'And Probably Permanently'

Even good writers require resuscitation. We can’t count on critics or publishers to keep them and their work alive. That’s the reader’s job. You and I can reanimate Edward Dahlberg and Janet Lewis simply by buying or borrowing their books, reading them and sharing our pleasure with other readers, who in turn may pass along the good news. Even in our aliterate age, someone’s still reading Chekhov and Proust. But less exalted names can always use a boost. Take the American poet L.E. Sissman (1928-76), dead from cancer at age forty-eight. 

I’ve been reading Sissman’s poems and essays for more than half a century but returning to them today is accompanied by memories of another among his admirers, my late friend D.G. Myers, dead from cancer in 2014. Go to A Commonplace Blog and find many references to Sissman, including here and here. It’s good to see another writer has remembered Sissman. “A Sort of Boston Adventure: Thinking About a Fine Poet, L.E. Sissman” was published by Peter LaSalle earlier this year in New England Review.

 

I admire LaSalle’s devotion to Sissman, the pleasure he still takes in familiar poems, but there’s a little too much LaSalle in his twenty-page essay/memoir. Read him for the scattered mentions of Sissman:

 

“In essence and overall, his work captures the character of a poet who remained outside the circles of the competitive and often backbitingly contained world of the Boston poetry scene at the time, a loner in the field . . .; the general opinion of Sissman as a person is stated well, I’d say, in a description by friend and admirer John Updike; just three telling words: ‘a decent man.’”

 

LaSalle quotes a poem from Sissman’s first book, Dying: An Introduction (1968). “A Disappearance in West Cedar Street” recounts a rundown apartment in Boston where he lived as a young man. Another resident, a painter named Shriner, has disappeared:

 

“Did absolutely nobody appear

When they interred his box in Potter’s Field

(I would have been there.) Did nobody yield

A summer hat, a winter thought, a tear?

 

“Or did he make it to New York? Did his

Ship dock at last at Fifty-seventh Street?

Did angels, agents, and collectors meet

His price for life? Is that where Shriner is?”

 

In the final stanza, the disappearance is left unexplained, yet another mystery of big city life:

 

“Grey curtains flutter. A tall smell of pork

Ascends the stairs. The landlady below

Tells me in broken English she don’t know.

Did Shriner die or make it to New York?”

 

I sense a comparable mystery about Sissman. Where did he go? Why isn’t he read as often as dozens of celebrated mediocrities?  I’m reminded of the column Sissman wrote after the death of W.H. Auden and published in the January 1974 issue of the Atlantic:

 

“The day after W. H. Auden’s unexpected and untimely death last fall, I was incensed to see a suggestion in the New York Times to the effect that the poet’s work might not outlive him. Now, I’m prejudiced in favor of Auden — as you will abundantly see in the course of this article—but I think that any objective and fair-minded critic would allow the likelihood that his work, in large part, will go on being read, and go on being influential, for many years to come. And probably permanently.”

 

[Find all of Sissman's poems in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). A selection of his monthly essays in the Atlantic have been published in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the ’70s (1975).]