Diane Seuss on Discovering Objectivity Through Aging

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Diane Seuss about her new poetry collection, Modern Poetry.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I felt like your collection Frank: Sonnets had more anecdotes and parts of your life that were creating this whole. You told me it was autobiographical. But this one, Modern Poetry, I feel like is more of like a long, continuous discussion. And in some ways, it was maybe deeper. And even, in some ways, maybe darker.  One of the things I really walked away with, I mean, there’s a lot in here, was, it had a lot to do for me about aging, and the person that you have become and the way that you look at your emotions and let go of them in a certain way, and what age brings you.  There is something about aging that struck me.

Diane Seuss: I think that’s very true. Yes. I’ve always been interested, even in Four-Legged Girl, which was my third book, I’ve always been interested in sort of coldness, as a middle ground, as a way of finding middle ground. Because my young, emotional life was very intense and very warm, very vulnerable. And there’s something to be said of objectivity. And I think, in aging, I have come, just through sheer necessity, to a deeper form of objectivity. Keats expresses it in a poem toward the end of the book, you know, I do it through him. I think just my relationship to romantic love, for instance, is echoed in what he comes to kind of as a ghost at the end of the book. So yes, I think a kind of cool wisdom, not romanticizing poetry or human beings or love, but coming to an understanding of love that is larger really, than then I’ve had in the past.

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Diane Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; Four-Legged Girl, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open; and It Blows You Hollow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Her new poetry collection is Modern Poetry.