Some five years before his death from cancer, Clive James published the poem “Change of Domicile” in one of the lesser-known literary magazines – the British Medical Journal’s Supportive and Palliative Care, the September 2014 issue. Coincidentally, that’s the month my friend D.G. Myers died from cancer. The poem begins:  “Installed in my last house, I face the thought That fairly soon there will be one house more, Lacking the pictures and the books that here Surround me with abundant evidence I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.”   Sensitive readers, of course, will be offended: how morbid. Others will be riled by even a hypothetical account of an afterlife. James’ poem reminds me of the parlor game my brother and I played in hospice, shortly before cancer killed him. One of the things I miss most about him is his sense of humor. All our lives we carried on as though anything can be funny and be made fun of. That doesn’t mean we broadcasted. Gentle souls are so easily distressed. Our premise, one pondered by Egypt’s pharaohs, was simple: assuming we survive after death, what do we bring? Another way of looking at it is to ask what we would miss if we didn’t bring it. We limited the choice to inanimate objects. I’ll skip the more salacious stuff. Ken’s immediate answer was music. He was a musician and once owned enough record albums to fill half a garage – Beethoven, Schoenberg, Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Leon Russell, you name it — all favorites.   Not surprisingly, I said books, my constant companions in life. Among the assorted torments of Hell would be the strict absence of volumes. Or an infinity of books, all written by Joyce Carol Oates.   In a 1997 essay, “Nearing Ninety,” William Maxwell expressed his only regret associated with death: “[W]hen people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke.” The last book he read, in the final months of his life, was War and Peace. When he had read a third of the book his eyesight began to fail, and the novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read the remainder of Tolstoy’s novel to him aloud.  She recounts the experience in an essay collected in A William Maxwell Portrait (2004):    “Reading War and Peace with Bill allowed me a rare and privileged view of how a great writer reads. I had, I suppose, known that anyone who writes above a certain level must read differently from most of us. Nabokov, in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature, asks what a reader needs in order to read a book properly. . . . His four correct answers: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

“You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends. I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away myself into a state that can feel none of this sort of losses.”  If Alexander Pope is read today, he’s read as a manufacturer of elegantly barbed witticisms, a crafter of technically perfect verse. What is The Dunciad but an assault on his sorry contemporaries, exemplars of “Dulness”? Pope himself  wrote “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth."   Pope writes above in a letter to Swift on April 2, 1733. John Gay, the poet and playwright, had died less than four months earlier. The letter continues:   “I wished vehemently to have seen [Gay] in a condition of living independent, and to have lived in perfect indolence the rest of our days together, the two most idle, most innocent, undesigning poets of our age. I now as vehemently wish you and I might walk into the grave together, by as slow steps as you please, but contentedly and cheerfully: whether that ever can be, or in what country, I know no more, than into what country we shall walk out of the grave.”   Pope would live another eleven years; Swift, another twelve. As a boy, tuberculosis of the spine left Pope stunted and in pain. He never grew taller than four feet, six inches. If his physical suffering accounts for his satirical gift, it also helps explain his love for and dependence on Swift and his other friends. They “help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” He also faced the English laws banning Roman Catholics from teaching, attending university, voting and holding public office. Pope to Swift on September 15, 1734:   “I have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew . . . When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you . . .”   My niece tells me she is reading Pope’s poetry and asked what I thought of him. In my private pantheon he is one of the supreme English poets and terribly unfashionable. Our age could use him. Hannah gave me a little hope.

Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17:  “So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no, since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s tentative yellows, then the green and blue and bolder tones of flowering summer. So has this winter passed, as do all things— except the final absence. Without you, for instance, all of time is cut in two— before and after—seasons all the same, despite the beckoning lushness of the new, the living, rich in fur and fins and wings, intent on resurrection. But they go, our absent loves, and leave us stranded here, parted from all the changes of the year as by an endless fall of pallid snow.”   Turning gentle into a verb is a nice touch. Shakespeare’s poem, known as the last of the “procreation” sonnets, follows. The speaker fears that if he celebrates the “heavenly touches” of the “Fair Youth,” his comeliness, future readers will assume he is exaggerating or lying:   “Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’ So should my papers yellow’d with their age, Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage And stretched metre of an antique song:    But were some child of yours alive that time,    You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.”   Every writer asks, Will I be read in the future, after I am gone? How will I be read? Most writing, of course, is quickly forgotten, often during the writer’s lifetime. We remember Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” though his identity remains uncertain – a nice irony, given Shakespeare’s stated intention. He lives on, but anonymously. The final two lines are stirring: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” All of us hope to live on through our children, if only in memory. Espaillat reminds me John Shade’s investigation into the afterlife, prompted by the death of his daughter Hazel, in the poem that lends its title to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire:   “I'm reasonably sure that we survive And that my darling somewhere is alive . . .”   As Espaillat puts it, in regard to "the final absence": “But they go, / our absent loves, and leave us stranded here."

“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.”  “Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the radicals of existence”? I don’t know what that means. “Radicals” intended etymologically, meaning “roots”? As in chemistry or politics? All of the above? A similar “office” applies to prose as well, though “office” sounds a little high-falutin’.     “To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against opportunistic mendacity.”   The ethics of writing. As John Berryman puts it in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” An honest writer comes equipped with a bullshit detector that he applies first to himself, then others. Lies enter language through politics, fashion, self-aggrandizement and any effort to seek approval. The hardest part of writing is keeping it vital while remaining faithful to the truth.     “If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and ‘language.’ It will be a polymer mold of what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?”   W.S. Di Piero might be describing prose or poetry assembled by artificial intelligence. What I’ve read or seen of it, even when it’s a competent copy of a human creation, feels hollow, dead inside. Something is missing, something vital and as personal as DNA or the individual human sensibility. Something “sentient,” to use Di Piero’s word. Algorithms write like backward children eager to please teacher.   [The quoted passages, a single continuous entry, is drawn from Di Piero’s Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017).]