This Bonus Bit supplements the full-length interview with poet Diane Seuss for the Melody or Witchcraft podcast.
Section 1: Diane speaks about her approach to her books, her interest in objectivity, Dickinson’s presence in a variety of ways in the books, including Althea, the forthcoming book.
“High Romance” – is Diane’s poem she mentions from her book, Modern Poetry, in which Keats is a ghost. The poem first appeared in the New Yorker (with thanks to Susannah McNamara for her help in providing the text).
High Romance
Diane Seuss
And then Keats’s ghost found
that he could no longer love
Fanny Brawne. He’d escaped
the body like a love
letter from its envelope, and he’d flown
like a love letter in a windstorm.
He’d seen that the words
formed from ink melted in the rain.
Words, he now knew—and he’d once been
such a devotee—didn’t matter,
or didn’t matter so much as he’d believed
they mattered. Something mattered, he knew,
but whatever it was he couldn’t put
words to it, or he didn’t have the heart
to put words to it. He did feel love,
but it was an arrow without a target.
It was diffuse, like an atomized
perfume, or stars as the poor see them,
who cannot afford glasses. He saw
that Fanny, as she was known,
was a concept, just as he had been a concept.
They each inhabited the same amount
of space, like a tablespoon
of butter and a tablespoon of lard.
In a book, they would each occupy
a single page. Their brains, encased
in cranial bones and flesh and heads of hair,
could each rest on a single silk pillow.
Ideas, he found, don’t die. Even notions fly
like cottonwood seeds through the air.
And love had been a notion. He saw
that Fanny, in time, would slip free of herself—
everything does, in time, even roses,
even stones, foothills, fleas, and poems.
Rhyme, he saw, existed on its own behalf.
He could catch it like a bird catches
an air current. From above, he could see
that Fanny was not trifling. Nothing,
from above, is trifling, nor more compelling
than anything else. His love for her, he saw,
had been an invention of the mind.
Only belief could sustain it, but he
could no longer sustain belief. Now
and then he’d try it on again—love—
like a fancy hat he could not afford
and now appeared ludicrously overdesigned.
Once, his ghost managed to look at her again,
through the gauzy curtains that hung
over her bedroom window. His gaze
was too objective to find her beautiful,
but objectivity itself—that was beautiful.
Section 2: We chat on my geographic origins and Diane lays on us her newly coined, “We repeat it, til we defeat it!”
