`Well Versed in Terminus'

Since learning of Tom Disch’s death by suicide on July 4, and particularly since seeing this obituary in The Independent, I’ve been reading his poetry with death in mind and finding it everywhere. John Clute puts it like this in his obit:

“As the author of a large number of death-haunted science-fiction novels and stories, and of several Gothic tales which treat modern America as a land of the dead, and of a huge body of poetry much of which danced with death in formal measure, Disch could from the first have been described as a writer well versed in terminus.”

I can’t speak of Disch’s science fiction, which I haven’t read in decades, though I note he titled a 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. With Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and About the Size of It (2007) on my desk, I began tallying poems with death as a theme but quickly lost count. Instead, consider some representative titles: “Symbols of Love and Death,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written almost a decade before her death), “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “The Art of Dying,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “How to Behave when Dead” – and that’s just Yes, Let’s. About the Size of It includes “Death Wish IV” but also “The Vindication of Obesity,” with this memorable simile -- “cheeses rank/as death” and this final line: “With news of the deliciousness of death.”

I won’t perform a literary post-mortem on Disch, a search for clues to explain what appears to have been a lonely death in Manhattan. His unhappiness – I won’t say “depression,” a word and condition I no longer understand -- is well documented. Besides, a writer’s frequent probing of mortality is no reliable predictor of self-destruction. Much of what we know about death we owe to Dante, Shakespeare and Beckett, and none was a suicide.

Look at these titles from the last month of Disch’s suggestively named online journal, Endzone: “Letters to Dead Writers,” “Back from the Dead!” “In Memoriam,” “Why I Must Die: A Film Script,” “Tears the Bullet Wept,” “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead!” Most of the entries, poetry and prose, are like jottings in a public notebook, at best works-in-progress. They make for sad and funny reading, but Disch’s gifts as a poet lie elsewhere. Consider another “In Memoriam,” this one published in About the Size of It:

“Nothing, no one, gives me rest
I have put it to the test
And it is not an idle jest
The life I live must lead to death
An emptiness and end of breath
Though still my heart beats in my breast
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

“The streets are filled with criers crying
No end of them, nor yet of dying
Some men may smile a little while
If sellers sell and some are buying
But they will join the rank and file
Who decorate our ancient Nile
No end of them, nor yet of dying

“Memorials are built and then
Time silts a river, builds a fen
And tells its immemorial jest
To the worst as to the best
The world will be as it has been
I am feeling so depressed
Nothing, no one, gives me rest”

For now, put aside Disch’s death and read this strictly as poetry, representing neither the best nor the worst of his work. The meter is heavily iambic and befits nursery rhymes and “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Disch’s strategy, I’m guessing, is to undercut self-pity with child-like echoes. The same applies to his mix of demotic and archaic – “rank and file” and “Though still my heart beats in my breast,” respectively. The poem works because it’s so straightforward and traditional in sound and sense. It reminds me of “He Resigns,” by John Berryman (another death-haunted poet), written early in 1971 while he was sober but severely depressed. It was published posthumously in Delusions etc. after his suicide on Jan. 7, 1972:

“Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
Her having gone away
in spirit from me. Hosts
of regrets come & find me empty.

“I don’t feel this will change.
I don’t want any thing
or person, familiar or strange.
I don’t think I will sing

“any more just now;
ever. I must start
to sit with a blind brow
above an empty heart.”

Berryman’s poem is more desolate – and greater -- than Disch’s. Its power is in his reliance on stripped-down colloquial bluntness. No Hopkins-derived syntactical contortions, as in The Dream Songs. And yet, Berryman rhymes. It’s as though his misery was so complete, so close to a scream or mutter, only ABAB could turn it into poetry. Berryman and Disch deserve devotion and study not because they ended their lives (or in Disch’s case because he was a victim of “the system,” as some have claimed) but because their poetry endures.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for passing on this remembrance of Disch by his friend Bruce Bawer.