Sissman and Sworder: Death, An Introduction

L. E. Sissman

Things sometimes, or often, or perhaps usually, come together in ways that seem odd. With the recent death of Roger Sworder (see here) the thoughts of many of those who were close to him turned not to his philosophy and his teaching - these things being outstanding and obvious - but to his poetry. It is likely, we know now, that he probably had some foreknowledge of his impending demise and this explains why, in his last few months, he wrote a series of long autobiographical poems in a very straightforward, unaffected narrative style of blank verse, a reflective poetry that looked back to important and lingering incidents in his younger days. He had dabbled in poetry over many years and a collection of his verse, along with several essays on poetry, was published by Connor Court Press. It is hoped that his final poems will be published in due course. When they are it will be seen that they are strikingly different to his earlIer poems; as death approached he adopted an entirely different style, seeking a naturalness of voice, a plainness and a simplicity not found in his more overtly intellectual earlier poetry. From being immersed in the high idiom of the English romantics, in his last year or two he had acquired a taste for American poets and was especially fond of Edwin Arlington Robertson. The influence of Robertson is evident in these last poems. 

Stop. Don't Read. - Essays and Poems by Roger Sworder, 

published by Connor Court Press.

An even more telling comparison can be made, however, with another American poet with whom, unfortunately, Dr Sworder was most likely not familiar, namely the little known L. E. Sissman. As it happens, the present author spent his last meetings with Dr Sworder discussing the advent of Neoreaction as a political philosophy, and they spoke explicitly about the labours of Mencius Moldbug. What they failed to discuss was Mr Moldbug's fine taste in poetry - a topic that would assuredly have roused Sworder's interests even more than the Moldbugean critique of democracy. Sissman is a Moldbug "discovery". In one of his posts on Unqualified Reservations he boldly proclaims Sissman to be his choice for poet of the XXth century, see here. It is a matter of great regret that Sworder did not live to become properly acquainted with either Neoreaction or Moldbug, and even more so with Sissman because, on the evidence at hand, he would surely have found a kindred voice. 

Sissman himself was influenced by and admired Edwin Arlington Robertson, and, remarkably, wrote a poetry of impending death in a style to which Sworder's last poems bear a striking resemblance. Sissman had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. He turned to poetry and published a book of poems entitled Death: An Introduction, in 1968. His poems are typically in blank verse, affect no poetic idiom and are characterised by what Moldbug describes as a "naturalness of voice." "Ours is an age of faux-unaffected verse, of contrived pseudo-simplicity," says Moldbug. "When you read Sissman you feel the difference." His poetry is "completely direct. It has no hidden meanings at all. There is zero Empsonian ambiguity. It is almost light verse...." These are exactly the qualities typical of Sworder's final poems too. The present author - and others in his circle - have struggled of late to place Sworder's last poems, so different are they to his others. There is some T. S. Eliot in there, certainly, and, as already noted, some Robertson - but their directness and "naturalness of voice" is so similar to that of L. E. Sissman it is hard to believe he was not channeling him from the beyond. 

Yet we can be fairly certain that he did not know Sissman's work. Sissman is, as Moldbug observes "untaught, unknown, and out of print." It seems, rather, that Sworder was able to avail himself a certain mode of American poetry, a mode of which Sissman is a shining, albeit obscure, example. Like Sissman, Sworder was a man of unusual verbal dexterity, a man with a vast vocabulary - the sort of man who could rip through a cryptic crossword in a matter of minutes. But the shadow of death brought a new concentration upon simplicity and directness and sincerity. All pretence and cleverness is gone. 

The present author finds it extraordinary - or at least odd - that an unlikely circle of connections (Moldbug - Sissman - Robertson etc.) might suddenly shine such a revealing light upon these poems. These are men somehow all on the same page. He is not at liberty to publish Sworder's last poems here just yet (they are being collected and edited by Brian Coman) and so in that absence he will instead offer a collection of some very fine Sissman poems below. It was while reading these that he encountered a strangely familiar voice. They are, no doubt, better than Roger Sworder's poems - Moldbug is right, Sissman is a great poet - but this is nonetheless the poetic voice to which the last poems of Sworder ought to be compared. 

* * * 

 

LOVE-MAKING; APRIL; MIDDLE AGE

A fresh west wind from water-colored clouds
Stirs squills and iris shoots across the grass
Now turning fiery green. This storm will pass
In dits and stipples on the windowpane
Where we lie high and dry, and the low sun
Will throw rose rays at our gray heads upon
The back-room bed's white pillows. Venus will
Descend, blue-white, in horizontal airs
Of red, orange, ochre, lemon, apple green,
Cerulean, azure, ultramarine,
Ink, navy, indigo, at last midnight.
Now, though, this clouded pewter afternoon
Blurs in our window and intensifies
The light that dusts your eyes and mine with age.

We turn our thirties over like a page.



THE MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY

Struck dumb by love among the walruses
And whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffing
Missing, the mastodons like muddy buses,
I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.

A general grant enabled the erection,
Brick upon brick, of this amazing building.
Today, in spite of natural selection,
It still survives an orphan age of gilding.

Unvarnished floors tickle the nose with dust
Sweeter than any girls' gymnasium's;
Stove polish dulls the cast-iron catwalk's rust;
The soot outside would make rival museums

Blanch to the lintels. So would the collection.
A taxidermist has gone ape. The cases
Bulging with birds whose differences defy detection
Under the dirt are legion. Master races

Of beetles lie extinguished in glass tables:
Stag, deathwatch, ox, dung, diving, darkling, May.
Over the Kelmscott lettering of their labels,
Skeleton crews of sharks mark time all day.

Mark time: these groaning boards that staged a feast
Of love for art and science, since divorced,
Still scantily support the perishing least
Bittern and all his kin. Days, do your worst:

No more of you can come between me and
This place from which I issue and which I
Grow old along with, an unpromised land
Of all unpromising things that live and die.

This brick ark packed with variant animals --
All dead -- by some progressive-party member
Steams on to nowhere, all the manuals
Of its calliope untouched, toward December.

Struck dumb by love among the walruses
And whales, the off-white polar bear with stuffing
Missing, the mastodons like muddy buses,
I sniff the mothproof air and lack for nothing.

VISITING CHAOS

No matter how awful it is to be sitting in this
Terrible magazine office, and talking to this
Circular-saw-voiced West side girl in a dirt-
Stiff Marimekko and lavender glasses, and this
Cake-bearded boy in short-rise Levi’s, and hearing
The drip and rasp of their tones on the softening
Stone of my brain, and losing
The thread of their circular words, and looking
Out through their faces and soot on the window to
Winter in University Place, where a blue-
Faced man, made of rags and old newspapers, faces
A horrible grill, looking in at the food and the faces
It disappears into, and feeling,
Perhaps, for the first time in days, a hunger instead
Of a thirst; where two young girls in peacoats and hair
As long as your arm and snow-sanded sandals
Proceed to their hideout, a festering cold-water flat
Animated by roaches, where their lovers, loafing in wait
To warm and be warmed by brainless caresses,
Stake out a state
Of suspension; and where a black Cadillac 75
Stands by the curb to collect a collector of rents,
Its owner, the owner of numberless tenement flats;
And swivelling back
To the editorial pad
Of Chaos, a quarter-old quarterly of the arts,
And its brotherly, sisterly staff, told hardly apart
In their listlessly colored sackcloth, their ash-colored skins,
Their resisterly sullenness, I suddenly think
That no matter how awful it is, it’s better than it
Would be to be dead. But who can be sure about that?

A DEATHPLACE

Very few people know where they will die,
But I do; in a brick-faced hospital,
Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,
Into three parts; the Dean Memorial
Wing, in the classic cast of 1910,
Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian
Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which
Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch
Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees
In World War I, and won enlisted men
Some decent hospitals, and, being rich,
Donated her own granite monument;
The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent
With marble piping, flying snapping flags
Above the entry where our bloody rags
Are rolled in to be sponged and sewn again.
Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain
(If only my own tears) will see me in
Those jaundiced and distempered corridors
Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close.
White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe
Before the pinpoint of the least syringe;
Before the buttered catheter goes in;
Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins
Inside my skin; before the rubber hand
Upon the lancet takes aim and descends
To lay me open, and upon its thumb
Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum;
And finally, I’ll quail before the hour
When the authorities shut off the power
In that vast hospital, and in my bed
I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red,
The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead.
Then will the business of life resume:
The muffled trolley wheeled into my room,
The off-white blanket blanking off my face,
The stealing secret, private, largo race
Down halls and elevators to the place
I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased
In artificial air and light: the ward
That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue.
Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,
A booted man in black with a peaked cap
Will call for me and troll me down the hall
And slot me into his black car. That’s all.



THE TREE WARDEN

I.

A FAREWELL TO ELMS

In late July, now, leaves begin to fall:
A wintry skittering on the summer road.
Beside which grass, still needing to be mowed,
Gives rise to Turk's caps, whose green tapering ball-
Point pens all suddenly write red. Last year,
The oriole swung his nest from the high fan
Vault of our tallest elm. Now a tree man
Tacks quarantine upon its trunk. I hear

An orange note a long way off, and thin
On our hill rain the ochre leaves. The white
Age of a weathered shingle stripes the bark.
Now surgeons sweat in many a paling park
And bone saws stammer blue smoke as they bite
Into the height of summer. Fall, begin.

II.

THE SECOND EQUINOX

Perambulating his green wards, the tree
Warden sees summer's ashes turn to fall:
The topmost reaches first, then more, then all
The twigs take umbrage, publishing a sea

Of yellow leaflets as they go to ground.
Upon their pyres, the maples set red stars,
The seal of sickness unto death that bars
The door of summer. Bare above its mound

Of leaves, each tree makes a memorial
To its quick season and its sudden dead;
With a whole gale of sighs and heaving head,
Each ash attends its annual burial.

The warden, under a boreal blue sky,
Reminds himself that ashes never die.

III.

DECEMBER THIRTY-FIRST

The days drew in this fall with infinite art,
Making minutely earlier the stroke
Of night each evening, muting what awoke
Us later every morning: the red heart

Of sun. December's miniature day
Is borne out on its stretcher to be hung.
Dim, minor, and derivative, among
Great august canvases now locked away.

Opposed to dated day, the modern moon
Comes up to demonstrate its graphic skill:
Laying its white on white on with a will,
Its backward prism makes a monotone.

In the New Year, night after night will wane;
Color will conquer; art will be long again.

IV.

MAY DAY

Help me. I cannot apprehend the green
Haze that lights really upon the young
Aspens in our small swamp, but not for long.
Soon round leaves, as a matter of routine,

Will make their spheric music; and too soon
The stunning green will be a common place.
Sensational today runs in our race
To flee the might of May for willing June.

To reach a bunch of rusty maple keys,
Undoing a world of constants, more or less,
I tread on innocence. The warden sees
In May Day the historical success
Of labor; a safe date for planting trees;
A universal signal of distress.

NOTES TOWARD A TWENTY-FIFTH REUNION

"And what do you do?" Mrs. Appoplex,
Fat dam of some dim Story Street savant
In baggy Marimekko muumuu and
Barbaric Inca necklet, asks my wife
At some dream sherry party packed with ham-
Strung academics swaying gently in
The wind of Babel. "Why, just cook and fuck,"
My wife does not, so sweetly, tender in
Reply, although I wish like hell she would.
Whose world is real, for Christ's sake, anyway?
Their sculpture gallery of images
That move mechanically in circumscribed
Tangents and - this is a recording - talk
In selfsame selfsongs all the livelong day?
(I must say I have just enough of a
Foot in that world to see its tiny point
Flash in the haystack of irrelevance.)
Or my free-form theatre of absurd,
Unaugurable happenstance, in which -
For gain, my lads, for gain - we businessmen
Risk all upon a nutty and divine
Idea of weal and on our con-man's skill
To sell it to each other, I'll back that
Frail matchstick pyramid of barest will,
On which to balance, one exposes all
To the black, hithering eye of the abyss,
As realer than the static autoclave
Of academe, full of blunt instruments
Becoming sterile as they sit and steam.
And yet, when I return in steaming June
To my Reunion in the pullulant
Hive of the Yard, I'll look with shuttering
Eyes on my unknown classmates, businessmen
Who have no business with me, and greet
The likes of Mrs. Appoplex and her
Effete levée with a glad, homing cry.
The question is, what kind of fool am I?

****

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black