dedicated to flash nonfiction pieces of 750 words or fewer.)

Maybe every autobiography is also an elegy, a monument for a past self now dead and gone but not forgotten. Seuss’s sonnets are narrative and elegiac, memorializing her personal history, both rural Midwestern and urban bohemian, both as an artist and as a woman, as a much-of-the-time teacher and an all-of-the-time poet. Unsparingly retrospective, they meditate on the questions of what it might mean to be a country person in a city—and not just any city, but in a sense the Ur-urban environment of America: New York City—as well as what it means to be a woman in a mostly male artistic environment (possible answer: “I was that writer named anonymous”).

Among the areas of scholarship in her official teaching bios, Seuss lists “Traditional Form and ‘Freaking’ Form,” “Writing the Rural, including the Gothic Pastoral,” “Poetry and Trauma,” and “Ekphrastic Poetry,” all of which are approaches on dazzling display here. Not dissimilar to how Emily Dickinson both adhered to and departed from hymn meter, or how Allen Ginsberg shifted the haiku into the 17-syllable American Sentence, or how Evie Shockley originated the son-not, or how Terrance Hayes plays with the sonnet’s expected status as a love poem to write political poems in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), Seuss takes what is arguably one of the most hidebound poetic containers and stuffs it with concerns seldom expressed in iambic pentameter because “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.” The tension between the built-in economy of a 14-line poem and Seuss’s own unruly life becomes the collection’s page-turning impulse.

As Seuss writes midway through the sonnets themselves, “a sonnet is one frame in a long strip / of celluloid most of which will end up on the cutting- / room floor back when there were cutting rooms.” She uses the form to deliver cinematic images and scenes, as when she describes accidentally OD-ing on her adult son’s Suboxone: “I had no clue what I’d done / until later in bed my Self began to break into parts of equal measure like frames of film / unspliced and floating away from each other.”

The propulsive and self-revelatory sequence of sonnet after sonnet populated by vividly drawn major and minor characters calls to mind John Berryman’s Dream Songs, as well as the storytelling instincts of Gerald Stern and Sharon Olds, plus Sylvia Plath’s mesmerizing combination of pride and self-effacement. Seuss leaves no stone of her hardscrabble upbringing unturned, covering the tragedy of her father’s early death from an “abdominal tumor” and her mother’s subsequent return to earn her college degree, a time when “her domain was TV dinners and Joyce,” as well as charting the way she herself “was a quiet child” but “schemed behind the silence. Already setting up the terms of my survival / like chess pieces whose royalty I coveted.”

So also conveys her fish-out-of-water experience of life in New York City, as when, with incisive self-awareness, she writes

I went up to a guy at the record store
to ask him who did the song ‘Refugee’ and he said, ‘Me,’
and I realized after I found the album and looked at the photo
on the cover I’d asked Tom Petty who did a Tom Petty tune.

Illuminating her own self-proclaimed notion of freakishness, Seuss asks in the description of a workshop she teaches, “How might formal improvisation serve as an act of both homage and individuation, as a touchstone that allows us to journey deeper and deeper into our freakish originality?”

Even a cursory flip through the collection’s pages, where the poems roll by with widely varying right margins, reveals a sonneteer intent on making the 13th century poem her own in the 21st century. She lets iambic pentameter (which she likens in typically unexpected and explicit fashion to cumming) come and go as it pleases, and she relies on internal rhymes as opposed to end ones, and sometimes becomes almost self-indulgent in her own apparent intoxication with wordplay, as when she writes: “The lambs this year are dumb but lambs are dumb / their tiny brains archaic smiles humans to a lamb / are all the same all rams the same all ewes are mom.” She blends sensual description and intellectual commentary seamlessly, sometimes turning that commentary critically upon herself.

“I want people to know / that I’m suffering,” she writes, “but at the same time I want them to see me as a normal person. So when I go pick up a sandwich I want to / feel like this person recognizes that I’m something Other but still deserving of sympathy.” In short, “Sometimes I want to be looked at as a freak.” By building these freakishly original sonnets, Seuss both embraces and transcends her feelings of non-belonging. She dons her strange poetic form like an array of outré outfits and rocks them, even as she admits “this body has never been a home, my shack a shackle […] poems are someone else’s clothes I slipped / into so I could skip town.”

In a 2019 interview with The Rumpus, Seuss defines “freaking form” as “learning traditional forms so that they can be usurped, upended, repurposed, like a bathtub that can be made into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. I’m sort of an anti-intellectual intellectual, a geek about the literature and visual art of the past but I like to bring it down, downtown, here where I live, with the earthworms and gravediggers.”

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The word sonnet derives from the Italian sonetto meaning “little song,” and Seuss leans into that musical association throughout the book, but especially in a sequence where she incorporates conversations she had with her son, usually verbatim and used with his permission. In perhaps the most memorable of these, she quotes her son’s invented lyrics for a country tune: “used to carry girls around on my back / now I sleep alone when I hit the sack / I been so poor and been outside / my woman left me / and I can’t even cry / I eat cracker sandwiches and wish I could die.” Encapsulating these proletarian concerns within an elevated form, though clever, is not a gimmick, but an astutely anti-romantic way for Seuss to document the real experiences and struggles of a class of people who don’t often find themselves represented in formal poetry.

Like the collection’s namesake, Frank O’Hara, Seuss’s writing is witty and personal in tone, graceful in its syntax, elegant yet gritty, and has a similar nostalgie de la boue. Ethereal and metaphysical abstractions mingle with the material concreteness of dirt and drugs, sex and bodies—“the pleasures of the lowdown” as she puts it.

In the aforementioned Rumpus interview, Seuss says of her own aesthetic:

[It] seems to be one of opposing energies. I’m interested in the rural, but I approach it via degrees of formal experimentation. I think of my work as punk-rural, in that it emerges from rural spaces, but looks for the toughness, the strangeness, the absurdity, the taut stringiness, the rage and pain of it all as opposed to the homespun.

Her agrarian landscape and the people who populate it are a far cry from the folksiness and quietude a reader might find in, say, a Ted Kooser poem, or the traditional values that a poet like Wendell Berry celebrates. Seuss feels both passion and compassion toward the region she’s from, but she also seeks to puncture any tendency to sentimentalize that region as innocent or bucolic. Irreverent and uncompromising, she takes readers instead past shacks painted “Kool-Aid colors” to “Fuckerson Park,” to seedy bars and filthy riverbanks and middle-of-nowhere neighborhoods where “all the dogs were named / Pee Hole.”

Unlike O’Hara’s, Seuss’s poems bristle with feminism, the promised bluntness of the adjectival frank on full display when she writes of how “I aborted two daughters,” adding “I was and am stupid, please no politics, I’ve never gotten / over it, no I don’t regret it, two girls with a stupid penniless / mother and a drug-addict father, I don’t think so.” Or when she describes the downtown New York City literary scene:

The famous poets came for us they came on us or some of us
at least on some of us they did not come their poems were beautiful
or not but either way we learned to call them beautiful they came
like honeybees to hyacinths to some of us they came in some of us
the ones they called unreadable but fuckable or readable and fuckable  

Or, perhaps most passionately and damningly, when she writes of how, “I lived within punk’s borders” but “it was no more liberated than what … had come before that,” just

the same old dangerous white boy song
and dance, unaware of its misogyny and convinced that its dangers were      innovational
and had the power to uncap the revolution which, had it come, would         have proven
to be a profound disappointment for they would have lost their supremacy

As O’Hara does, she drops in the names of her friends, both famous and civilian, but she never holds back her disgust at the persistently patriarchal nature of the world, especially the cultural world.

So, too, does her voice ring with well-placed righteousness at injustice and exploitation, as when she writes, “Remember cancer / clusters on Pucker Rd., something wrong with the wells, dumped cyanide in a pit / and built over it,” never looking away from the dispossessed and their agonies and resentments.

I can’t help but hear echoes of Gregory Orr, especially when Seuss asserts, “when I have been suffering at times I could / step away from it by embracing it, a blues thing, / a John Donne thing, divest by wrestling, then sing.” In Poetry as Survival (2002), Orr argues that the reading and writing of poetry provide a profound resource in addressing, withstanding, and even transcending both personal and collective trauma and suffering. Humans, he writes, “evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one.” According to Orr, this survival commences when poets translate their “crisis into language,” giving it “symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it,” and this process essentially “arrays the ordering powers our shaping imagination has brought to bear on these disorderings.”

That concentrated application of order upon disorder feels crucial to Seuss’s decision to use the sonnet, that restrictive form, to bring patterns and beauty to the chaos of devastation and desire, loss and anguish, affection and addiction. As she writes relatively late in the series, “Literature is dangerous business, the entrapment of form in poetry, plot / in fiction, can be claustrophobic to a person like me, and no trellised exit gate, / one can find themselves not just lost but impaled on the tangible details / of someone else’s world.” By letting the sonnets be as roomy as they need to be, Seuss allows what can sometimes feel like an airless form to breathe. Two of the sonnets near the middle actually appear as the front and back sides of a wide foldout page, an accommodation to the rangy length of their lines and a commitment to not limiting them to the book’s trim size.

I felt inordinately excited, therefore, when, on page 109, Orr himself shows up in a poem that begins, “Takes time to get to minimalism, years lived through, eau de / suffering” in which Seuss writes “yes, I’m in that camp, as Orr writes, we move from / choked silence to blurted speech to diary with its useless key / to story to poetry, the most shaped, therefore most distant from / the original crime.”

Yet as bad as the incidents recounted across frank so often are—be it the need to flee from her partner Kev when she had “twenty minutes before he’d get home to try to change my mind / or kill me,” or watching her beloved friend Mikel dying of AIDS, “lesions on his nose and ear and neck / and temple”—the book never becomes a litany of sorrows or indulges in self-pity. Seuss animates each episode with her personality and humor, as fellow working-class memoirist Cookie Mueller did, and she imbues each image with unflinching candor and dignity, much like photographer Nan Goldin.

The book opens with three epigraphs, exquisitely chosen, one from Candy Darling, one from Amy Winehouse (off her debut album Frank, naturally), and one from Elaine de Kooning. The move announces that while this book will deal with a mysterious and alluring milieu—that of the non-male person making their way in a rarified artistic realm—there will be no mystification, or perhaps even a de- or anti-mystification.

“This is my barbed wire dress. It protects the property but doesn’t hide the view,” she quotes Darling, and by the time you reach the last page, you see that the sentiment functions as a mission statement of sorts. The whole book is like that dress, barbed and artful, dramatizing both Seuss’s writing life and her life-life, staking out a territory for the reader to look at and admire but never to control or own. The errors and achievements belong to Seuss alone.