'Full of Threats or Menaces'

I’m pleased to learn the poet and fiction writer Tom Disch – identified as “T.M. Disch” – is cited twelve times in the Oxford English Dictionary. I’m not surprised. Disch had a hedonist’s love of language coupled with a barbed sense of wit. He lived by the observation he made in The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995): “Nothing can excuse dullness, except a critic intent on originality.” 

The entry for ospimath includes a citation from Disch’s 1968 novel Camp Concentration: “‘Opsi?’ I asked Mordecai. ‘Short for opsimath—one who begins to learn late in life. We’re all opsimaths here.’” Not surpisingly, also cited is William F. Buckley (dead, like Disch, in 2008). The OED’s definition: “A person who begins to learn or study late in life.”

 

Found in the same novel is another exotic word, nystagmic: “I don’t care to look behind it at the nystagmic flicker of image that the nethermind is broadcasting to the faulty receptor of the overmind.” It’s medical in origin, the adjective form of the noun meaning “involuntary, rapid, oscillating movement of the eyeballs (most commonly from side to side).”

 

From another Disch novel, Echo Round Bones (1967), comes this: “A minacious cold seemed to settle over him, followed by a feeling of hollowness, that spread slowly to all his limbs.” As a critic and sometimes as a poet, Disch could be minacious, which means “menacing, threatening; of a threatening character; full of threats or menaces.”

 

Here, from Orders of the Retina (1982), is a favorite Disch poem, “What to Accept”:

 

“The fact of mountains. The actuality

Of any stone – by kicking, if necessary.

The need to ignore stupid people,

While retraining one’s natural impulse

To murder them. The change from your dollar,

Be it no more than a penny,

For without a pretense of universal penury

There can be no honor between rich and poor.

Love, unconditionally, or until proven false.

The inevitability of cancer and/or

Heart disease. The dialogue as written,

Once you’ve taken the role. Failure,

Gracefully. Any hospitality

You’re willing to return. The air

Each city offers you to breathe.

The latest hit. Assistance.

All accidents. The end.”

 

The entire poem embodies common sense and a plain-dealing stoical acceptance of life on life’s terms. In a word, it’s mature without being fuddy-duddy, in particular the part about dealing with stupid people, which is always difficult, especially when they’re convinced of their brilliance. Humor is rare in poetry, whether slapstick or rarified wit, and Disch is among the funniest of recent poets, along with Turner Cassity, A.M. Juster and X.J. Kennedy.