By MAHEA DANIELS
“Let’s light a fire and sit around it and talk,” Diane Seuss, the latest guest in the Visiting Writer series, said in a lecture last Thursday, Sept. 27. She created this type of intimate conversational setting with the crowd as she talked about her renowned work as a poet and answered questions regarding her collections, including “Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open,” “Four–Legged Girl,” and her newest work, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl.” Her work has made appearances in “The New Yorker,” “Poetry,” “Brevity,” and “The Missouri Review,” and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Seuss’ “fevered lines get under your skin until reading becomes a visceral experience.” The sublime experiences that pervade her work were something that the audience clearly experienced while reading her poetry. However, this type of experience did not exist only within the pages of her poetry. As a speaker, she breathed life into her words, describing how creating poetry was “like the mountains … both overwhelming and terrifying.”
Seuss explained that much of her work is inspired by personal experiences. “We all have two or three subjects, and we keep working on them throughout our lives,” Seuss said. “There’s something about working them through life and tracking that work through language.” For her, one of these core topics is pain and grief because this is an emotion she has been dealing with since a young age. She emphasized that poetry does not resolve heartbreaking experiences, nor “change what happened or lessen the grief,” but, writing those feelings into her lines allows the emotions to “become a part of the world.”
Seuss’s father died when she was seven years old. Her mother coped by regularly visiting the gravesite, but Seuss dealt with her grief by channeling it into her writing. “My mom attends the graves. She is the most loyal grave tender … but I don’t do that,” she said. “Rather, my poems are my version of grave tending.” She went on to say that writing is another way to have a relationship with the experiences that have caused such pain.
Throughout the entirety of the lecture, Seuss often redirected questions at the audience. After she was asked how she writes about painful experiences, a participant in the audience responded by noting that they often avoid writing about what is most painful. Seuss said that at her age, she is not able to ignore the pain, so “just to write about it openly is something,” regardless of how personal the subject matter may be.
In the final moments of the talk, Seuss was asked about the current events surrounding the Kavanaugh hearings and how they have affected the topics she is currently writing about in her poetry. “Poetry is a form of testimony,” she said. Seuss’s writing not only testifies to her own life experiences but also transcends the pages, attesting to what others felt as well.