☀ Today's Poem: Two Poems by Diane Seuss

April 30, 2024

Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar

The best I ever wrote was in an attic.
No chair. Manual typewriter on an upended box.
No screen on the lone window, which I removed.
Bats flew through.

I woke up one night and Blue was in bed with me.
Nah, I said, and he put on his wire-rimmed glasses and left.
Somehow, I ended up with two kittens. Littermates.
I wonder how they lived and died, where they went.

The only furniture was the mattress on the floor.
A wooden box full of someone's Mardi Gras beads.
No ethics. No lock on the door.
No worries about vermin, rabies, fleas.

Where did I pee in the middle of the night?
There must have been a bathroom down those narrow stairs.
A shower somewhere.
A gold shower curtain laced with mold.

Blue once told me I walked in on him peeing and laughed.
That it ruined his life.
Well, Jesus, I'm sorry.
I would never have apologized back then.

I knew no forms.
Just a swarm of bees in the rafters who agreed to leave me be.
I made a line break when I took a drag on my Salem Light.
Menthols were pure as poetry.

Where are the words now, that you wrote in that hellhole?
On the typewriter ribbon I stuck in a knothole.

Romantic Poet

You would not have loved him,
my friend the scholar
decried. He brushed his teeth,
if at all, with salt. He lied,
and rarely washed
his hair. Wiped his ass
with leaves or with his hand.
The top of his head would have barely
reached your tits. His pits
reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

from the book MODERN POETRY / Graywolf Press

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Color photograph of the Poetry Daily black tote with a specially commissioned illustration

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National Poetry Month 2024 is almost over, and our inaugural run of Poetry Daily totes is nearly gone—at the end of this week, they'll no longer be for sale. Choose from an evergreen Poetry Daily logo tote, featuring the last line of Diane Seuss' poem, "Romantic Poet," and a companion black tote, featuring a specially commissioned illustration.

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An Interview with Ricardo Maldonado

"My lived experience is that poetry can be something like secular faith in what we have to offer one another. I’d like this to be corroborated by institutions and community centers all over the U.S. and all over the world. The world needs more poets because poets evaluate how language matters and why it matters and how the world that we build with language matters. We can do that work through the Academy. Poem-a-Day is a great example. But I want to see a plurality of venues."

via POETS & WRITERS

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What Sparks Poetry:
Lindsay Turner on "Forms of Displeasure"

"In The Upstate, I was trying to connect the regional experience of a place, a certain corner of Southern Appalachia, with the bigger structural issues of America of 2016-2020, roughly, and of the world. I was trying to do this in poems because it’s also what I was trying to do in real life, struggling against the claustrophobia of depression and anxiety as well as of certain region-based patterns of writing and thinking."

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