'And All Are Lucky Just to Be Alive'

The writer who has died since I launched Anecdotal Evidence, whose subsequent nonexistent work I’ve missed the most, is probably Tom Disch (1940-2008). There’s an irony here because Disch is best known as a writer of science fiction, a genre I largely gave up around age thirteen, though his novel Camp Concentration (1968) remains rereadable. 

Close readers of his poetry had little reason to be surprised by his suicide. Death remained his abiding theme. He titled a 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. With Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and About the Size of It (2007) on my desk, I began tallying poems devoted to death but quickly lost count. Instead, 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 could make death, at least in his poems, amusing.

 

In the Autumn 1994 issue of The Kenyon Review I happened on “Trees in the Park,” a poem aware of mortality but in Dischian terms a celebration of life and its variousness:

 

“Each is so visibly its own history,

The thrust or tilt of the trunk

A geologic record of some slow event

We have been too impatient

To observe, whether an alteration

Of the supporting mineral mass beneath

Or the cumulative effect of leaves

Thirsting for the fractal vagaries

Of light and rain. The results

Are there in their varying

Perpendicularities, the choice

Of where each branch has felt impelled

To go. So with us: we show

Where we have been in the conformation

Of cheek and jowl, lip and jaw,

The stride or the slouch that declares

This one needed more love at age eleven,

That one read the wrong book at twenty-five,

This other lacked a certain vitamin,

And all are lucky just to be alive.”