I can’t think of another poet who wrote so often or so amusingly about death as Thomas Disch. I once tried tallying his death-themed poems and lost count. Here’s a sample: “How to Behave When Dead,” “Symbols of Love and Death,” “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written a decade before her death) and “Death Wish IV.” And then there’s the suggestively named Endzone, an online "LiveJournal" Disch kept from April 26, 2006 until July 2, 2008, two days before his death by suicide. Look at these titles from his final month: “Letters to Dead Writers,” “Back from the Dead!” “In Memoriam,” “Why I Must Die: A Film Script,” “Tears the Bullet Wept,” “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead!” When it comes to death poems, here is my favorite, from ABCDEFG HIJKLM NOPQRST UVWXYZ (1981), “The Art of Dying”: “Mallarmé drowning Chatterton coughing up his lungs Auden frozen in a cottage Byron expiring at Missolonghi and Hart Crane visiting Missolonghi and dying there too   “The little boot of Sylvia Plath wedged in its fatal stirrup Tasso poisoned Crabbe poisoned T.S. Eliot raving for months in a Genoa hospital before he died Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs   “The execution of Marianne Moore Pablo Neruda spattered against the Mississippi Hofmannsthal's electrocution The quiet painless death of Robert Lowell Alvarez bashing his bicycle into an oak   “The Brownings lost at sea The premature burial of Thomas Gray The baffling murder of Stephen Vincent Benét Stevenson dying of dysentery and Catullus of a broken heart”   I never sense morbidity behind Disch’s lines. That may sound ridiculous but Disch deems death a worthy opponent, deserving of our laughter. True laughter suggests sanity. Try reading aloud “The execution of Marianne Moore” and “Pope disappearing like a barge into a twilight of drugs” and not at least tittering. Read the following passage from Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) and see how Disch falls into his scheme: “The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! -- so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please -- at that which is unhappy.”   Disch’s laughter and much of the laughter he inspires is the mirthless sort. Only occasionally does he supply us with a jolly good time. Consider this thought: “. . . to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia . . .” That was written by the happiest, most mentally fit of writers, Max Beerbohm, in “Laughter,” the final essay in his final collection of essays, And Even Now (1920). The inability to laugh, or to laugh only as a gesture of social obligation (the robotic ha ha of the cocktail party or board meeting), is an ailment clinically associated with psychic constipation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders  in its most recent edition glosses the condition as “tight-ass to the max; a real bummer.” A related symptom, according to the DSM-5-TR, is habitual use of the acronym LOL and in more severe cases, LMAO. Sufferers are to be approached with the utmost caution. Seek professional assistance.   That Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008 -- Independence Day – has been interpreted by some as a gesture of contempt for the United States. I don’t agree. Some souls get worn out and tired earlier than others. For now, put aside Disch’s death and read his poems, novels and stories, and remember at least occasionally to laugh.

The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times The post America the Beautiful appeared first on The American Scholar.

“In spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us manage to honor stop signs, and we all honor the dollar sign, whether or not we are willing to admit it.”  In 1995, R.L. Barth published The Golden Calf: Poems of Money, edited by the poet Turner Cassity and Mary Ellen Templeton, a fellow librarian of Cassity’s in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. The subject is a rare one among poets – so crass, after all, and so bourgeois. Contrast that absence with the ubiquity of the quest for wealth in the novels of the nineteenth century, from Balzac to Henry James and beyond. Even crime novels, whether pulpy or sophisticated, are frequently driven by the desire for loot. The editors have found moolah poems by thirty-three American and English poets writing between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, without including Ezra Pound’s crackpot ravings in the Cantos.   The statement at the top is drawn from Cassity’s introduction. As ever, his tone is arch, erudite, almost campy and very amusing. “[W]hile it has been easy to find poems about begging, borrowing, and stealing, as well as gambling and privateering,” he writes, “it has been very difficult to find poems about simply earning or making money.”   Many of us spend half our lives earning money, and yet few poets show much interest in the subject. “Human envy being what it is,” Cassity writes, “Erato and Mammon will probably never lie down together in any degree of comfort, but no topics as central as avarice and ambition can fail to engage a really serious writer, as the Renaissance, the 17th, and the 18th centuries were well aware.” Several of the poets and poems in C&T’s anthology are new to this reader. Take “Worldly Wealth” by the Welsh poet Rowland Watkyns (1616?-64), with the subtitle “Natura paucis contenta” (“Nature is satisfied with little”):   “Wealth unto every man, I see, Is like the bark unto the tree: Take from the tree the bark away, The naked tree will soon decay. Lord, make me not too rich. Nor make me poor, To wait at rich mens’ tables, or their door.”   Given that money is often a pretext for comedy, some of the collected poems qualify as light verse. Take Ebenezer Elliott’s (1781-1849) “On Communists,” written while Karl Marx, who never held down a regular job and lived off the largesse of Friedrich Engels, was still alive:   “What is a Communist? One who has yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings; Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing To fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.”   Here you’ll find well-known names too: George Herbert, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling and E.A. Robinson. Here is another poem by yet another non-job-holder, though not a sponger like Marx, Emily Dickinson:   “Because ’twas Riches I could own, Myself had earned it -- Me, I knew the Dollars by their names -- It feels like Poverty   “An Earldom out of sight to hold, An Income in the Air, Possession -- has a sweeter chink Unto a Miser's Ear.”   Cassity provides an “Afterword,” his poem “A Dance Part Way Around the Veau d’Or, or, Rich Within the Dreams of Avarice.” It appears not to be available online but you can find it in Hurricane Lamp (1986) and The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998).

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My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.   FICTION The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasant misery.  Plague, starvation, abuse, and then the Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a number of places.  I had planned to breeze through this on the way to Xiao Hong’s more famous Tales of Hulan River (1942) but that will have to wait.  “For Mother Wang, her day of agony was all for naught.  A life of agony was all for naught” (p. 29 of the Howard Greenblatt translation). The Witch in the Wood (1939), T. H. White – By contrast, a marvelous piece of nonsense, a much sillier book than the preceding The Sword in the Stone.  Monty Python and the Holy Grail now seems somewhat less original. The Sheltering Sky (1949), Paul Bowles – An American couple tourist around Morocco after the war.  The husband seeks the sublime; the wife does not.  The husband is also a sociopath, and I at one point wondered how long I could stand his company, but after a crisis hits I was fine.  Existentialism can seem awfully adolescent when the only problem is ennui, but in the face of a real problem working through the ideas become interesting.  All this before the last section, the last 40 pages, as bleak a blast of despair as I have encountered in an American novel.  “She felt like saying: ‘Well, you’re crazy,’ but she confined herself to: ‘How strange.’” (Ch. XV, p. 91)  That’s how I felt! I, Robot (1950), Isaac Asimov – I have picked up the idea that people working or theorizing on computer programs that are for some reason called “artificial intelligence” take this collection of stories form the 1940s seriously.  See for example Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor of computer science (do not look at his list of publications!) who writes in or on the New Yorker that he was “struck by its [the book’s] new relevance.”  I was struck by how irrelevant the book was, or I guess how it was exactly as relevant as it has always been.  The first story is a little chemistry problem written by a 21-year-old working on an MA in chemistry, but Asimov soon switches to philosophy.  What I think is the most famous story, “Liar!” (1941) is a simple puzzle in Kantian ethics.  In the next story, “Little Lost Robot” (1947), the characters solve problems by pushing fat robots in front of trains.  I had not realized how young Asimov was when he wrote the first Robot and Foundation stories.  If they sometimes seem a little undergraduate, well. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Patricia Highsmith – A regular old murderous psychopath story, good fun compared to some of these other books. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), Anthony Powell – Another installment of the higher gossip. The narrator has gotten married and spends the book writing around his new wife, so that by the end I know as little about her as at the beginning, although I learn a lot about everyone else. ’I suppose she lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust.  I don’t think Charles’s father – “Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with.  He used to be very handsome, and so amusing.  He looked wonderful on a horse.  He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya.  Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’ (Ch. 2, 89) Neither Boffles, Amy, the Frenchwoman, or the horse are ever mentioned again in the novel. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Cynthia Ozick Suzanne and Gertrude (2019), Jeb Loy Nichols – A short, sad novel about an introverted English woman who adopts a stray donkey.  Expect more donkey content here over the next few months. When These Mountains Burn (2020), David Joy – A final miserable novel, compassionate this time, but unflinching in its look at the ongoing American narcotics epidemic, this time in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, so painful in places.  Joy has recently discovered that where he is lucky to get seven people to attend a free reading in North Carolina he can get seventy people to buy tickets to one in France.  He is joining a sadly well established American literary tradition.   HISTORY 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), Eric H. Cline – In a sense more misery, but at some distance.    POETRY The Far Field (1964) & Straw for the Fire (1943-63), Theodore Roethke Sunbelly (1973), Kenneth Fields Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1954-60), Richard Eberhart – the poems of the 1950s, really, not the whole thing. Foxglovewise (2025), Ange Mlinko – Possibly a major work.  I think I will revisit it next year when the paperback is published.  Recommended to fans of Marly Youmans.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Só (Alone, 1892), António Nobre – Since Portuguese literature is often imitative, I could call Nobre a Symbolist, and he sometimes sounds like the missing link between Romanticism and Pessoa, but I thought his voice was individual.  A long poem about a stay in a sanitarium (Nobre died young of tuberculosis) should be translated; it all should be translated.  I read a school edition that says the book is recommended to 8th graders.  I have no idea how, or how often, this book is actually taught, but I would be shocked if one percent of American 8th graders are assigned such a complex book of poems. Pierrot mon ami (My Pal Pierrot, 1942), Raymond Queneau – Pure jolly fun, but between the slang and wordplay and sudden shifts in register, hard as the devil.  Sometimes it felt like I was reading a Godard film. Roberte ce soir (1954) & La Révocation de l'Édict de Nantes (1959), Pierre Klossowski – Two odd novellas.  The wife sleeps with the houseguests and the husband theorizes about why this is a good idea.  Each novella has one long scene that might be pornographic if not written in such a comically formal register.  The second book turns the first inside out, which is interesting.  Perhaps those ridiculous sex scenes, for example, are just the art-loving husband’s painting-inspired fantasies.  One curious scene describes a painting that could easily be by Pierre’s older brother Balthus.  Utterly different style than Queneau but just as difficult.  I need to find an easy French book, a Simenon novel, something like that. Contos Exemplares (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Not as intricate, but often a bit like Isak Dinesen.