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.”
1 comment:
The title of your piece immediately made me think of Bob Dylan's "Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues" (My kids' favorite Dylan song when they were younger):
Well, I soon lost track of my kids and wife
So many people I never saw in my life
That old ship was sinkin' down in the water
There were 6000 people tryin' to kill each other
Dogs a-barking, cats a-screaming
Women a-yelling, men a-flying, fists a-flying, paper flying
Cops a-coming, me running
Maybe we just better call off the picnic
I got shoved down, got pushed around
All I remember was a moanin' sound
Don't remember one thing more
All I remember's wakin' up on a shore
My arms and legs were broken
My feet were splintered, my head was cracked
I couldn't walk, couldn't talk, smell, feel
Couldn't see, I didn't know where I was
I was bald
quite lucky to be alive though
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