How does one obtain the education necessary to become a great poet? This is what we might call the anxious subtext of the hopeful MFA experience. For the ancient Greeks—who saw poetry as a cultural instrument to explore matters that fascinated and unsettled them—the poet was divinely inspired, near to a prophet. But the Greeks also insisted that poetry was a practiced skill, approached manifold in rigorous education of form and style. This duality is still relevant: The poet’s education sometimes involves not only “poetry school,” as one of my students cheekily called it, but also a sustained relationship with unseen forces beyond the self. For the poet Diane Seuss, these modalities overlap and inform one another in the event of the poem, tapped into through memory.
It was tempting, I’ll admit, in preparing to introduce Seuss and her brilliant new collection, Modern Poetry, forthcoming in March from Graywolf Press, to quickly reeducate myself in the entire history of poetry. But as I labored neurotically in my task, ringing in my head were lines from “My Education,” a poem from her new book: “Not just what I feel but what I know/and how I know it, my unscholarliness, / my rawness, all rise out of the cobbled / landscape I was born to.” I paused, pulled back by the poems themselves to the heart of the matter, a deeper truth her poetry proclaims—that there is an education, a knowing we all contain: our lived experience.
Born in 1956 in Michigan City, Indiana, Seuss was raised by a single mother after her father’s early death. All her books are streaked through with the battered beauty of rural Michigan, where she lived through her childhood and still remains, and that formative grief. Yet to read Seuss is to revisit the very of memory. “Memory a tree so loaded with fruit and birds the tips // of the branches rake the ground,” she writes in “Folk Song.” And again, “The
