Still Life with Diane Seuss
It was the 50th anniversary of Graywolf Press—a nationally acclaimed non-profit publication and home to some of the world’s most renowned poets—and I stood outside the glass building of Chicago’s very own Poetry Foundation, where the free celebratory reading was hosted. I was about twenty minutes early, and the doors weren’t open yet. Next to me was the only other person in the courtyard, a grey-haired woman in a heavy coat. Late October in Chicago always feels like winter. She told me she knew one of the featured poets, Diane Seuss, from their years together at Kalamazoo College. According to her, Diane was the rising star of the creative writing department, mentored by professors and older students alike. And after listening to her work during the reading, I could see why.
At first, Diane struck me with her intensity—glaring makeup, colorful, almost tacky clothes. She was unlike any of her poet peers, who were polished and muted, the high-class rich hipsters of the modern teenager’s dreams. As soon as she began to read, however, I understood that in front of me was a woman of incredible mastery and vision, of exquisitely molded pain. I was mesmerized by her words—the seemingly disjointed narratives of her poems, taken from across her collections, woven together by rich imagery of womanhood, suffering, and a life that often isn’t represented in literature and art. This life is that of street urchins, sex workers, addicts and lovers, and kings of the garbage dumps, all portrayed with the tormented tenderness of Diane’s memory. That is the spectacular quality of her work: she is not simply describing things she had seen out of the corner of her eye, it is her own life and experience told with a lucid candor. So profound was the impact that Diane’s poetry had on me that I bought her latest book, Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks And a Girl.
I am by no means an expert on contemporary poetry that I wish I was. Still, Diane’s book struck me as completely unique from all else. It is driven and organized by art—fine art, the art one sees in museums and private galleries. The titles are peppered with references to famous paintings, the running themes of “still life” and “self-portrait” connecting most of the poems, and fragments of the title painting fill the pages between sections. To Diane, art serves as a representation of class, and the discussion that the poems portray is also that of class: its role in Diane’s life and the way it has forced her to perceive the world.
“I have lived in a painting called Paradise, and even the bad parts / were beautiful,” reads the first poem, “I Have Lived in a Painting Called Paradise”. Here, she sets up the image that the collection then explores: her life as a work of art. Art, in Diane’s eyes, and in mine, is not flawless—but it is nevertheless beautiful. From here, the descriptions of sex stores, drugs, poverty, and mental illness transform into things of beauty, of value. The contrast is jarring: for so long, art has been inaccessible to most people, especially those in the lower and middle classes. Art has become synonymous with culture and taste, concepts that seem inherently white, inherently rich, inherently “proper” in every way. Through the telling of her own experiences of homelessness, assault, and abuse, Diane shows that anything can be art—from the streets to the palaces to everything in-between. Her poetry and the art it is inspired by is distinctly different from the art that I grew up within Russia. There it was protest art that my parents curated, all of the repressed sufferings on the walls of our old gallery. While Diane argues for the romanticization of the ugly, the artists of my home believe in exposing it to the world, basking in the unbearableness. For Diane, art is a form of escapism. When she grew sick of her life revolving around “memory”—trauma—“[Diane’s] eyes were hungry for paint.” Taking it in became a way for her to imagine herself as someone deserving of the privileges of the upper class, someone successful within the capitalist system, someone as beautiful as the art they were surrounded by.
Still, there is a critique of art, an unresolved battle between Diane’s need to consume it and her contempt for it. No doubt, this contempt is born out of a struggle to survive, profoundly incompatible, or so it seems, with art’s abstraction and lack of utility. In the title poem, she writes: “Art, useless as tits on a boar.” This comes after a description of the painting the poem is inspired by, grisly and cynical, as an expression of Diane’s frustration at the upper classes’ indifference to the struggle of those who are impoverished and oppressed. The artwork itself is a depiction of two peacocks, brutally killed, and a girl looking at them from her window with healthy interest and detachment, obviously lacking any empathy for the birds. Diane, like the peacocks, is a victim of this class divide, and the art she both loves and loathes—its representation. She is now aware of the toxicity of her relationship with art. She sees the self-hatred that propels her to crave for a different world, and she rejects it, still in search for a harmony between beauty and pain that does not delegitimize pain while remaining beautiful.
Eventually, she finds it, hidden in activism. By the end of the book, Diane’s focus shifts. Now referencing more contemporary artists, women, queer people, and people of color, she begins to identify herself with them rather than just admire their work. “I was Freddie Mercury’s body,” she writes. “That abortion I had in the late ‘70s grew to be Amy Winehouse,” yet another poem. Through this, the reader watches her realize that art is not always the privilege of the privileged and that there are others like her that see the world so painfully and paint it with words or with sounds or with the stroke of a brush. She finds self-love in the love that she has for her fellow artists, and through it, I am able to find some of my own. If at the start of the book, Diane molded her world to conform to the elitist ideas of art, at the end of it, she saw that those ideas aren’t all that art has to be. “I Climbed Out of the Painting Called Paradise,” reads the title of the book’s last poem, and so did she.
Eva is a high school senior, an INFP, a Slytherin, and, among other things, a poet. Growing up in Russia in a family of political dissidents, she struggled with her parents' and peers' expectations. Now, a refugee in Chicago, she has learned to let go (a little bit) and notice the beauty in the world. And write about it. She is passionate about the Beatnik movement, the 1920s, electoral politics, contemporary art, and people-watching. She also occasionally exists on Instagram at @evagelmann.
This article was edited by EIC Kailah Figueroa