'He Writes On, Day After Day'

Clipped from the New York Times, folded and tucked into Dying: An Introduction (1968) is the March 11, 1976 obituary for L.E. Sissman. The poet had died the previous day, age forty-eight. On the same page is the obituary for the Italian politician Attilio Piccioni, dead the same day, age eighty-three. Sissman’s anonymous obituarist quotes him as saying: “My mind is compartmentalized. In advertising you learn the discipline of working against deadlines. I find this useful in writing poetry.” 

At the time of his death, Sissman wrote copy for the Boston advertising firm of Quinn and Johnson. I’ve read reviews of Sissman’s poetry that held this against him. The three poetry collections Sissman published during his lifetime – including Scattered Returns (1969) and Pursuit of Honor (1971) – I found at Kaboom Books here in Houston. All are first-edition paperbacks. Given the obit and the good condition of the three volumes, I suspect they were previously owned by someone who followed Sissman closely during his brief poetic career. The poet had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1965 at age thirty-seven. He became the poet laureate of cancer. Here are the opening lines of “A Deathplace” (go here to listen to Sissman reading it), the first poem in Scattered Returns:

 

“Very few people know where they will die,

But I do; in a brick-faced hospital,

Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,

Into three parts . . .”

 

I also bought a copy of A Place in the Country (trans. Jo Catling, 2013) by the late W.G. Sebald. In his essay devoted to Robert Walser, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” Sebald writes:

 

“The only certain thing is that he writes incessantly, with an ever increasing degree of effort; even when the demand for his pieces slows down, he writes on, day after day, right up to the pain threshold and often, so I imagine, a fair way beyond it.”