'Like the Old Year, with Mourning on Our Sleeve'

In 2014, the late Terry Teachout, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, described L.E. Sissman’s poems as “stunning and disquieting.” The headline on Terry’s piece suggests what he means: “Mortality as Muse.” In 1965, Sissman was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, the cancer that would kill him eleven years later. In that time he published three collections of poetry and numerous essays and reviews for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, while working for an advertising agency in Boston. Many of his poems, including most of his best, chronicle his experience with cancer. Terry quotes lines from the title poem of Sissman’s first collection: Dying: An Introduction (1968): 

“‘But be glad / These things are treatable today,’ I’m told. / ‘Why, fifteen years ago—' a dark and grave- / Shaped pause. ‘But now, a course of radiation, and’— / Sun rays break through. ‘And if you want X-ray, / You’ve come to the right place.’”

 

That brief passage suggests some of Sissman’s notable qualities as a poet – wit, satirical insight, clear-sightedness, the absence of self-pity. For the poem’s epigraph, Sissman uses the opening lines of Philip Larkin’s “Next, Please” (The Less Deceived, 1955): “Always too eager for the future, we / Pick up bad habits of expectancy.” Terry writes of Sissman’s poems:

 

“Their crisply rhyming iambs were a perfect embodiment of the highly individual sensibility of a poet-businessman who looked his fate in the eye without blinking. In ‘A Deathplace,’ for instance, he envisioned his ultimate demise: ‘Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap, / A booted man in black with a peaked cap / Will call for me and troll me down the hall / And slot me into his black car. That's all.’ That seems to me at least as good as ‘Aubade’ [1977], Philip Larkin’s 1977 poem about his fear of death, not to mention braver. Like all of Mr. Sissman’s best poems, it’s utterly free of sentimentality and (unlikely as it may sound) coolly witty in its unswerving acceptance of the inevitability of the dark encounter that awaits us all.”

 

Not all of Sissman’s poems are cancer- or death-haunted. Though his life and work, and their inevitable linkage, are compelling, he shouldn’t be remembered as a grim-minded Johnny-One-Note. He was, among other things, a chronicler of his time not unlike his friend John Updike. Included in his third collection, Pursuit of Honor (1971), is “New Year’s, 1948,” written in eight sections, each given an hourly time signature starting at 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and concluding at 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day. It describes a party in Boston attended by a young man and his friends (Sissman went to Harvard), with all the predictable elements -- booze, loud music, women. The first section concludes:

 

“. . . In honor of the infant year, which springs

Out of this artless gallery of things

That we walk in, inspect, join, grasp, and leave,

Like the old year, with mourning on our sleeve.”

 

Sissman was born on this date, January 1, in 1928 and died on March 10, 1976 at age forty-eight. The first anniversary of Terry Teachout’s death at age sixty-five is January 13.