'Where Its Masters’ Love Is'

The late D.G. Myers and I once talked about the tendency to pigeonhole writers according to some aspect of their subject matter. Melville is your go-to cetology guy and Edith Wharton took care of sleds. Or, as Nabokov said of Hemingway’s books: “something about bells, balls and bulls.” David and I both admired the American poet L.E. Sissman, who was diagnosed in 1965 with Hodgkin’s disease, the cancer that would kill him eleven years later. In that interval he published three collections of poetry and numerous essays and reviews in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, while also working for an advertising agency in Boston. My friend David would die of cancer in 2014, seven years after he was first diagnosed. He once wrote to me about Sissman, “No one else is his equal in capturing the experience of living with the disease,” and then quoted him: 

“Abridged, I burned with moral purpose, seethed

With fever to persist, sang angry songs

Of vengeful, mutinous futility,

Slowed my halt feet to a death march, prolonged

The bittersweetness of each breath, paroled

Myself with garlands of last words. . . .”

 

It’s true that many of Sissman’s poems, including most of his best, chronicle his life with cancer. I’m increasingly reluctant to categorize him as “the poet laureate of cancer,” as I have in the past, just as I don’t want to confine Philip Larkin to the death and depression file. Sissman is among the wittiest of American poets and he covered some of the same middle-class ground as his friend John Updike. The first poem in his first collection, Dying: An Introduction (1968), is an eight-page, three-part sequence, “Going Home, 1945.” The fifth part of the second section details a familiar twentieth-century American landscape and is titled “The Town”:

 

“In this al fresco gallery of Sheelers –

Replete with stack and tipples, ramps and hoppers,

Vents, derricks, ducts, louvers, and intercooler –

I wander lonely as a cloud. Here is the beauty

Of this ridiculous, gas-smelling city.

Not those gilt towers stuck up so proudly

To spell a skyline, not those too loudly

Dulcet and unobtrusively huge houses

Dotting the northern suburbs. No, the heart

Of it is where its masters’ love is:

In the cold-rolling mills, annealing rooms,

Pickling and plating vats, blast furnaces,

Drop-forging shops, final assembly lines:

Wherever angular, ideal machines,

Formed seamlessly of unalloyed desire,

Strike worthless stereotypes out of the fire.”

 

The reference in the first line is to painter-photographer Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), a first-generation American Modernist who often painted industrial landscapes. Among Sissman’s gifts was the pleasure he took in artful arrangements of detail. Sissman’s editor and literary executor Peter Davison described him as a “master of every curiosity.” Among the pleasures of reading Sissman is the generous attention he pays to the world. He sees things and knows how things work. Count the loving specificities in this section of “Going Home, 1945”:

 

“There still remain these nights

Of close restraint in heat, a camisole

Of dampness wired for the amazingly

Loud sound of streetcars roller-skating; for

The shocking sight of the electric-blue

Stars overhead; for their galvanic smell

Of ozone; and the unforgettable scent

Of air-conditioned drugstores, where the pure

Acid of citrus cuts across the fat

Riches of chocolate, subjugates perfume

(Evening in Paris), soap, iodoform.”

 

Sissman adds an epigraph from Larkin: “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left . . .”