I stayed in my apartment all day. I ate yogurt and some hamburger. I ate two calcium chews and took a biotin capsule for my hair. I drank two cups of English tea. I brought down the garbage to the basement and got the mail. I wrote the first part of a book review and a draft of a very short prose thing. I listened to classical music all day on my noise cancelling headphone, and three people called. One was the host of a radio show, and we spoke about the fates of prominent broadcasters whose lives, as a consequence of MeToo revelations, had been rearranged. I took a bath with epsom salts and lavender body scrub from Khiel’s. I thought about my sister’s husband and how missing her had created a bond between us. I responded to someone’s post on Facebook by referring to myself as the only sober person at the orgy, and I thought about how I often felt like the least cool person, because of my open desire for things, among the cool people I knew. One of my friends reminded me of my age. My friends tell me my age every day, as if I have left it on a bench during a walk. They want me to be the same age as them because I am the same age as them and we have made an unspoken pact to accompany each other through life’s stages. My friend said, “I remember when you once had flu You were wearing pajamas.” Maybe tights and a camisole, but pajamas? I think she meant when I was 33 or 34. No one knows what they are doing.

No form of abuse or indignity any woman could describe she has experienced because she is female would come as new information to anyone in the world. That female humans are a group it is okay and in some cultures and societies proper and ordained to torture and belittle is a fact everyone knows. The GOP is hoping it’s still okay to enough people in the world and especially in the US to practice business as usual. Presenting more evidence of rape and battering, as if this is evidence, demeans us. Destroying the right people would help. Just destroying them.

Yesterday I posted a short comic thought and a young woman shared it. Here is the post: “Ever the optimist, I think we are witnessing the nervous breakdown at the end of masculinist culture in the form of a zombie apocalypse of very ugly men, leaking slimy fluids, in agonized postures.” I looked at the young woman’s repost, and she had written with a smily face, “Of course you mean ‘ugly on the inside’.” This is not the first time on FB a person has wanted to bend something I have written in a preferred epistemological direction. I said to her, “No, I meant it as I wrote it.” I added, although I wish I had not, “People show their inner ugliness on their bodies.” She said the disability mafia was strongly opposed to the word “ugly,” used in any context. I wrote, “I DON’T CARE.” I wish I had not used caps. I had already gone from zero to sixty when I first saw her remark. There is something aggressive about a person trying to pry off your meaning. I said to her, I don’t want to be corrected, or cleaned up, or advised according to your understandings. She has since deleted the post and unfriended me. It will not be news to readers of my posts to know I loathe the current wave of language policing, virtue signaling, and groupthink pressure. I loathe the concept of trigger warnings and to me the equally infantilizing concept of safe spaces. I loathe the use of the word “cis,” which has produced another biologically determined set of binary categories that may not even describe anything real since many people, trans or not, see themselves as gender nonconforming and gender fluid. I especially loathe that so much of this policing of language is enforced by female humans. It is neogoodgirl-itis. The need felt by female humans to look correct and correct others, to be kosher and on the right side of any moral divide, as they see it, deserves its own special vomit emoji. Be variant. Be deviant. Be a bother to others with your bent and original thoughts, dear young women. Or I will cut you. (Well, she cut me, but whatever.)

A few days after the planes hit the towers, I was included in a group of volunteers escorted to ground zero. A friend of mine was friends with a young woman who was an Anglican priest. She had a posh parish on the Upper East Side, and 9/11 gave her something grittier to engage with. She was English and beautiful and able to be earnest and witty at the same time because of the accent and being English. She had special access because she was delivering last rites over bodies and remains that were found. She wore a white vestment when she said the last words, looking down at dusty rubble and wreckage. We were taken to Trinity Church and from there to Bouley Bakery to prepare meals for the workers at the site. I had never been to Bouley Bakery, but I knew how to work in a professional kitchen. I remember a long stainless steel table where strudel dough was extruded from a machine. We were not making strudel. We worked all night until the sun came up. I was able to return to make food on other days. My friend who knew the Anglican priest was a journalist. We weren’t tired at the end of the long shift. We were a little giddy and wobbly. For a while we stood outside the fenced area of devastation and looked at it changing colors in the reddish glow of the rising sun. Workers in hard hats moved around. There were vans from the Red Cross in the streets, dispensing the kinds of provisions we had helped prepare. A certain kind of comraderie forms around disasters, and all of New York City was like that for a while. I loved my friend especially that night, and the feeling of our time together there and then has remained.

GRAYWOLF PRESS, 2018, $16, paperback

Diane Seuss writes about sex as though she is talking directly to you. “[B]y the time she’s sixteen, every girl knows how to think dirty,” she writes in “It wasn’t a dream, I knew William Burroughs,” a poem in her third collection, Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf, 2015). There is sex in her memories of red shoes that tipped her balance, a captured toad so scared it peed in her hand, and the dark mound in the center of a brown-eyed Susan that reminds her of “a nipple bitten black.”

Her poems float between Downtown New York and things that get stuck to screen doors in the country. And in every one there is a now and a before that are lived simultaneously in sleepless, horny sadness. All the nightgowns she wears are “war-torn.” Even death looks like a bad boyfriend you want never to get over. There is sex especially in the scratch and sniff of words. “Thoughts are puppets, dangling from their tangled strings,” she writes in “Free Beer.” Nothing turns this woman on more than arousing language past meaning, then setting it lose to bite your neck.

Four-Legged Girl was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize, and Seuss has racked up a number of other awards and residencies. She taught creative writing at Kalamazoo College for 30 years before retiring recently. The poems in her just-out fourth collection, Still Life with two dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf), are based on paintings and the lives of visual artists. Really, the book is another lab for experiments with language, rough emotions, and the indeterminacy of feeling like a hick in New York and a hipster in a cornfield. Seuss likes picture frames because they freeze time and because, as with doors, when you are inside you want to get out and when you outside you want to get in.

She thinks about what is big in a painting and what is marginal. She thinks about people who aren’t depicted in art and don’t go to museums, like many of the farmers she grew up around in tiny Michigan towns with main drags made of dirt. Each poem is a lens through which we can see the painting as well as the life the poet sees inside it, namely her own life, playing as a kid in a cemetery near her house and wandering boggy trails. If you look carefully enough at frogs and stalky things, they deliver a vocabulary for delirium. In the poem “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise,” the poet sees the seeds in split milkweeds, ready to fly off, and remembers them “once packed in their pods like the wings and the hollow bones/Of a damp bird held too tightly in a green hand.” In “A Wal-Mart Parking Lot,” the paint flings of Jackson Pollock conjure arcs of “frozen Coke splatter.” And in the extraordinary poem, “Still Life with Turkey,” the poet cannot tear her eyes from a dead turkey, strung up “by one pronged foot.”

Each death is all deaths, especially the death of her father, who died when she was seven. He was sick all the time she knew him, and when, at his funeral, she is asked if she wants to see him in his coffin, she says no, thinking it’s what’s expected of her. In the poem she writes, “Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying/a sort of penance for not seeing then.” A moment later the turkey, with its “raw-looking head,” reminds her of “the first fully naked man” she saw when working as a candy striper. And there they are, all her subjects in 36 lines: sex, death, and comedy, trussed together in a green hand.

I called her to talk about writing and women during the thing that is happening to our country. She was open, funny, and smart. There is a sweetness in her voice. A softness delivers the wit, and it reminded me of something she told an interviewer about her time in New York in the 1970s, when she was hanging out on the edges of cool and living with a guy who turned out to be a heroin addict. She said, “I wasn’t tough. . . . I wasn’t hard enough for that situation. . .. A lot of women weren’t. A lot of women got impaled on it.”

In our conversation she said, “I got out of a shitty relationship. Who’s ever in love with somebody who isn’t shitty? I left with my manual typewriter and my dad’s briefcase and escaped.” Back in Michigan she met a man “pretty quickly,” and they had a son who in time also became addicted to heroin. When we spoke, Seuss had just returned from a visit with her son that had gone well. “He’s clean,” she said. She plans to stay in Michigan for the time being, to be close to her mother, whom she adores. Otherwise, she said, “I would go anywhere where they would take me, Canada, Iceland. I love solitude and wouldn’t mind being cold.”

We moved on to talk about how she makes poems, and she said, “I stuff all the parts of an experience into a gunny sack, then I slit open the sack and the language falls out.” I said, “What’s a gunny sack?” I imagined burlap but wanted to be sure. She laughed and said, “A sack you carry potatoes in or kittens you are planning to drown.”

She wrote many of the poems in Still Life at the artist colony, Hedgebrook. Nearby was a place called Cape Disappointment, and one day she drove there. She said, “I mean, how could I resist? It’s a lighthouse up on rocks, and you had to hike out to it. I just didn’t want to. I thought I was maybe passing up the opportunity to jump, but I climbed into the back seat of the car and took a nap. Afterward I thought about how the outing was like my poems, where nothing much happens on the outside. It had been a long drive, and I had had to piss, and I’d just squatted and pissed, so that had happened. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf, where a shawl falls off a wall, and she decides, ‘I better write about it for 100 pages.’ I was deciding to live pretty much for the sake of language, and I think that has been part of my whole life. Even at my dad’s funeral, I remember someone handed me a rose, and there was an ant crawling on it, and I liked having the words to describe it to myself.”

That singularity stamps all her sentences. Every original voice teaches you to hear its sound as much as what it’s saying. At the last conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Seuss was asked to be on a panel to talk about poetic personas, and when it was her turn to speak, she recalled an incident from her time as a graduate student. The poet Galway Kinnell was a visiting writer, and Seuss’s mentor suggested she read some poems to the star. Seuss was sitting on the floor, by his feet. It was one of those scenes. She read two poems narrated by what she called “monsters,” who spoke in the syntax she had heard growing up. Kinnell had sat with his eyes closed. When she finished, he opened his eyes and wearily said, “Why don’t you write in your own voice?” At the AWP panel, she said she had been embarrassed and shamed and had not answered him. She said, “Now, I would have told him, ‘That is my real voice’.”

She continued that thread, “Where I grew up, there was this woman who carried everything she owned in a dress form. Another woman refused to die. Her body was done, but she just wouldn’t stop living. There was a wildness and erotic rawness that people don’t get about the people I’m from. The other day my niece said to me, ‘I danced til my pussy was raw’.”

Back at AWP, there were three other panelists with Seuss, all younger than she, and after she finished speaking, each one told a story about how wonderful and inspirational Kinnell had been to them. It was like the experience with Kinnell was happening again, forty years later, and Seuss told me, “I thought if I don’t speak up now, I’m going to drive off Cape Disappointment. I threw my water bottle on the floor and said, ‘Come on, you guys met Kinnell after his dick fell off. That night he had his eye on somebody else. They all came to the college and fucked students. Sometimes I was the girl. The writing world was extraordinarily dangerous for a young woman. The danger was to her psyche, never mind her body. The feeling was of being erased, and many talented women stopped writing.” The audience encouraged her to keep going.

Before we rung off, I asked Seuss what she was working on. She said a memoir in sonnets. She said she was pretty happy, then laughed, adding, “There is no thought in my head that does not eventually find itself to death, no relationship that is free of death, even with living people, the few that are left.” She said, “People see poetry as such an emotional process, but I view it, even when I write about difficult things, I see it as an intellectual process, as a problem to be solved. That’s what I love about these sonnets. You have 14 lines and that’s it. To get all of that stuff in that little sack. It’s teaching me about what you don’t need about life. It’s such a pleasure, even the hard stuff is so sweet.”

Serena brilliantly named the thing that was happening to her while it was happening. I wish every woman in the stands had rushed down to the courts to support her and refuse the demeaning spectacle. Watching clips of Ramos, his body language, his face, his lean, it is the thing we cannot tolerate for another moment. This Me-too is happening every fucking second of the day and night, girls and women warned they can’t object, they can’t loathe unfairness, they can’t dream the murder of everything that points a finger and sends them to their rooms. Serena, more and more you are made to embody our vast and loud refusal.

At the heart of the control of women’s bodies is a desire to curtail their pleasure. Good girls who behave politely on tennis courts, for example, receive approbation. Being good feels bad. It gives no pleasure. Different forms of pleasure are all the things that Christian morality and other religions have categorized as sins or errors or whatever the fuck negative term they apply. Males for the most part get a pass. Their pleasure is supported. Their pleasure excuses their aggressions against others, especially women. One of the most degrading roles you can assign to women and women will assign to themselves is the role of moral guide, moral uplifter. I’m not going to refine what I’m saying here. It’s a thought I had while washing a plant dish. Don’t correct me. I’ll delete you. It feels good.

Men like Ramos understand themselves as men in encounters such as his with Serena yesterday. He feels his anger rise. He has been challenged by a female, and everything in his being and from the culture that has made him and surrounds us all tells him in a way he is not conscious of his responses are correct and lawful. He feels no hesitation and doubt, and why should he? Where in society or in his private life would he learn he is a puppet, acting according to a set of commands?