'Demographer of the Common Woe'

Only in the last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a internal list and weighing them against my own precious self. I’ve led a improbably healthy life which only encouraged the universal young man’s conviction that I was immune to mortality and even much grief. My father, a sedentary, cigar-smoking, sausage-eating man, died at eighty-four. I’ve learned only recently that a former girlfriend and one of my former newspaper editors are dead. Nine years ago, my friend D.G. Myers, one of the most alive persons I’ve ever known, died. Last year we lost Terry Teachout, not to mention the recent deaths of people I knew and admired through their writing – Helen Pinkerton, Clive James, Dr. Oliver Sacks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Simon, Roger Scruton. 

One of the saddest such public deaths occurred earlier, in December 1985: Philip Larkin, among the last of the great poets and a specialist in death. I learned of it from the New York Times, a not unusual source for such news in those pre-internet days. Now I’ve happened on an elegy of sorts for him -- “For Philip Larkin,” published by a poet I had never heard of, Lolette Kuby, in the Summer 1988 issue of The American Scholar:

 

“Frightening to one who lives

 alone, the thought of the sudden trip

 to emergency. Unexpected

 death under the knife hardly worse

 than imagining the unknown doctor

 attempting to locate a cousin

 or some friend, who, found,

 would be dismayed to learn a week had passed,

 a week in which one had been

 pictured (if thought of at all)

 in the satisfying boredom

 of a bachelor’s routed rounds,

 a week since, gasping for air,

 one may have talked into the line

 that opens in The Nearest Hospital,

 summoning rescue.

 No children, never married,

 an only child oneself, there’s no one

 for anyone to send condolence to.

 But if one is poet laureate

 of consternation, demographer

 of the common woe, the world’s eyes

 are smudged with one’s obituary,

 and one’s voice is left behind, difficult

 to describe as the taste of tomato.”

 

The tagline at the end of the poems says Kuby was teaching English at Cleveland State University and was author of An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man: A Study of Philip Larkin’s Poetry (1974). An English professor living in my hometown who prizes Larkin – such unexpected good news. I discovered she had a website and went there to learn that Kuby had died on July 24, 2017.