Charles Coleman Finlay just blogged about the style of Thomas M. Disch, referencing a piece in the LA Times today by James Sallis.
Sallis isn’t the first to reference Disch’s style, of course–it’s probably impossible to separate his work from his style. But all this talk of Disch and style reminds me of his poem, “The Rapist’s Villanelle,” which is the first thing I ever read by him and was so creepy and well-crafted that it made me go out in search of other poems by him (which few poems do for me). I read it in a poetry class in college. Funny thing is, I read it not because it was assigned, but because it was one of the few poems we skipped over in the anthology textbook. Also, though I hadn’t read him at that point, I was aware of Disch’s connection to genre fiction, so I was curious. Plus, how many poems about rapists (from their POV no less!) have you ever seen? It’s online here.
Later in college, that poem lead me to Disch’s poetry collection, Dark Verses & Light, for an assignment in a different class for which we had to write an essay about a contemporary poet’s work. There’s another poem of Disch’s in that volume that this talk of style reminded me of as well, called “Why This Tie, Why That,” though it’s not as much about style as the title might imply.
I’ll go ahead and post it here on my blog, in case anyone is interested. [ETA: Here’s the essay.]
Although I didn’t know Disch, I had talked to him on a few different occasions. I first met him at Readercon a couple years ago. We were both on a post-apocalyptic panel called Everybody Dies. I recounted my meeting with him on my blog after the con:
Headed off to my one and only panel: Everybody Dies, which was about post-apocalyptic fiction and its more grim cousin in which, as the panel title suggests, everybody dies (not just nearly everbody). It started off well enough, but by the end it had gone completely off the rails and I basically couldn’t think of anything to say. Let me explain. It was going along nicely, but at some point one of the panelists, Tom Disch, complained that he couldn’t hear the two women panelists (Tor editor Beth Meecham and moderator Nancy Hanger). It was a rather long rant that perturbed our moderator who wondered aloud if maybe she should just leave. So that wasn’t good. But then the panel continued, and Disch started talking about Hamlet, and about how pretty much all of the characters die, and was talking about how each death matters. Well, he started listing some of them…and inexplicably burst into sobs. At first I thought maybe he was doing some kind of performance art, to be so moved by talk of Shakespeare, but he seemed to be genuinely upset. I later learned that he had recently lost a loved one, and so thought it rather stupid (and perhaps a little callous) that he was placed on a panel called “Everybody Dies.” In any case, Disch continued to participate in the discussion and was several times more moved to tears.
So it was an inauspicious meeting, which gave me a good story to tell about the panel from hell, but suddenly it’s not so amusing anymore.
I then again saw Disch just a month or so ago, when he gave a reading at the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series. We didn’t really talk, but he made a joke to me as we entered the venue, then after the reading he was sitting right across from me at the after-dinner. I had thought that I should have brought my copy of Dark Verses to have him sign it, and/or any of the other books of his I have, but I totally forgot the day of the reading. I also thought that I should interview him about his new book for SCI FI Wire, but though I made a note to do so I neglected to follow up on it. I really wish now that I had.
And speaking of SCI FI Wire, I ended up writing the obituary for Disch. But then the really odd thing–for me anyway, probably not for anyone else–was that the day SCI FI Wire published the obituary I’d written, they also published a piece written by me about Susan Beth Pfeffer’s new novel the dead & gone, which my editor titled “dead Explores Post-Apocalypse”. So, side by side, two pieces–Disch’s obituary and the Pfeffer piece–one an obituary, the other a profile with a headline that was just eerily relevant to the piece before it, at least to the person who wrote them both.
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