Tom Disch excelled at every literary genre he tried his hand at and had big infuential fans and yet -- and yet he was dogged by bad luck, by a prejudice against genre fiction (he made his mark initially as a sci-fi writer), and by the lack of one breakthrough event that could have turned him into a household name -- to write a best-seller that is made into a movie or be at the center of an intense controversy or ideally both at once. He was a brilliant novelist: read "Camp Concentration," "334," "On Wings of Song," and the short stories in "Getting into Death." He also distinguished himself as an author of children's books (jn verse and prose), an anthologist (speculative fiction), and as a playwright willing to take on the Cathlic church in a verse play that Harold Bloom picked ouit for The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997. A fearless critic -- whether of theater or books, in London or New York -- he was a poet of immense formal gifts, great inventiveness, wit, humor, and sometimes savage loathing. In some of his parodies, such as one he did of A. R. Ammons, what shines through is his affection; he share with Ammons the ability to say yes to life in all its diversity and for all our perplexity. In the poems he wrote in his last year, he displays ire as fierce as his irony is bitter. Always prolific, Disch chronicled the year of his suicide in poems, a few of which we've posted on this blog. -- DL
What I Can See from Here
I face east toward the western wall
Of a tall many-windowed building
Some distance off. I don't see the sunset
Directly, only as it is reflected
From the facade of that building.
Those familiar with Manhattan know
How the evening sun appears to slide
Into the slot of any east/west street,
And so its beams are channeled
Along those canyon streets to strike
Large objects like that wall
And scrawl their anti-shadows there,
A Tau of twilight luminescence
At close of day. I've seen this
For some forty years and only tonight
Did I realize what I had been looking at:
The way god tries to say good-bye
May 24, 2008
