Diane Seuss: My aesthetic—not in the least prescriptive for anyone but me—seems to be one of opposing energies. I’m interested in the rural, but I approach it via degrees of formal experimentation. I think of my work as punk-rural, in that my it emerges from rural spaces, but looks for the toughness, the strangeness, the absurdity, the taut stringiness, the rage and pain of it all as opposed to the homespun. The rural is no less punk than the urban. Roadkill. That’s my aesthetic. Naked dancing on the water tower. Cheez Doodles and a Coke. Cigar-smoking ghosts on the riverbank. I love what I call “freaking form”—learning traditional forms so that they can be usurped, upended, repurposed, like a bathtub that can be made into a shrine to the Virgin Mary. I’m sort of an anti-intellectual intellectual, a geek about the literature and visual art of the past but I like to bring it down, downtown, here where I live, with the earthworms and gravediggers.
https://therumpus.net/2019/12/the-rumpus-interview-with-diane-seuss/
If I am to build on my own aesthetic through Topeka, if Topeka is one of the most poetic cities, I need to retrace my traced histories compared to poets who moved away, so-called "made it", while alos noting Anne Boyer and CA Conrad moved away at a young age.
Menninger's My other mother was punk, the outcast, night coordinator, graveyard shift as those other intellectuals were at home getting ready for bed. The Potwiners made a path for their kids, while mine was just huddled through, trying to make it, guideless.
Draw on that guidelessness for my poems?
Punk Topeka.
I wished I could have skipped just one day, rule follower, as others could just go to the library, cruise around, as they were smart.
Worked at McD's.
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