Diane Seuss's latest collection of poems, frank: sonnets, is the winner of one of the year's biggest American prizes for literature, and more: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It's been a coup long in the making. We spoke with the author of one of recent poetry's winningest volumes about how it felt to take home the Pulitzer, the sheer range of the sonnet form, and more.
Can we start by acknowledging the excitement of this moment?! How does it feel to win the Pulitzer for frank: sonnets? (After winning the National Book Critics Circle Award!) Where were you when you got the news?
Thank you for that acknowledgment of the moment! I was home in Michigan, alone, as I’ve been throughout the pandemic. I actually happened upon the live stream of the Pulitzer announcements online. I guess I knew somewhere in my circuitry the announcement would be coming, but I didn’t imagine my name being called. When poetry came up, of course I thought “Wouldn’t it be wild if frank: sonnets was a finalist?” When my name was called, first as a finalist and then as the recipient, and the book’s cover flashed on the screen, I felt, to be honest, a pressing in of all of my dead loved ones. My father. Mikel, the person on the book’s cover. My mentor, poet Conrad Hilberry. And also poetry mentors I never met in the body—Frank O’Hara, Dickinson, Keats—poets I love and who were with me, in imagination, throughout the writing of the book. I felt the presence and history of the sonnet itself. I experienced sheer gratitude for all of them, and for my collaborators in life and in poetry, and for the complicated life I’ve lived. I went a little numb, a little dizzy. Then I called my mom and sister and son. I want to mention that frank: sonnets also received the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, along with, as you mention, the National Book Critics Circle Award. Each of these was distinct, unexpected, and exhilarating.
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," you write. What was the effect on the mind (and on your poetic practice) of working in a 14-line space?
I’d primarily worked in free verse, although I did do a sequence of sonnets in Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. They were all 14 lines, no rhyme, no meter, but every line was what Ginsberg called an American Sentence—17 syllables, the same number as is in the 3-line haiku form. I discovered in that sequence that somehow the compression and even distractions of composing in that form helped me access intuition, and to discover unlikely intersections that my conscious mind hadn’t considered. In writing the sonnets of frank, the form was a rescue raft, a lifeline, the safety net beneath the trapeze act. I liked how it equalized every event, relationship, song, or story that the individual sonnet might take on, so living for a time in a space with a dishwasher received equal weight with the death of my father. I compare the sonnet sequence, in one of the poems, to the cells in an old-school strip of film. I’m not sure I could have written a “memoir” without the structure the sonnet provided. It also helped me feel upheld by the practitioners of the past. Keats’ “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person'd God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,” e.e. cummings, “sonnet entitled how to run the world),” Wanda Coleman’s jazz sonnets, all rang through me and stood beside me in the years I wrote frank: sonnets. The sonnet, like poverty, teaches me what I can do without, but also how much muchness there is in 14 lines, or 14 dimes.
In what ways did you approach the revision process differently than you had in previous collection?
My revision process may be a bit unusual, in that I usually revise within a very brief window of opportunity. I have written poems for so long that I write them with (at least) two minds—the present tense improvisor, and the revisor, with a longer view. I don’t move on until I get that particular poem, the poem-of-the-moment, right. That was probably truer of these sonnets than of my process with any of my earlier collections. I do keep a file on my computer called “Unfinished poems,” which is a euphemism for “Failed.” I have, though rarely, come back to poems in that file and fixed them up pretty, so to speak.
What most surprised you about writing the book and the reception to it?
The surprise, I guess, in writing the book was just how pleasurable it was. I loved exploring the potential of the form, and how far I could push it toward prose, then toward song, and how very much it can hold when given half a chance. The reception to the book has been phenomenal. I have loved the fact that people have sent photos of the book in landscapes all over the world—Paris, Rome, India, Mexico, Las Vegas, Nevada and Las Vegas, New Mexico, in intimate settings, in public spaces, just everywhere. People have said that the Pulitzer feels like theirs, not just mine. I couldn’t ask for a more perfect response, because that’s how I feel about it, too. The book became its own entity, separate from me. In fact, when I called my mom to tell her about the Pulitzer, her first response was that I was kidding. “Nawwww,” she said. “No, he did!” I said. “frank won the Pulitzer!” The honors and awards, in consort with such brilliant finalists and semi-finalists, has been beyond anything I ever expected or risked dreaming.
What are you working on at the moment? Do you ever find yourself returning to the sonnet form?
I have steered clear of the sonnet so far. My process is to move forth from whatever I just did, and I’ve taken the sonnet as far as I could for now. I’ve drafted my next collection, which is composed of longer free verse poems with some short palate cleansers in between riffs. And there is a sequence of contemporary ballads, so I haven’t abandoned references to given form. The book will be called Modern Poetry, and is due to come out in 2024. The voice is recognizable, of course, but it leans toward the rhetorical. The solitude of the pandemic, the isolation from landscape via travel, certainly impacted this next collection. But I’m still me—there’s no other choice.
