Sissman, L(ouis) E(dward) (Vol. 18) - Alfred Corn
ALFRED CORN
Sissman's poetry, like his life, is singular and problematic. Possibly a good many Harvard graduates now executives in advertising agencies write verse; some may have published it; one or two may, like Sissman, have discovered themselves stricken with a fatal illness (in his case, Hodgkin's disease). But surely no one else, after such knowledge, could then go on to write a poem in which a biopsy specimen (it "Turns out to end in -oma") is described as "my / Tissue of fabrications." Nearly all of Sissman's poems were written after the discovery, and nearly all of them are, at least by moments, funny, sometimes outrageously so. How is this to be accounted for? Auden said that wit demanded imagination, moral courage, and unhappiness: "an unimaginative or a cowardly or a happy person is seldom very amusing." Sissman is a witty and amusing poet indeed; and he must have fulfilled the conditions mentioned. But the laughter afforded by [the poems collected in...
[The entire page is 592 words long]
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