Sissman, L(ouis) E(dward) (Vol. 18) - William H. Pritchard
WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
"Dying: An Introduction" … was my introduction to Sissman's work, encountered by chance while leafing through a magazine; and I remember being surprised and disturbed by it—my realization being that this was not just something "made up", that the poem's "I" was indeniably speaking of its creator's "appalling" experience. Yet the final section of "Dying: An Introduction" was called "Outbound" and felt oddly and poignantly exhilarating. Released from the doctor's office, Sissman, now introduced to his own death, walks a Boston November street that, of all things, smells like spring. Meeting some college students he is thrown back to his freshman year at Harvard, twenty-one years before, when he discovered for the first time "the source/Of spring in that warm night". So it is with truly a new lease of life that he now, two decades later, sees the November evening, the street, the college girls "As, oddly, not as sombre/As December,/But as...
[The entire page is 765 words long]
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