The Melody or Witchcraft podcast interviews begin with a love for poetry, its craft, and a major literary ancestor: Emily Dickinson. I’m your host, Kathryn Petruccelli, a poet, workshop leader, Substacker, & former guide for the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. I’m interested in things like the sources of creative inspiration, how the past influences the present, challenging cultural norms, social justice, and poetry as a tool for survival. I have yet to fail to fall further in love with each poet-guest after our conversations. I hope that will be true for you, too.
Non-poets & poetry skeptics: you are very welcome here!! Names or poetic references are fleshed out or linked to in the show notes if not in the moment.
Things you are at risk of as a listener:
Learning new ways to understand poetry.
Filling up your “new writers/books to read” dance card.
Finding healing and companionship around the stress of living.
EXPLICIT LANGUAGE NOTE:
Please be aware that there is a curse word in Episode 15.
kathrynpetruccelli.substack.com for complete notes, photos, and links.
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In Episode 15, Diane Seuss & I go deep into the poems and come out with lessons around narrative, death, poetry’s power against same, and who cares if they’re remembered.
In addition to the following full-length interview, look for the Diane Seuss “bonus bit” episode where Diane talks about her upcoming collection and you also get to listen in on some of our off-the-record chat.
Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry (2024), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and frank: sonnets (2021), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and she is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her seventh collection, Althea: Poems, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2027.
Diane’s choice of Dickinson poem:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –c. autumn1862, Fascicle 18, Sheet 4, (FR372; J341)
[I saw a little movie of a person stroking a small bird with two Q-tips, one held between]
Diane SeussI saw a little movie of a person stroking a small bird with two Q-tips, one held between
the forefinger and thumb of each hand. It tipped back its head to receive the minor
tenderness, which to the bird must have felt like being touched by a god. For moment
I knew what it would be to feel at the mercy of love, small-scale, the kind shown but not
spoken of. I was afraid to touch you. I was afraid of the lesions you’d described to me
over the phone, their locations and the measurement, in centimeters, of each. Jesus-marks,
you called them. All so I would be prepared and unafraid or less afraid but still I was afraid
of dying like you were dying. When I first arrived I looked so long into your eyes you
shivered and ordered me to look away. You were imperious in your dying yet courtly
about my fear, you understood, as if I were a child afraid of lightning storms, which I am,
having at age ten been struck. Out of the blue you said that once you were dead I’d never
be able to listen to Blue again, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, not just the song but the whole album.
It was a minor curse you lay across my shoulders like a fur dyed blue, and so I listen now
in defiance of you. In the listening the pronoun shifts. We are listening. There is no death.
People, concepts, & other references made in the conversation:
The line “wish in one hand, shit in the other” appears in this poem by Diane.
In Gregory Orr’s essay on poetic temperaments, he states the four temperaments as story, music, imagination, and form.
Frazar Stearns (although this article is dated, it gives in-depth context for the circumstances around and impact of Stearns’ death)
The reference we make to Higginson and Emily’s question about whether her poems “breathe” comes from this: Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself-it cannot see, distinctly-and I have none to ask- Should you think it breathed- and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude- It’s the beginning of her initial letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 15, 1862, Letter 260
Steepletop – the house of Edna St. Vincent Millay
On ED’s question about where her father went after his death in 1874, I found these two things:
“Home is so far from home since my father died.” (ED to Higginson, 1875)
And with many thanks to my colleague at the ED Museum, Emily Bernhard, for digging this up: This is from The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (vol. 2, p. 227), (Jay) Leyda is quoting from Life and Letters of ED by Martha Dickinson Bianchi: “After her father’s death she went about always wondering where he could be, and even to her brother’s children saying unforgettable things in her search for a clue to what, and where, he was, and ‘what kind’ he had become ... And no acting of tragedy in later years ever effaced the memory of her husky whisper, ‘Where is he? Emily will find him!’”
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
Di’s short essay on bold poetic declarations: “Divine is Mine,” which comes from The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basic, ed. Diane Lockwood, 2018, Terrapin Books.
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Emily’s “taller feet” quote is: “Could I make you and Austin — proud — sometime — a great way off — ‘twould give me taller feet —” (to Susan Dickinson, Letter238, 1861)
Here is the last poem in Diane’s frank: sonnets that I read in the interview
Recorded April 20, 2026.
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