'His Rucksack of Gift'

Posterity is no friend to artistry. For every Melville (famous, forgotten and feted, in that order) there’s an Edward Dahlberg or Adelaide Crapsey who go straight to forgotten and stay there. Anyone who writes knowledgably about books sooner or later performs acts of resuscitation, and it’s not all about altruism. Readers naturally want to share enthusiasms with others. We can thank Don Thompson for reminding us again of L.E. Sissman, one of our finest postwar poets. He published “Death of a Quizkid: L. E. Sissman and Postwar American Poetry” last year in the Levan Humanities Review:

“Sissman never fit in with the misfits; he was a businessman rather than a bohemian. His poetry was too restrained for the most part to attract advocates of Confessionalism, too buttoned down for the Beats, too concerned with the particulars of everyday life to satisfy Deep Image poets. But in the end, he was as autobiographical, as trenchant, as deep as any of them. And he was always himself. Sissman stood apart from every school of postwar American poetry, facing death too young with courage, poise, and humor.”

Thompson is not a polished writer. He deals too eagerly in prefabricated categories. He perpetrates what journalists call the “buried lede,” and doesn’t mention Sissman until the fifth of his ten pages. The first half of his essay reads like refried Wikipedia. But the pleasure he takes in Sissman’s words is obvious, and he reminds readers, especially young ones, what they are missing. If he moves one curious reader to seek out Hello Darkness: the Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978), Thompson has performed an essential public service. These lines are from Sissman’s homage to the Irish poet, “Patrick Kavanagh: An Annotated Exequy” (Scattered Returns, 1969):

“[H]e got

On with the serious business of what

 An artist is to do with his rucksack

 Of gift, the deadweight that deforms his back

 And drives him on to prodigies of thought

 And anguishes of execution, bought

 At all costs of respectability

 And all expense of nice society,

 Until, alone, he faces homely him,

 The only other tenant of his room,

 And finds the world well lost.”