`Dense Swatches of Nothingness'

L.E. Sissman is a difficult poet to quote briefly while trying to respect the formal integrity of his lines. He was not often aphoristic, and his poems often possessed the narrative drive of short stories, complete with dialogue. His form of choice was the poetic sequence, linked lyrics carefully numbered, dated and datelined. In his second book, Scattered Returns (1969), the second section, “A War Requiem,” is arranged in five movements with 32 subsections – 23 pages in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman. The poem’s scheme is a 40-year sampler of American life starting with the Great Depression, thematically bracketed by World War I and Vietnam. The scaffolding of “A War Requiem” is the life of L.E. Sissman, born in Detroit on New Year’s Day 1928.

Given the title, the poem’s autobiographical content and date of composition (it was first published May 3, 1969, in The New Yorker), you might expect narcissism or a political screed, the sort of thing hundreds of poets turn out by the yard. We get instead thumbnail portraits of representative Americans, witty wordplay, the sweep of history and dozens of stories – like a cosmopolitan Winesburg, Ohio or Cheever in a minor key. The poem is metrically formal but loose-limbed enough to contain hundreds of scraps of Americana.

Sissman is not a nature poet but his vignettes of the natural world are vivid and unromanticized. (Perhaps he is a nature poet.) I reread “A War Requiem” over the weekend when I noticed a late-autumn landscape two blocks from our house – blue-gray fog, a leafless bush with pointillist berries, mud. I had to look for the poem but the scene reminded me of the start of “A Marriage, 1958,” Section 21 of “A War Requiem”:

“November russets flush the last of green
Out of its summer coverts; mist and frost
Condense and crystallize on lignified
Black twigs; red berries shrivel; a sad light
Undistances horizons, setting dense
Swatches of nothingness beyond the fence
In non-objective umber.”

The poem’s fifth and final section, V., is a single lyric, the 32nd, titled “Twelfth Night, 1969.” Here, Sissman’s equation of World and National History, and individual history, is beautifully modulated. Here’s the poem’s finale:

“Snowbound on Twelfth Night, in the interact
Of winter, in the white from green to green,
I warm myself in isolation. In
The aura of the fire of applewood
With its faint scent of McIntoshes, in
The disappearing act of the low sun,
A marginally yellow medallion
Behind the white snow sky, under the in-
Undation of sharp snowdrifts like the fins
Of sharks astride our windowsills, I hide
Out in my hideout from the memory
Of our unlovely recent history,
And those fresh divisions just gone west.
A sharp sound brings me back: perhaps a tree
Cleft by the cold, but likelier the crack
Of a gun down at Devens. Snow begins
To lance against the window, and I see,
By luck, a leisurely and murderous
Shadow detach itself with a marine
Grace from an apple tree. A snowy owl,
Cinereous, nearly invisible,
Planes down its glide path to surprise a vole.”

Cinereous is perfect. It means ash-gray or resembling ashes, and echoes with “sin.” How many Vietnam poems address the subject with such tact and delicacy without bathetically insulting the war and the deaths of so many? Another section of the poem is titled “Thirty Thousand gone, 1968.” Most such poems were cartoons without nuance, and now are long forgotten. “A War Requiem” is one of the great poems of the era.

The editor of the posthumously published Hello, Darkness, his friend the late Peter Davison, notes that Sissman, an advertizing man by profession, started earning recognition as a poet in the late nineteen-sixties after he had been diagnosed with cancer and around the time of his 40th birthday. But the recognition was not universal and even thoughtful readers of American poetry are ignorant of Sissman’s work. Davison writes in his preface:

“Some fellow-poets praised his accomplishments, but the moral terrorists who dominated the poetry business of the time withheld their accolades.”

Many of the same terrorists and their poetic progeny live on. Sissman died in 1976, age 48.