The Best American Poetry

Happy birthday, Ludwig Van!

My father, Joseph Lehman, shared his birthday-- December 17 -- with the greatest of all composers (who was baptised on December 17). Here is Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" (opus 133). -- DL

 

Homage to Walt: "I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You" [by David Lehman]

For Brian Clements's inspired project of annotating the two hundred years since Walt Whitman was born, two hundred poets and writers have contributed poems or reflections, which Brian -- in conjunction with North American Review -- has posted daily since Walt's birthday (May 31). I got to be #198 in a distinguished list that Martín Espada kicked off.

Convinced as I am that the last line of "Song of Myself" would make an excellent first line, I wrote a poem that begins and ends with "I stop somewhere waiting for you." Click here and you'll read it. And be sure to check out Brian's introduction to the project and the entries by such as Julia Alvarez, Ellen Bass, Maxine Chernoff, Richard Deming, the aforementioned Señor Espada, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Todd Gitlin, and Robert Hass, to limit myself to names beginning with the first eight letters of the alphabet. -- DL

https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/every-atom-no-198?fbclid=IwAR2PIRymF2sEEwFHHjr7zgYA9IGk56oyT_pQjPs8J1SyvQx8MoMe77VdrFs

"But Not For Me" (Happy birthday to you, Ira Gershwin)

 

One of Ira Gershwin's greatest lyrics:

"They're writing songs of love, / But not for me.  . ."

"With love to lead the way, / I've found more clouds of gray / than any Russian play / could guarantee.  . ."

"I was a fool to fall and get that way / hi ho alas and also lackaday."

"It all began so well, but what an end. / This is the time a fellow need a friend, / When every happy plot / Ends in a marriage know, / and there's no knot for me."

"Every Atom": Brian Clements' Whitman Project -- 200 Days in Honor of 200 Years

A tip of the fedora to Brian Clements, who, in conjunction with North American Review, initiated "Every Atom" on Walt Whitman's birthday, May 31. On that day and for two hundred days after, poets and lovers of poetry cited, quoted, and commented on select passages from Whitman's oeuvre to honor the bard of democracy's two hundredth birthday.

Martín Espada kicked off the project with a post celebrating the passage beginning:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshy and sensual…eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist... no stander above men and women

In Espada's words,

<< Whitman gives the “sign of democracy”—and declares himself the advocate for those excluded from democracy’s embrace. Speaking for “the rights of them the others are down upon” is the poet’s way to electrify and illuminate American democracy with his egalitarian vision, the ideal of democracy as it could be and should be.

<< In so doing, Whitman confronts a history of silence, charging himself with the responsibility to “remove the veil.” If the alternative is silence, then the “long dumb voices” of the despised and the “forbidden voices” of the indecent must speak through him.  The question, even now, is whether this country is ready for Whitman, open to his “way of being” when we need it most. >>

Kudos to Martín for choosing the 1855 edition of "Song of Myself," to my mind far superior to later editions. The lines he chose exemplify how Whitman, as he aged, tended to revise for the worse. "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" is hands down better than "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son."

On November 20, Marie Howe responded to the challenge with a poem of her own, "The Singularity," incorporating line three of "Song of Myself." Ellen Bass (September 3) quoted lines (ending in "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from") that she read when she "was nineteen and on LSD"; Whitman gave her permission to transgress the sexual norms of the time. Richard Deming (Nov. 26) examines the impulse to "loafe" ("I loafe and invite my soul") and speculates on how sloth, one of the seven capital sins, gave rise to one of the greatest poems in the language. Ethelbert Miller (Sept. 7) considers "I am the teacher of athletes. . ." in connection with the "black bodies [of football players] touching the leaves of grass before each kickoff. On June 11, Richard Jackson brought up Whitman’s belief that he had the right to contradict himself because he “contains multitudes.” Does this assertion not amount to an anticipatory defense of personae, masks, and heteronyms? 

I chose the last line of "Song of Myself" -- "I stop somewhere waiting for you" -- arguing that it could serve as the first line of a poem. I did it in verse and have a hunch it will be the 200th in the series.

Thank you Brian Clements, for curating this extraordinary tribute to Whitman. Here is a link to the index for twenty summer days beginning with June 28.   -- DL

"Cape Fear" (1962) [by David Lehman]

Here is the first of my monthly movie columns for The American Scholar. For my opening salvo I chose Cape Fear (1962), in which Robert Mitchum captures the very essence of threat, lust, rage, and menace.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xeb13jNKiM8

Seven Haiku for a Mongolian Master [by David Lehman]

Seven Haiku for Mend-Ooyo

Lunch on the silver
edge of the wide bridal sky
in Mongolia.

Wife starlight blossom:
honeydew of honeymoon:
two melons ripe, sweet.

Man of the secret
code of the poet: ciphers
of Mongolia.

Paired pillows, the luck
of sweet violets, horses
on hills with white hats.

In Mongolia
seven Buddhas reign at night,
rain all afternoon.

Guest and host embrace
as the dark side of the moon
is loved by the night.

Evening's first star wears
her seven jewels and shines
in Mongolia.

Note: 

In Mongolia, Stacey and I spent time with Mend-Ooyo, an accomplished calligrapher as well as the nation's leading man of letters. After a leisurely and literary lunch he celebrated the occasion by giving us Mongolian names -- mine is Tsolmongerelt (meaning "light of the morning star") and Stacey's is Odontuya (meaning "starlight"). Mend-Ooyo's own name translates roughly as "Man of the Secret Code," and a woman we stopped to chat with is "Lucky Violet." When I wrote seven haiku for Mend-Ooyo, I incorporated some of these details and other examples of how in the Mongolian imagination images substitute for abstractions. Marriage, for example, means "linked pillows" in Mongolian. Stacey took the photo of me on camel after Mend-Oyoo drove us out to the desert. -- DL

Epigraph of the Month: Scott Fitzgerald's for "The Great Gatsby"

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’”

-Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (a fictional character in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise]

A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”). What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – There’s No Business Like Show Business, They Say It’s Wonderful, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, and the rest – as “routine composing.”  Recall, too, the reviewer who left the theater after a performance of Roberta complaining that Jerome Kern’s score lacked tunes you can whistle. Maybe his mind was elsewhere when the orchestra played Yesterdays, Let’s Begin, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura), a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon). The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which line of objection, the best answer is the movement of a dancer, the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour on his face, and the recollection of the late John Simon's typically brutal and wrong-headed attack on that landmark movie, The Godfather

The Greatest Songs to Lose the Academy Award [by David Lehman]

In 1937 the award for best song went to "Waikiki Wedding." Nominated was "They Can't Take That Away From Me" by the Gershwin brothers, neither of whom ever won the award.

In 1941 the award went to a worthy song, "The Last Time I Saw Paris," music by Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein. But "Blues in the Night" (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). "It was the only timer an Oscar [award] was stolen by an Oscar [Hammerstein]." Pictured at left is Harold Arlen, who could take solace in know that, with lyricist Yip Harburg (with an assist from Ira Gershwin) he wrote the music of the most popular of all Oscar-winning song, "Over the Rainbow."

In 1953 Harry Warren's "That's Amore" as delivered by Dean Martin should have gotten the nod over Sammy Fain's "Secret Love."

In 1954 "Three Coins in the Fountain" by Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn won the prize, and it's a good song, especially as sung by Mr S, but an even better song was "The Man That Got Away" by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin sung by Judy Garland in "A Star is Born."

In 1960 do you really believe "Never on Sunday" is better than "The Second Time Around"?

In 1964 "Chim Chim Cher-ee" collected the most votes. Among the also-rans was the vastly superior "My Kind of Town" by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, perhaps because the two of them had already won four times each.

After 1965, when "The Shadow of Your Smile" was named the winner, it no longer mattered, but for the record here's the full list starting in 1934 when "The Continental" was winner number one.. -- DL

"Loss of Halo" [by Charles Baudelaire, trans. D. Lehman]

Loss of Halo (Perte d’Aureole) by Charles Baudelaire

“What! You here, too, old pal? You, in this den of iniquity! You, quaffer of quintessences! You, who sup on ambrosia! This is a real surprise.”

“My dear chap, you know my fear of horses and carriages. Just now, as I raced across the street, stomping in the mud to get through that chaos in motion where death gallops at you from all sides at once, my halo slipped off my head and onto the filthy ground. I’m afraid I didn’t have the sang-froid to pick it up –let’s just say I deemed it less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to have my bones broken. And then I said to myself, look for the silver lining. I can now walk around incognito, doing whatever nasty things I like, indulging my vices just as lesser mortals do. And here I am, just like you, as you see!”

“You should at least report the loss of your halo or post a reward for its recovery.”

“Not on your life. I am quite happy here. You alone have recognized me. Besides, dignity bores me. And it pleases me to think that some bad poet will pick it up and put it on his impudent head. How sweet to make someone happy! Especially someone I can laugh at! Think of X or Z. You have to admit that’s funny.”

-- translated by David Lehman

[from The American Scholar, Spring 2014]

The Luck of Sid Luckman [by David Lehman]

Born November 21, 1916, Sid Luckman, the greatest Jewish quarterback of all time, graduated from the Brooklyn playgrounds, Erasmus Hall High School, and Columbia.

With Sid at the helm, the Chicago Bears, "monsters of the midway," won the NFL championship four years out of eight.

He threw 25 touchdown passes in one year.

He threw 2,000 yards in a season.

In one game he threw for 453 yards and seven TD passes.

His pop, Meyer Luckman, was what is known in informed Russian Jewish immigrants as a shtarker. He worked with Lansky and Luciano.

Sid was wooed by Michigan and West Point but chose Columbia.

He was to Columbia football what Lou Gehrig was to Columbia baseball.

His father was charged with murder in 1935 and was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder, serving twenty years.

In 1940 Sid led the Chicago Bears to a 73-0 romp in the championship game against the Redskins.

Sid Luckman had what Chicago Bears' coach George Halas called the old zipperroo.

-- David Lehman

Long Live Noir -- and No R [by David Lehman]

A few years ago I wrote a piece for The American Scholar employing the Raymond Roussel method of composition that obliges the author to commence with one word or phrase and end with a meaning derived from a homonym of the initial word or phrase. Noir became No R. Here's how:

<<<
Kaminsky got on the noir bandwagon early on.

At Wesleyan he majored in French, spent his junior year in Paris, went to the Cinémathèque Française at the Palais de Chaillot, and watched American movies with French subtitles as a way to learn the language. Many of the films were classic noir efforts of the 1940s and early ’50s. He saw Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, and Dark Passage with Bogart and Bacall, and The Killing with Sterling Hayden organizing a racetrack heist, and The Lady from Shanghai with Anita Ellis’s voice coming out of Rita Hayworth’s mouth singing “Please Don’t Kiss Me” and meaning the exact opposite, and Pickup on South Street with Richard Widmark as an experienced pickpocket who lifts a woman’s wallet in the subway and the wallet happens to have strips of microfilm that the Communists crave, and Widmark lives on a houseboat under the Brooklyn Bridge and Thelma Ritter gets offed and Jean Peters gets beaten up like you wouldn’t believe, and Cry Danger and The Woman in the Window and Laura and The Asphalt Jungle and the dozens of other notable movies that feature fatal females, mixed-up males with mixed motives, robberies and insurance scams that go wrong, greed that turns lusty, lust that turns deadly.

The dialogue is snappy, witty in the hard-boiled manner. Even cabdrivers crack wise. The fare is a private eye, and the cabbie says sympathetically, “Tough racket.” “Maybe so,” the dick replies, “but cabdrivers don’t live forever.” “Maybe not,” the cabbie concedes. “All the same it’ll come as a surprise to me if I don’t.” In another part of town, Ann Sheridan of the magnificent mane kills a burglar in self-defense, or so she claims. The dame-in-distress sobs to the police: “I’ve told you all I know.” Husband Zachary Scott of the mustachioed sneer knits his brows, but can’t help looking bitchy: “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.” Both are lying. But the true noir note is sounded by Eve Arden as Paula, a secondary character, officiating at a party for the suspects, witnesses, and extras. When she has everyone’s attention, she admits to having committed a crime against society some years ago. I “married a man,” she announces. Later the busty broad deadpans that “practically everything” she has is real. “It’s a shame to waste two perfectly good mouths on you,” she remarks when a pair of gossiping girlfriends get on her nerves. Later, still: “Don’t show me out, I know the way. I always look for an exit in case of a raid.”

“Some things that happen for the first time / seem to be happening again”: Lorenz Hart’s definition of déjà vu (from his lyric for “Where or When”) applies with a vengeance to noir. Accidents seem predetermined; events occur as if repetitions of themselves. The gang leader has a heart-to-heart with his dead Ma in the back yard after dark, and the brains of the operation feeds nickels into the jukebox so he can watch a nubile girl jitterbug with a boy her own age. Exhibitionists in gaudy undergarments perform for laid-up photographers across the courtyard. The surgeon with a cigarette dangling from his lips gives the escaped con a new face, and if there’s a knock on the door, the chances are that a man with a gun will enter the room and shoot first, ask questions later. What do you want me to do, count to three like they do in the movies?

A thug throws a pot of hot coffee at a moll’s face or, giggling, rolls an old lady’s wheelchair down a flight of stairs and the wrong man is arrested. The prizefighter refuses to throw the bout and gets beaten in the alley. There's a scheme to do away with one angle of the triangular three, sit pretty, and collect the insurance. bit it doesn't quite work out as planned. The pampered invalid has a panic attack, picks up the phone, and dials the emergency number she has been given. A voice answers, “City Morgue.”

The dead return to life. A beautiful murder victim walks into her own living room wondering what the hell the gumshoe asleep in an armchair is doing there. A small-town notary goes to San Francisco, has a drink, feels funny, and spends the next week—that is, the rest of his life—trying to solve the mystery of his own murder before he expires of a slow-working poison. In one scene at a club, a girl singer does a swinging version of “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.” We go to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Reno, Mexico, the state penitentiary, a lost highway or two, but for some reason we keep returning to San Francisco. There is also a valise stuffed with $20 bills, a crooked cop, a cuckolded husband, a pair of lethal scissors on the desk, a sensitive black man played by James Edwards, a stick-up in the parking lot, a confusing plot, a lot of rain, and a lot of cigarettes.

It was an easy genre to like. The French were crazy about it.
>>>

But that's just the noir portion. How do we get from here to "no R"?
Click here to find out.
From "No R" by David Lehman in The American Scholar. Click here for the rest of the piece. [Originally posted 2015.]

For other noir features we have run every Sunday since July 2019, click here.

"And the Angels Sing"

Music by Ziggy Elman (trumpet solo)
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
The Benny Goodman Orchestra
Martha Tilton (vocal solo), whose birthday this is

 

Poem for Mitch Sisskind [by David Lehman]

On Veterans' Day let us remember the fallen, and honor them.
It used to be Armistice Day.
Now it is a three-day weekend.
As King David would have said: How the mighty have fallen.
But some things don't change even as all the fashions do
so the old feel older in an orgy of planned obsolescence.
I wondered: Who will inspire them to do the great things
the Alte Kockers of the past revealed in prophecies?

So I went to Mitch, my old friend, thinking: if anyone knows,
he does, and he told me a very simple solution he had
for the problem of inspiration, which Freud would have called
the problem of anxiety. "When you need inspiration,"
Mitch said, "there's no need to look any further than
Orson Welles' classic commercials for Paul Masson wine.
Many of them can be seen on You-Tube. I saw a nice one
the other day. I just wish it went on longer."

"The Big Clock" -- Kenneth Fearing's novel, John Farrow's film [by David Lehman]

On TCM on a recent Sunday at midnight and again at 10 AM, Eddie Muller of Noir Alley showed The Big Clock (1948), a great movie adapted from the fearless Fearing novel centered on a magazine empire that puts out such periodicals as Newsways, Crimeways, Sportsways, Airways, Styleways, and Artways. Charles Laughton is the Luce-like villain; Ray Milland the magazine editor who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time and is the object of a manhunt that he is supposed to be in charge of. Watching it, and enjoying Elsa Lanchester's splendid performance as a kooky painter modeled on Alice Neel, I recalled writing this paragraph years ago for American Heritage. Here's what I wrote when asked to name an "underrated" detective novelist:

<<< The 1940s was a great period for the indigenous American crime novel, and Kenneth Fearing was a notably sophisticated master of suspense. A distinguished feature of his Dagger of the Mind (1941) is that it is set at a venerable artists’ colony like Yaddo or MacDowell, where intrigue and amorous affairs are usual but homicide is not. The Big Clock (1946), one of the greatest murder mysteries, has inspired two movies (the one from 1948 with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton has it all over the 1987 remake with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, No Way Out). Fearing offers a clever variant on the law of the purloined letter, which stipulates that the elusive object of a search may be most effectively concealed if it is left out in the open. The Big Clock —the title is an allusion to Time Inc.—also features a manhunt organized and led by the hunted man, an editor at a magazine empire whose publications include Newsways, Crimeways, Homeways, Personalities, and The Sexes. How can I, a poet who has written for a newsmagazine and has a passion for detective novels, fail to embrace Kenneth Fearing, a hugely undervalued poet with a splendid last name who wrote for a newsmagazine and produced several masterpieces of detective fiction?
>>>

For our other recent film noir features, timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's Sunday morning repeat of Saturday midnight's noir, click here.

"The Triumph of Bullshit" [by T. S. Eliot]

Did you know that T. S. Eliot wrote a poem entitled "The Triumph of Bullshit"?  Neither did I until I started reading The Poems of T. S. Eliot, volume one (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the massive tome edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in an heroic act of scholarly dedication. Of its 1311 pages, approximately nine hundred and sixty are devoted to commentary, and I cannot imagine a more meticulously annotated book of TSE's greatest hits. I meant to review it nearer its pub date last December, but to do it justice would require forty seminar hours. The commentary and notes are immensely valuable. Eliot is no doubt the profoundest modern poet, and the one with the greatest lasting influence. And it is good to remind us, as the volume does, that in his younger days, Eliot had an irrepressible sense of humor that was gloriously incorrect. For example, consider "The Triumph of Bullshit," one of tse-tse's "scabrous exuberances," in Ricks's phrase. Stanza one follows:

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,
Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,
Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

You can read the rest of this curiously erudite poem here. -- DL

A KGB Bar Blast from the Past (circa 2006)

With thanks to Star Black, herself an original co-director of the KGB Bar Monday night poetry series, this photograph of Deborah Landau and David Lehman, two former directors of the series:

A Noir Poem: How About You? [Suzanne Lummis Asks David Lehman]

Suzanne Lummis: Okay, David your turn. Like me you've written many noir poems. How about choosing one that illustrates Lynn Emanuel's contention that "form is content in noir movies"?  David Lehman: Here's a pantoum.

Laura

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

from When a Woman Loves a Man by David Lehman (Scribner).

Click here for other recent noir features we have posted on Sundays since July 2019.

Leonard Bernstein's "Divertimento" [by David Lehman]

So you've never heart it before, / or even heard it,  / you're driving on Highland Road when it starts, / and instead of driving up East Remington and home, / you drive down Highland / until it intersects with Hanshaw, / then double back, and drive up the Parkway / and back down and then over to Berkshire / and then to Cayuga Heights Road / and finally Sunset Park, / but you don't stop, you continue driving, / so you can hear the whole thing /all eighteen minutes forty eight seconds of it, / the end enthralling, the music outlasting the applause / with thanks to Lauren Rico for playing it / on "Symphony Hall" (Sirius 76) / Bernstein's Divertimento for Orchestra / composed in 1980, and said to be / based on two notes, B (for Boston) and C (for Centennial).  -- DL

Tom Disch, 1940-2008 [by Ken Tucker]

When Tom Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008, we ran this short obituary note by Ken Tucker: 

The general public may know his best-known credit: He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, which became the acclaimed 1987 Disney cartoon. But Disch also wrote ten science fiction novels and scores of short stories that placed him at the center of his genre for their uncommon literary adroitness, dry wit and clear-eyed skepticism. Go read the lyrically beautiful On Wings Of Song (1979) immediately, please. He also wrote a unique trilogy of mordant thrillers: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994).

His primary calling, however, was as a poet. He published a half-dozen collections characterized by a mastery of poetic form, and in 1995 published a collection of essays, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, that overflowed with glowing appreciation and ruthless criticism of what he considered the best and worst tendencies in modern poetry. I kept it on my bedside table for periodic re-reading and inspiration.
I'll quote just one apercu among many from that collection that all critics would do well to heed: "The larger value of negative criticism—beyond the sigh of relief that 'At last someone has said it'—is that, without it, any expression of delight or enthusiasm is under suspicion of being one more big hug in that special-education classroom where poets minister to each others’ needs for self-esteem."
Others will doubtless comment on the importance of Disch’s poetry in this space; my small request is that you also read the full range of what Disch wrote and fully appreciate his art, craft, and passion. It was the failure of an audience to appreciate the scope of what Disch accomplished that, I'm willing to bet, was one cause of his sad, too-early death.

--Ken Tucker

The general public may know his best-known credit: He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, which became the acclaimed 1987 Disney cartoon. But Disch also wrote ten science fiction novels and scores of short stories that placed him at the center of his genre for their uncommon literary adroitness, dry wit and clear-eyed skepticism. Go read the lyrically beautiful On Wings Of Song (1979) immediately, please. He also wrote a unique trilogy of mordant thrillers: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994).

His primary calling, however, was as a poet. He published a half-dozen collections characterized by a mastery of poetic form, and in 1995 published a collection of essays, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, that overflowed with glowing appreciation and ruthless criticism of what he considered the best and worst tendencies in modern poetry. I kept it on my bedside table for periodic re-reading and inspiration.
I'll quote just one apercu among many from that collection that all critics would do well to heed: "The larger value of negative criticism—beyond the sigh of relief that 'At last someone has said it'—is that, without it, any expression of delight or enthusiasm is under suspicion of being one more big hug in that special-education classroom where poets minister to each others’ needs for self-esteem."
Others will doubtless comment on the importance of Disch’s poetry in this space; my small request is that you also read the full range of what Disch wrote and fully appreciate his art, craft, and passion. It was the failure of an audience to appreciate the scope of what Disch accomplished that, I'm willing to bet, was one cause of his sad, too-early death.

--Ken Tucker