KARAN

Seth, thank you for these powerful poems. I love these Pantoublocks! In “Pantoublock with Resilience and Kerosene,” you write, “I've learned 20 different words for resilience / since December and none of them apply to a world without a mother.” Let’s begin with the famous process question. How do you begin, write, and finish a poem? Do you begin from a specific element — image, idea, memory, or thought, for example — or do these elements form in tandem with each other? Which is also to ask, where do your poems come from? And finally, most importantly, why do you write?

SETH

First, I want to thank you for the generosity you’ve shown to my work. It’s such a privilege to have someone engage so deeply with it.

I love a process question! My process is primarily driven by the spark of an idea, like you’ve referenced above (image, idea, memory, thought). The spark can manifest as any number of things. Sometimes an image will appear in my mind and I’m trying to render it with fidelity on the page the way a painter would on a canvas, only my tools are words rather than acrylics or watercolors. Sometimes a phrase will pop into my head and I will follow its path until a draft is made. Sometimes I have an urge to write about a particular memory, and I’ll let that instinct guide the process.

To answer your first question more directly, there is usually an internal drive to write, and the elements you cited above will fall into place organically in the process. My innate creative state is grounded in listening and intuition. Most of the time I have to let it arrive, rather than coerce it into being. Polishing comes in the revision process, and it’s important to me to let the poem dictate what and how it wants to be. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s a matter of staying present in the moment where my mind — or perhaps more accurately, my ego — has been turned off and moved to the side, and a certain group of neurons allows me to be a vessel to transcribe this poem entity onto the page. This state of being is the most ideal iteration of this process, but there are times when I’m more consciously present, as well, which I instinctively resist because I’m afraid that any instinct that exerts a will to control or shape the process will result in either a loss of emotional impact, or result in a product that’s more cloying and cliche than inspired by an authentic interaction with the muse.

My poems are born from a collaboration with this muse as described above, but they’re filtered through my (sub)conscious, and therefore coloured by my own impressions, memories, and aesthetics. I personally think it’s arrogant to assume that we write, or create, anything entirely on our own. The best art, in my opinion, is an expression of an artist’s fusion with an indefinable, abstract entity which can be labeled as any number of things. In this way I see it as an engagement with the divine, though I wouldn’t say it’s a dialogue with a deity every time. Poets and artists are privy to this peek behind the curtain, and we do our best to translate it into a medium or a language we understand. It’s possible this is a way for us to wrestle within our own psyches, as well, and consciously or unconsciously choose to attribute it with more mystical or practical qualities.

I write because I’m driven by this instinct to create, but I’m also driven to write as a means to make sense of the substance of life. To put it more plainly, writing provides catharsis to confront both experience and emotion. It’s important to me that, whenever possible, what I write will hopefully transcend beyond just myself, and will have a lens that encompasses a broader observation of the world, as well. I’m not writing as a means of confession, but hopefully synthesizing internal and external worlds in a way that can be relevant, or of use, to a reader. I might have the desire to write about a particular topic or memory, but it will be an intuitive urge that then pushes me to write; the push often being an unbidden phrase or image probably drawn from my subconscious that opens a connection to the muse. 

KARAN

Tell us more about the form of the Pantoublock. When did you invent it? What made you gravitate towards refrains and what do you like about prose blocks? I love prose poems and was so delighted to see more traditional elements (repetition) being used alongside it. How does this form serve your exploration of themes/subjects that are most important to you (love, mortality)? 

SETH

I started writing into the Pantoublock form as a way to write about grief with a buffer built in. My mother passed away at the end of 2023, and I needed a way to write about it that wasn’t too visceral or triggering to engage with. While I was on the West Coast helping my sister pack up my mother’s apartment, I read an article one morning in the American Poetry Review by Phillip Metres about the pantoum. One aspect from the article that struck me about pantoums was how they have historically been used as a tool for tackling themes such as social justice, trauma, and grief. The idea that I could use a form to write about grief was the initial seed that would lead to the sprouting of the earliest Pantoublocks.

Prior to writing into the Pantoublock, I engaged with form as a means of structuring a poem and experimenting with where it would live on the page. I avoided writing into formal structures because I feared taking an overly intellectual approach would either come off as less sincere, or would mute the emotional heft of a poem.

I chose the pantoum as a strategy to write into in order to have a slight emotional buffer for myself, but I tend to push against rules, so the Pantoublocks don’t follow every single norm of the pantoum. Three ways the Pantoublock deviates from the pantoum form are in the concluding stanza, the refrains throughout the body of the poem, and in what I call lingual units. Whereas a pantoum would typically conclude with a stanza consisting entirely of lines that appeared already, I omitted this stanza as a way to resist resolution. The lines of a pantoum that recur are often, (though not always), repeated exactly as they first appeared, but in the Pantoublock a word or a stem are maintained and the rest of the line is transformed in some way. Pantoums are built of single lines that are repeated, but in some Pantoublocks I am repeating an entire unit of language to function the way a line would, and transmuting the recurrence of the original unit of language. In order to help streamline the process for myself, I did settle on a Pantoublock spine, which resembles the following:

Line 1 

Line 2 

Line 3 

Line 4 

Line 2 repeated and transformed

Line 5  

Line  4 repeated and transformed

Line 6  

Line 5 repeated and transformed

Line 7

Line 6 repeated and transformed

Line 8 

Line 7 repeated and transformed

Line 9 

Line 8 repeated and transformed

Line 10 

(When I’m drafting Pantoublocks, I use a spine consisting of only numbers, but I’ve labeled it for clarity.)

Thus the one consistency between the pantoum and the Pantoublock is the central function of the second and fourth lines becoming the first and third lines in the subsequent stanza. Occasionally I’ve cheated a bit by teasing out the third line in the first stanza to repeat.

Fusing the form of the pantoum with the prose block obfuscates some of these mechanics. Prose blocks often cue a reader to move their eye or orate at a more accelerated pace, which lends a sense of urgency to the refrains. The shape of the block is informed by the length of where I choose to enjamb the first line for effect, which can make defining its ultimate width and length a bit nebulous. Sometimes I’ll stumble upon an enjambment possibility mid-block and try to build the block around it. The enjambements, or jammies as I like to call them, are important to the effect of the poem. As much as possible, I try to avoid ending a line within the block on an article or connecting word. Each line ending within the block is a possibility to create an opening within the form for readers to bring their own associations to, creating the possibility for multiple meanings of the word, or for a subversion of the expectations of what the reader is assuming will follow a certain word.

In full transparency, it’s a form that is still evolving, and it’s a queer form, so it can hold more than one type of content. For example, much of the Pantoublocks written before I entered my MFA program at Randolph College were grounded in image and narrative. One possibility I’m exploring with the encouragement and guidance of my mentor this semester at Randolph is playing with the possibility for heightened prosody, the music and sound, within the form. 

To address the other parts of your question more directly, my current theory of what made me gravitate toward refrains is, for me, what’s become an obsessive quality to grief. I’ve always personally enjoyed repetition as a preference, and I probably got the idea of the refrain changing on the recurrence from a workshop I took with Eugenia Leigh. We read Richard Siken’s Crush, which operates on an almost exhaustive amount of repetition and obsession, but one of the things that makes that collection so effective is how Siken changes something, or inserts something new for the reader to digest upon the reintroduction of an idea, line, or phrase. 

I think the prose block is what queers, or subverts, the form of the Pantoublock. It offers a container for the poem on the page but it resists classification. Prose poems in their standard form challenge the idea of whether a piece is an example of a poem or flash fiction. Pantoublocks can contain narrative, but they can also hold a more melodic approach to the poem. They look like a standard form on the page but they resist definition by their ability to transmute depending on the needs of the particular poem.

The merging of the pantoum with the prose block has allowed me to freely explore themes of love and grief within the parameters of the form. I tend to obsess over certain ideas, or subjects, so the built-in repetitions of the form allows me to write about the same thing from different angles. 

KARAN

Gosh, I’ll have to try this out, Seth! I also love your titles despite, or perhaps, because of their repetitive yet refreshing feel. “Angry God and Pieta on a Dust Planet,” “Persephone and Milk Cartons,” “Resilience and Kerosene” — really love the leaps from A to B in your titles! What are your thoughts on titles? Do you think about titles a lot? What do you usually try to achieve with titles? Do you have a method?

SETH

Thank you Karan! The titling of the Pantoublocks was an aspect I was torn about at first. I have a personal aversion to leaving poems untitled, so even if it’s a working title, I tend to give one to every poem. My general thoughts on titles is they are an additional tool the poet has to introduce additional layers to a poem, or to leverage for a particular function.

For example, a title can provide context that’s not otherwise in a poem, like when a title includes a place and/or a date. Stuffing information into a title that can provide context for the reader can free the poet up to do other work within the body of the poem. This can be accomplished by essentially stamping it with an orienting label such as “El Paso, 2013”, or sometimes a longer title can be even more impactful: “Driving Out of El Paso in 2013 with a Carcass on the Hood and a Tigger Sticker on the Trunk”.  (These are random possibilities, but I hope the point is clear.)

Another functional way of using titles is taking the first line of the poem as the title so that it drives the reader straight into the piece. This is a personal favorite of how to use titles as a reader. I don’t think this strategy is as effective when the first line remains in the poem, though. My opinion is it’s more effective for the title to run into the poem and act as part of the actual anatomy of the poem. For this reason, I’m not a huge fan of bracketing the entire first line of a poem and using that as a title. Employing that strategy for titling might be grounded in organizing a manuscript, though, and one exception where I think it does work is Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets. 

For titling my own work, I might employ any number of the strategies aforementioned. For the Pantoublocks, though, I was of two minds because I do see these as constituting their own collection eventually. The first idea was to stick with numeracy such as titling each one “Pantoublock 1”, “Pantoublock 2”, “Pantoublock 3”, and so forth. I still think this could work as an organizing principle within a manuscript, but it doesn’t feel as dynamic. I toyed with the idea of assigning the same title to each Pantoublock, as well, like Terrance Hayes did with his sonnets in American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. Eventually what I settled on for the Pantoublocks was the current format of “Pantoublock with . . .”, which serves as a nod to Diane Seusse’s Still Life with Two Peacocks and a Girl. Since the Pantoublocks are finding homes in the world before they’re being collected in a full length, this strategy helps give each one its own identity within a journal. It also presents an opportunity to foreground or tease the content of each Pantoublock. The titles also mirror, to an extent, the refrains that recur within the form, since each title maintains the same stem but is changed based on the language that completes each title. In the instance of the Pantoublock that Oxonian Review published recently, “Pantoublock with Iacchus and Persephone,” the title helps orient the reader to understand early in the poem that it’s spoken in the voice of Iacchus. I used a similar strategy with a series of poems titled “Pantoublock in the Voice of my Mother,” which haven’t been published yet. The reader already knows who’s speaking, so I don’t have to do that work within the poem. 

KARAN

In “Pantoublock with Persephones and Milk Cartons,” you blend mythology with contemporary, personal imagery line after line: “Lost boys and girls / littered the sides of Sunday morning milk cartons, their faces grey / and monochrome against the plastic-coated, shiny white paper.” Alongside Persephone, we encounter Demeter, Hades, Reaper — the whole gang. There are some people who say mythology is now dead (overwrought) in poetry (I disagree). How do you see the role of myth and classic allusions in addressing modern themes and experiences? 

SETH

I love this question! I’ve been interested in mythology since I was a kid, and I’ve been drawn to art that incorporates these stories for as long. I don’t think there’s any escaping myth. Myths evoke powerful archetypes and these archetypes contain universally understood experiences that are expressions of the human condition throughout time. As diverse as we are as a species, we are fundamentally more similar than I think we prefer to admit. While myths as a motif might be overdone in modern literature, I personally can’t stay away from them. I do think there is an opportunity for more varied myths to be told in Western literature, however, and I would love to see more literature grounded in stories from all cultures. (I’m sure there’s a wide array out there already, I’m just not as aware of them yet.) I found myself naturally incorporating, and sometimes blending, mythologies within the Pantoublocks. Specifically, Greek myths of course, but also stories from the Lotus Sutra since I’m a practicing Nichiren Buddhist, and I feel a spiritual kinship to those stories.

In the case of the myth of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades, what gets lost for me in the tellings and retellings of the myth is the relationship between the mother and the daughter. Yes, we know that Demeter was pissed that her daughter was kidnapped, but how did that impact the relationship between Demeter and Persephone? The progenitors of these myths might not have been as interested in those details since one interpretation of the myth is to understand fertility and the earth’s changing seasons. (We can’t ignore the implications of misogyny at that time, either.) But relationships between mothers and daughters are so complex and complicated, and I have my own perspective as a son having looked at this relationship from the outside in my own life. One example of a poet that explored this relationship dynamic is Rita Dove in her collection, Mother Love, and I’m thinking in particular of the poem, The Bistro Styx, but the entire collection is required reading.

I have taught workshops for Brooklyn Poets that looked at myths, and my goal was always to reclaim and redefine them for ourselves. Myths can be used as a means for a poet, or a reader, or even an archetype, to take back power for themselves. I wrote an entire manuscript in undergrad with this purpose, using Persephone and Demeter as the basis. At the time I was writing into the mythic voices as a means of restoring agency to these figures who’ve been written about, but rarely heard from directly. I’m continuing this in Pantoublocks that are written in the voice of Iacchus. 

“Pantoublock with Persephones and Milk Cartons,” is a little different, though it does touch on the relationships between mothers and their children. Coming of age in the 90s and early 2000s, I remember the news coverage of Polly Klass, and the unease it inspired, especially since I grew up in Northern California. I see her story as an example of a modern day iteration of the Persephone myth. Unfortunately Polly isn’t here to tell her own story, and I’m not assuming that responsibility, either. However, myths and archetypes are cyclical, and they are constantly perpetuated as a result of human nature, which is just as opaque and nuanced today as it was in the ancient world. If we pay attention to the myths, we can learn from them and apply that wisdom to our daily lives to potentially disrupt the cycle, and write new stories for ourselves. Rather than dismiss myths as frivolous or archaic, if we study them with an eye towards personal or collective transformation, there’s a chance we can change human behavior for the better. 

KARAN

Your poem “Pantoublock with Sky Cast in the Role of Mourning Child” personifies grief in a striking, unforgettable way: “The sky is freeing herself of her burden like only someone who’s lost / a mother can.” I sense a lot of grief in your poems (not just this one), whether on or under the surface. In one sense, all poetry is about loss — of innocence, time, places, people, love, beauty, joy — even as it tries to capture these. How much of your poetry is an exercise in dealing with loss? Is it a distraction from grief, an exploration of grief, or a movement through grief? Does poetry bring you joy or ease your pain?

SETH

I’m intrigued by your premise of poetry being about loss. I think this is true of the themes you cite. I’m also thinking of the idea of how we experience time and our shared perception of reality. Memory, whether experienced or imagined, might be a motif that unites all the themes you listed, and it occurs to me that a lot of art might function as a tool for retrieval. The seconds I lived through typing that previous sentence are now gone, which is a type of loss. So, perhaps, poetry is a vehicle for resurrecting our own litanies of loss. I can’t help but think of Blake when you mention innocence. 

I’d like to think that my poems are about more than one theme, but as I reflect on your question it occurs to me that loss does inform much of my work. I’m currently submitting my manuscript, anatomy of a star, for potential publication to different presses, and this manuscript — the bulk of which I wrote in 2021 — is grounded in the loss of my father, who died when I was 19. When my mother passed, I suppose it was inevitable that her loss would fuel the writing of my next manuscript. 

I would characterize my relationship to writing the Pantoublocks as a defiant and confrontational movement through grief. Aligned with my own personal life philosophy, this is the only way I can move forward: to lean into the source of suffering. In its most idealized implementation, this would lead to an eventual positive transformation, though I admit I’m not there yet. Many of the questions that drive the creation of the Pantoublocks are self-centered and self-interested, even if I attempt to infuse them with elements that open more doors than just my grief. Though I’m still engaged, in my own way, with my Nichiren Buddhist practice, I am in a state of ambivalence towards all expressions of divinity. If I could give back every Pantoublock in return for restoring my mother’s life, I would, but what’s left to me now is the creation that’s birthed from destruction. I’m taunting Death, the Reaper, the Mystic Law, and though I can’t defeat death in my daily life, in a poem I can challenge it, skirt it, or even kill it.

Poetry offers me catharsis, but it doesn’t owe me anything. Poetry can and should be demystified, in my opinion, so it can be more accessible for people to use as a tool for their own ends. It’s enough to simply enjoy a poem. I write for myself, but there is an aspect to creating art for me that pertains to the idea of service. Being of service to others. My hope is my work can help people, in some way, achieve their own sense of catharsis or contentment, though I’m not expecting to heal anyone. Only people can heal themselves. 

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

SETH

I’m not sure I can place my work firmly in one camp because everything is connected. I did take a course in undergrad with Dodie Bellamy titled Writing on the Body, which was formative for me at the time. It piqued my interest in the sensual aspects of physicality.

I’m currently obsessed with the idea of the soul in the body, how the soul wears the body like a suit: sometimes it fits, sometimes it’s snug, and sometimes it’s so itchy the soul just wants out of the body. The idea of being embodied. Buddhism and science gesture towards other planes of existence, and this is fascinating to me. I also have very early, primal memories of existing before being embodied, and there are some Pantoublocks that touch on this. A sense memory that’s accompanied with a particular yet abstract visual component of hanging around somewhere before consciousness snapped in place between crib and kindergarten. 

Marie Howe gestures towards this in her work a bit. The ineffable. The folds in the air where souls pass through. There’s a poem in What The Living Do called “Memorial” and the entire third section essentially describes the energy, or essence, of a person leaving the body at the time of death. It’s incredible. A feat only she could accomplish, in my opinion.

In terms of where I’m moving next creatively, I think this theme will continue to recur, and I aspire to capture within a poem what Andres Cerpa described in a Randolph lecture as the high lyric. I’m still trying to put into words, for myself, exactly what that could mean, but I think it’s a state that exists with the sublime.

KARAN

Beautiful beautiful! I’m really interested in your background in fashion journalism. How, if at all, does this influence your approach to poetry? Do you see any intersections between fashion and poetic craft?

SETH

Wow! I did not anticipate this question! To be honest, that feels like another life, but I do think there’s a direct link between fashion aesthetics and the aesthetics of my poetry. I’ve received positive feedback in the past about how I use color in my poems, and I think this is possibly linked to how I trained my aesthetic eye when I studied fashion. I felt like I was late to the party at the time because fashion wasn’t immediately obvious in my background as a child and adolescent. The desire to acquire and catch up on the knowledge and jargon of the field pushed me to learn quickly, and this possibly carried over into my own poetry in my desire to achieve a precision of language. In fashion, green isn’t just green, there are myriad hues of green. It’s helpful to know the names of the details or features of a garment, like whether a dress is ruched, a sweater has a cowl or boat neck, the difference between an A line and a pencil silhouette. It’s helpful to know the ply of a cashmere sweater to determine whether the price of a garment is commensurate with the quality of materials and how it was constructed. This sensibility is carried over in the search for the right word to describe an emotion, a particular part of a body, or an object.

Another carry over is my interest in culture and trends. I was fascinated by what the trends of the time said about the zeitgeist of the people, which I think is related to my personal interest in history.  I think poetry does the same thing. It contains the obsessions, the paranoias, the ennui of a moment in time. We understand poetry similar to the way we do fashion: we look at what was happening in current events, we look at what factors dominated the interests and intellects of an era.

I feel compelled to acknowledge that there’s an entire branch of poetry that arguably does none of these things, and is instead deliberately more abstract and obtuse. One could argue this is also linked to a social component, but I want to keep the notion of poetry and what’s valid as broad and inclusive as possible.

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received so far, whether during your BA or MFA or even outside of institutionalized education?

SETH

It’s not advice so much as a principle I picked up on in Brooklyn Poets workshops with Carlie Hoffman. I really came away with a particular attention to line breaks and how important enjambment, (or jammies, as I call them because I like to bring a little levity into workshops), can be. I don’t want to be overly prescriptive about how I say this. However, the way a poet ends a line says a lot, to me, about their relationship to precision, and to places where openings can be embedded into poems. I touched on this above when talking about the Pantoublocks. To expand on it a bit, the line break is where the wheel of the poem turns, (not to be confused with the volta), and in its wake it leaves the line before it, and it paves the start of the line that comes after, and so on. Enjambments go a long way to framing how the reader experiences the poem both visually on the page from a macro perspective, and also on the micro level: breaking mid-thought or mid-image could speed up the pace of the poem but if not executed mindfully could also leave behind a sloppy effect. Each line is framing an image or a thought, and is instrumental in how the reader navigates through the poem, and at what pace.

KARAN

We’d love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a fashion collection — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

SETH

I’m indebted as an artist to the catalog of Tori Amos, who was one of my primary inspirations to pursue poetry as a teenager. I initially began writing poems as a means to write songs, and I spent a lot of my adolescence imitating her lyricism before I eventually found my own voice. One of my most recent obsessions is the song “Oysters” from her 2014 album Unrepentant Geraldines, which is just exquisite. However, I would be remiss not to recommend what I see as one of her best bodies of work, which is the 1998 album From The Choirgirl Hotel. It’s an example of an album where an artist transformed their personal tragedy and pain into art that resonated, and continues to resonate, on multiple planes. She taps into layers of the subconscious and the psyche that are represented in both the poetry and the production of the record. I’m obviously very biased, but there’s a passage in the song “Playboy Mommy” where the chords and the lyrics come together to create what, in my opinion, ranks among the most stunning bridges in all of recorded music. She sings, “somewhere where the orchids grow/I can't find those church bells /that played when you died /played Gloria /talkin bout / Hosanah.” Perhaps because the subject matter is about the Speaker’s deceased child crossing borders, or bridges, in the after life, it carries an added layer of oomph. There’s something about the marriage of grief with the holy that’s invoked by the use of the word “hosanah” (using the spelling from the liner notes), that reels me every time.