'Crisply, Pithily, and, Very Often, Cruelly'

Tom Disch on Turner Cassity: “A poet so consistently epigrammatic can be dismissed, by those incapable themselves of wit, as unserious, as though to be serious one must always be in a fog. Cassity never writes a poem without knowing exactly what he means to say—crisply, pithily, and, very often, cruelly. No contemporary poet of the first rank is less politically correct.”

In my private pantheon, with a gallery of their own, stands a triumvirate of witty poets, recent and current, who never disappoint and remain reliably amusing but can’t quite be described as writers of light verse: Disch, Cassity and R.S. Gwynn. All are poets, craftsmen. All are serious, learned and funny, non-aligned thinkers by nature, Gwynn a bit gentler than the others. Cassity died in 2009. Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008. Close readers of his fiction and poetry were shocked but not surprised. Few writers have remained so consistently death-haunted – and funny – as Disch.

 

He titled a 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. Leafing through Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and About the Size of It (2007), I began tallying poems with death as a theme but quickly lost count. Consider some representative titles: “Symbols of Love and Death,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written almost a decade before her death), “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “The Art of Dying,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “How to Behave when Dead” – and that’s just Yes, Let’s. About the Size of It includes “Death Wish IV” but also “The Vindication of Obesity,” with this memorable simile -- “cheeses rank/as death” -- and this final line: “With news of the deliciousness of death.”

 

Disch would have been pleased to know that he shared the day of his death with another critic of art: U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Disch concludes his essay “The Castle of Indolence” with these words:

 

“The art of poetry is poorly served by its bureaucratization, and only the trade is advanced. I will even venture a prophecy (which is the prerogative of poets, if not of critics) that they will, in my own lifetime, self-destruct. Not because Jesse Helms, or his like, mandates a holy war against the poets funded by the NEA, but because students, wiser than their teachers, choose other electives.”

 

[Disch’s review of volumes by Cassity and four other poets, “The Occasion of the Poem,” is collected in The Castle of Indolence (Picador, 1995), as is the volume’s title essay from which the Helms passage is excerpted.]