Diane Seuss: Poet of the Body
Diane Seuss’s poems are in equal parts visceral and evocative — to be precise, her use of language is so direct and honest that it speaks to experiences all people have, prompting emotional responses with every line. A large part of this is her use of the body — something everyone reading her work has — to express her insights and feelings most fully.
Several of the most moving poems from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection frank: sonnets are about her friendship with Mikel Lindzy and the effects that AIDS had on his body before the disease took his life. Many of these poems also include reference to Seuss’s time as a young mother. Seuss contrasts the themes of giving birth and motherhood with the themes of the early AIDS epidemic and death to fully flesh out both parts of these experiences.
In [He called from San Francisco], Seuss describes a phone call between the two friends: “I was nursing the baby, he said I have / a lesion on my calf, it looks like a cigarette burn, this was early in the plague.” She sets the stage for this time in history when people were getting rapidly diagnosed with a disease for which there were no cure. Seuss is living out twin mysteries: She must contend with her own changing baby and raising a child (a mystery for everyone who experiences it to some degree), while also watching friends like Lindzy suffer with no cure in sight.
She later comments in the same poem, “You’d think my milk would have been / copious but it was not and yet I am an animal, from there it was neuropathy / in his feet, he hobbled, who’d once won the town tennis tournament.” Their bodies are both changing in wildly divergent ways. As hers is recovering from pregnancy and childbirth, and learning to feed her young son, Lindzy’s body is declining rapidly. The downfall from being a tennis star to being unable to walk shows the vicious effect that HIV and AIDS had on Americans, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
In Seuss’s next sonnet in “Frank,” [I want to zero in on what he looked like], she describes Lindzy having “lesions on his nose and ear and neck / and temple,” and still compares him to pop culture icons Jack Nicholson and Neil Young. Meanwhile, he tells her, “Di / your body has changed.” Her response: “I’d just given birth to a ten pound baby. Jesus / Christ. What do you want from me. What did you ever want from me.” Having a child has changed her body in a multitude of ways, and her yearning for understanding is felt in these last lines. But the two friends are in two completely different scenarios, and it’s possible that neither can fully comprehend what the other is going through.
Seuss’s candidness about the way bodies change makes her poems stand out; her unvarnished truths provide a refreshing blast of truth to her readers. [Maybe we wander] holds nothing back when describing the birthing process: “Nurse says the membrane between life and death will thin like the effacement / of the cervix. I remember begging to die when I gave / birth and begging to be born when I was dying.” There are no moms with perfect ponytails and carefully applied makeup giving birth in Seuss’s work — she’s honest, even if it’s difficult to read.
She goes on to give the details of her labor in [Press a foot into this beach], saying, “If there / are poems, let them come in sick waves / like pushing contractions for a birth I did / not have the strength to finish. Cut me, cut me! / They cut me stem to stern.” Everything is out in the open in Seuss’s poems. Just as nothing is hidden when her poems describe the AIDS epidemic, nothing is hidden when she talks about what cis women experience as they have children. The urgency of her lines “Cut me, cut me!” and the seeming disappointment in herself for “not [having] the strength to finish” a vaginal birth touches on the wildness of the pain cis women experience while giving birth, as well as the pressure from society to give birth (and mother their children) in the “right” way.
Her poems about growing up and coming of age in a biologically female body are also so exact in their details and so perfectly drawn that they transport readers back to specific times in their own lives. The youthful exuberance of her poem [My first night in New York] shines through, even when looking back on a more painful experience: “I’d pierced / one of my ears with a darning needle, ice cube to numb it, to hurt: the only verb I knew, stabbed / through that ear hole a gold safety pin, the kind girls / back then wore on pleated skirts.” A girlhood ritual is splayed out for the reader to see, with no holds barred in her choice of words: “to hurt: the only verb I knew, stabbed.”
Seuss’s poem [You know what living means?] contains a semi-comical ode to her breasts:
…Tits blued by cold, insomnia, midnight,
indigoed like collapsed veins…
…I saw my tits when I was young reflected back to me in a blue
mirror on which were laid out lines of coke. Even then
they were old, savant-tits, they knew things. Purpled.
Milked-out. Mounded low and moving slow in the old way.
Again, Seuss isn’t leaving anything out. She’s acknowledging her body and showing appreciation for her breasts, as they are “savant-tits” who “knew things.” The idea that the body — and in particular breasts — know things is a sentiment that anybody who has lived in the world can find some connection with. Going through the world, our bodies absorb our experiences. As body parts used both for nourishment and sexual pleasure, breasts especially hold many of our corporeal memories.
Other poems feel more earthy, like [My favorite scent is my own funk], which begins, “My favorite scent is my own funk, my least favorite scent, other / people’s funk, and this, my friends, is why we cannot have nice / things.” Her willingness to dive into the messiness of our bodies makes reading her poems exhilaratingly freeing, as if someone has ripped back the curtain from the unwashed, behind-the-scenes experiences we all have as part of the human experience to show us that so many of our feelings are universal.
Seuss doesn’t shy away from any human experience, whether it’s public urination and a possible UTI in [I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment] (“I had to stop in a semipublic place to pee / on the ground. Just squatted there on the roadside. / I don’t know what’s up with my bladder. I pee and then I have to pee and pee again.”) or abortion in poems like [Margaret Sanger did the first one] (“I created the illusion of a cat with liquid eyeliner, I once stabbed / myself in the eye with the wand, what an awful mother I would have been”). She uncovers these experiences and takes the stigma out of them by treating them as what they are: experiences many (if not all) bodies go through.
Seuss’s use of these specific details — ear piercing, the urge to urinate, poking one’s self in the eye — works to immediately transport the reader back to times in their life when their bodies went through the same experiences. Some of these experiences also show the contrast between the beauty that women accomplish (ornamental earrings, seductive eye makeup) and the pain they experience on their way there.
In one of Seuss’s most full-bodied poems, [I courted her, that musky tart], she makes a comparison that is both shocking and instantly recognizable. While describing the “musky tart” of the title, she says, “her mouth like Day 2 of a bad period.” The luridness and richness of this detail immediately gives a striking visual of this woman’s face, and it also acknowledges the pain and messiness that cis women must go through during menstruation. Thankfully, the unnecessary shame and awkward silence that often accompany conversations about (or experiences of) women’s menses are completely absent here. Seuss’s poem works to put the worst part of many women’s cycles (Day 2!) front and center to convey a feeling and a color.
As Seuss says in [Here on this edge], “Wipe the lipstick off the mouth of anything and there you will find dove-gray.” Her poems wipe the lipstick off any cleaned-up versions of reality and gives the whole truth to her readers. This gift of honesty couples with her exacting language are what make Seuss’s poems about the body so compelling and so searing. It’s these poems that tell us the truth about ourselves (and our bodies) that stay with us the longest.
