Jesse Nathan: Part of what’s astonishing about frank is the performance of spontaneity. I wonder whether you could talk about how that worked in these poems—or in your poetry generally. Did you revise these sonnets a lot, or did they often come out pretty close to what they look like in the finished book? I’m curious about why spontaneity, or the semblance of it in poetry, appeals to you.
Diane Seuss: Thank you for this, Jesse. I love the notion of performed spontaneity, in that it gets at the fact that what seems natural, or improvisational, is still a product of decision-making, and still leads to a consciously made thing—a mechanical nightingale rather than the real bird that happens to fly in the window. It reminds me of what is called “natural makeup,” which is sort of a non sequitur, no? Maybe the most natural thing is when artifice announces itself. The first time I wore eyeliner, for a high school play, I extended the lines all the way to my temples. When I looked in the mirror, I recognized myself for what felt like the first time. After the play closed, I stayed true to the stage makeup, though these days I walk my dog with a naked face. Even the crows don’t recognize me.
I’d always composed poems with a high degree of spontaneity. As a teenager, I wrote directly on the typewriter in typing class. I knew nothing of line breaks, so the lines extended until I ran out of space on the right margin, and then I’d press return. It’s really no different now, except the computer is faster, and I have a bit more intuition about where to break the line. I picture the words streaming down my arms from my brain (or gut or heart) and out my hands onto the keyboard, a seamless spill, intentional in its spillage. Why that mode rather than a studied carefulness? Well, that is my nature. I come from a long line of women who found ways to be free within repressive or confined circumstances. I do revise, but it’s usually the case that I must revise within the kinetic aura of composition. I don’t move on from a poem until it’s right, and I only have access to what it takes to get it right during that particular window of opportunity. I’d say my revision process is compressed and intense. Whiskey in a thimble.
The collection that preceded frank: sonnets, called Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, was still spontaneous in the composition of individual poems, but all of the poems were guided by a persistent thesis, which in turn outgrew its skin, molted, and transmogrified. The composition of the book itself, the ordering of poems and the overarching structure, was extraordinarily stage-managed. Every move and every poem was designed as a step along a snaking path that led to the last line of the last poem: “I wanted / my mother, and this is why I left paradise.” (Even typing that line now makes me choke up a little.)
This most recent collection, frank: sonnets, took a near-opposite path, in that spontaneity was its source, its belief system, and its process, but that was as intentional as what I did in Peacocks. I was interested in writing a memoir, but I just couldn’t hear it in prose. Prose seemed too plodding, or embodied, or earth-bound, for the life I’ve lived. I wanted to enact that feeling of movement from moment to moment, moments of being as opposed to sustained chronologies. Remembering is an operation of the mind and the senses. The form, especially a traditional form like the sonnet, even if my practice of it is untraditional, has an inertness, a historicity, that needed to be aerated by something improvisational.
Solving the problem of how a collection of poems might sound, as I’m embarking on a new book, often happens for me on a road trip, alone, in an unaccustomed landscape. With frank, as documented in the collection’s first poem, it was a glorious residency in the Pacific Northwest, and a road trip to Cape Disappointment. I heard the voice of the book as I was driving back, having done nothing at Cape Disappointment but take a nap in the back seat of the rental car. It was after stopping to pee on the roadside that I heard the opening lines of what would become that first poem: “I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment but didn’t / have the energy to get out of the car. Rental. Blue Ford / Focus.”
All of my books seem to have a muse who accompanies me as I go. In Four-Legged Girl it was Myrtle Corbin, born with four legs and displayed, at times, in circuses. In Peacocks it was the still-life painters with whom I’d fallen in love, as well as Amy Winehouse. In frank, it was Frank O’Hara, who appeared out of the blue in that first poem. “I’m a little like Frank O’Hara without the handsome / nose and penis and the New York School and Larry / Rivers.” If the opening poem is the legend of a book, as in the legend of a map, which tells you how to read it, then this opening poem delivered everything I needed—a lyric “I” located on the outskirts of literary acceptability, no penis, no New York, on a “restless search for beauty or relief.” Once I returned to my little cottage, I got the poem typed up on the computer and saw that it easily broke into fourteen lines. It was just that quickly that I realized I could write a memoir in sonnets.
O’Hara’s appearance was the impetus for understanding that this book needed to move as life moves, as Frank’s poems often moved, nearly parallel to his gait and his kinetic charm as he walked down the city streets. For the most part, though there are exceptions, these poems couldn’t dilly-dally. I wanted them to move with the movement of the mind. I hoped this memoir would be as much about how one remembers, the mechanics of memory, as the memories themselves. Many of the poems echo the pinballing of thought as it bounces across a broad surface, as you suggest in your question. Other poems follow the deep dive of entering a specific memory with intense emotional focus. I figured that variation was important to the poems’ depths and textures, given that the sonnet form was consistent throughout, and potentially redundant, though my approach to the form shifted depending on the heat or coolness of the subject.
I just realized I sound as if I know what I’m doing. It can seem that way, as I’m looking back at a process that’s already past tense, but the fact is writing poems for me has always been about my ability to be open to serendipity and haunting. Sometimes I feel like I’m flying. Often, I feel like Hansel and Gretel hunting for a trail of breadcrumbs that has already been eaten by nightingales. Now and then I’m lucky enough to be standing at a dark window, watching a thunderstorm, my hands pressed against the metal window frame, just when a bolt of lightning splits an oak tree outside the window, burns a short trail across the grass, and strikes me, knocking me on my ass and filling me with blue electricity. I was ten years old and I never recovered.
From One Question: Short Conversations with Poets by Jesse Nathan (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2026). Used with the permission of the publisher.