The Triumph and Legacy of American Women’s Sonnets in Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets
Through its valor, grit, and elegant yet comfortable formal invocations, Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets finds its soul in what makes poetry poetry. The deep honesty, the emotional resonance, and the musical joy inherent in language all make up the foundations of this book. More narrowly, frank is part of a heritage that honors poetry (and specifically sonnets) written by American women since the mid-20th century.
Seuss calls back to the American women’s 20th/21st century poetic landscape. frank is imbued in the deeply sad and smart formal flirtations of Gwendolyn Brooks and Rachel Wetzsteon. It ascends through (rather than merely transcends) mundane experiences, as in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Ada Limón. It talks to the vicious, vulnerable, and narratively-contiguous work of Brittney Scott, Victoria Chang, and Ariana Reines. It even lends itself to mythopoeic, confessional, leftist, and utopian feminist writing, owing debts to Ai, Audre Lorde, Diane Di Prima, and Adrienne Rich.
Most importantly and specifically, of course, is the way frank: sonnets specifically speaks to contemporary American women’s sonnets. Rather than composing a cursory survey, I intentionally situate Diane Seuss in a lineage of women sonnet writers (ancestral, peer, and emerging) to both honor all the women mentioned in this piece and encourage readers to explore them, too. However, I am choosing to focus on two specific American women sonneteers for this piece: Wanda Coleman and Jill McDonough.
I first want to note that I am intentionally eschewing words such as tradition or canon when referring to the practice and history of sonnet writing by American women poets in the contemporary context. Rather than uphold racist or heteropatriarchal constructs of where authors fit into a fixed literary mold or oeuvre, I choose language such as lineage and landscape with intention.
It is impossible to consider American sonneteers and not mention the work of Wanda Coleman. Coleman’s poetic voice in her collected American sonnets is inflected with rage, sex, love, fear, and confidence. Coleman’s sonnets are wise. They’re also effortlessly cool and genuine, impossible to separate from their unapologetically Black and feminist subjectivity and linguistics. Coleman and Seuss love words, sex, and love. They are boldly and thoroughly enmeshed in their circumstances, and yet relatable through their honest portrayals of their respective experiences of womanhood.
Coleman regularly contemplates her subjectivity — its limitations and power — in her American sonnets; “American Sonnet #33,” an epistolary, has her addressing Black womanhood in the United States to her cousin: “I am denied the beauty of effective discourse, the fruit of / intellectual ascension, instead, I wallow / in the mundane routine of ceaseless doings…” (p. 35, Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets). Seuss is also seen honoring the intellectual, indulging (but with guilt) in the escapist worlds of literature and knowledge. She refers to her James Joyce-loving mother and her own discovery of books and words as a mechanism of survival.
A contemporary of Seuss, Jill McDonough, uses sonnets in a way to address her own subjectivity, too; much like the poems in frank, McDonough’s sonnets that are dispersed throughout her massive catalog are playful, poignant, and pointed narratives that encompass the intimate experiences of her own life. Both Seuss and McDonough suggest an erudite, self-possessed, and consciously feminist and queered, white and cis subjectivity. But their backdrops differ considerably. McDonough has a complex love affair with her honorary hometown of Boston, both its hedonistic pleasures and its deep inequity. McDonough regularly acknowledges her own participation in these inequities, wrestling with — and sometimes losing to — her own prejudices. Throughout frank: sonnets, Seuss struggles with place and privilege, too — mostly the stifling poverty and anguish in rural and industrial Michigan, but also assorted anomic feelings that come with being in theoretically more progressive, diverse cities in the United States.
So too, then, do Seuss’s and McDonough’s craft decisions differ. Seuss elicits various shades of sonnet: free verse, blank verse, and more structured sonic patterns such as through end and internal rhyme. Her formal qualities are both precise and freewheeling. McDonough’s sonnets, meanwhile, are formal and romantic: with their casual use of vernacular, dialogue, and slant rhyme, along with keen humor and impeccable scansion, they are classic Shakespearean sonnets. Nonetheless, Seuss and McDonough speak to us in similar emotional registers: at once reverent and irreverent, always concerned with both Big and Little feelings, and with one eye turned toward irony and the other toward grace.
I could go on and on about several poets whose literary engagement with the sonnet adorn the pages of frank. I mentioned Gwendolyn Brooks earlier, and I think that might be the most obvious comparison. Likewise, male poets have clearly influenced Seuss’s work, too: John Berryman’s sonnets and dream songs and Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets (which also pay homage to Wanda Coleman), for instance. Even men who didn’t often write sonnets: the passion of Jack Spicer and Paul Monette, the dignified erudition of James Baldwin, and, of course, the book’s powerhouse of a namesake, Frank O’Hara.
More than Seuss’s place in the overall American poetic landscape (irrespective of gender), the poems of frank: sonnets are, simply, good. They are an immediate pleasure and a challenge to read, and yet will reward a reader again and again if given the opportunity. But they are also good in the way fundamental human kindness is good. Seuss’s narrative shows us a person who encounters profound loss and grief and turns those traumas into weathered resolve and profound compassion: for herself and for others, even if she too is afflicted by their deepest unresolved pain.
That’s because, in frank, pain is allowed to be left unresolved. The book itself is clear-eyed and determined, but not certain about the future. Fear lingers, even as one ages and works through trauma. In the second to last sonnet (p. 129), Seuss encapsulates the fundamental human terror of trust and intimacy: “I once gentled a certain someone and it turns / out I loathe gentle.” Throughout the entirety of frank she is self-aware (and self-eviscerating), and the end of this poem turns the horror of being held into an even more devastating possibility: “[T]his is not a metaphor but a fable whose moral is as old as time: / I’m worried about these bruises and who will hold me when I die?”
Thankfully, there is reprieve. There is always redemptive grace, a chance to love oneself, to make peace with doubt. Diane the child and Diane the woman, whose shared grief stains the pages of frank, are always given space to be nurtured and reassured. Poems are often paired in a responsorial way in the book, each piece speaking broadly intertextually as well as with its neighbors in the book. Such is the case, then, between the last two sonnets of frank. Seuss continues the same breathless thought that ended the penultimate sonnet in the first line of the final one (p. 130): “I hope when it happens I have time to say oh so this is how it is happening.”
The final sonnet has one period (at the very end), making it a deliberate, unflinchingly honest monologue. I find this piece to be both the most rapturously joyful and nostalgically melancholic piece in the book — making it a logical and satisfying but not tidy ending to this cycle of sonnets. She is grateful and humble. She writes: “I don’t want to be afraid, I want to be curious.” She wants to give beautiful things and experiences to the people she loves most. She relishes in having been a few kisses removed from Jean-Michel Basquiat, and ponders who would find joy and pride and awe in having kissed her — a worry of teenagers and adults alike: “[W]ho will say of me I kissed someone who kissed / her or I kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed her.”
The bittersweetness of human connection, the incisive linguistic grace, the fundamental human questions of who will love me? and how will I be remembered when I die? — that’s the stuff of frank: sonnets. This fearless book is made of what is necessary and beautiful about poetry. Diane Seuss speaks to herself, other poets, and us as readers with frank — listen (and read) her labor of love with joy.
