Sign in  |  Register

The New Criterion

America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph

Notebook

September 2008

I.M. Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008

by David Yezzi

On the death of the author and poet.

Thomas M. Disch, the poet and award-winning science fiction writer, committed suicide on July 4; he was sixty-eight. I first heard his name in 1990, while misspending my youth as an actor in New York: Tom Disch was notorious. I showed up to a rehearsal at the now-defunct RAPP Arts Center on the Lower East Side (where I was cast in a forgettable bit of avant-gardism) the day that Tom made headlines for his play at the Center, The Cardinal Detoxes. The theater’s landlord—the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, as it turned out—took exception to the play’s savage skewering of the Church, and the Buildings Department attempted to chain the door.

Several years later, at Parnassus: Poetry in Review, I was introduced by a fellow editor, Ben Downing, to Tom’s poem “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (“she is a monument/ At last among the multitude that she has visite ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase

Subscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions)

Subscribe to TNC (Online only)

Purchase article credit and clip this article

If you already have an account login first

David Yezzi's latest collection of poems is Azores (Swallow Press).


more from this author

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 September 2008, on page 76

Copyright © 2010 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/I-M--Thomas-M--Disch--1940-2008-3901
rate this article for your user profile

E-mail to friend


The New Criterion

By the author

The drama of promise

by David Yezzi

A review of James Agee: Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Hudgins (American Poets Project).

Bacon's theater of the absurd

by David Yezzi

On Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain, London.

Grammars of a possible world

by David Yezzi

On the New Critics, then & now.

You might also enjoy

Unmasking the unmaskers

by Gary Saul Morson

On the uses & abuses of the Great Books.

Loose ends in Liverpool

by Anthony Daniels

Reflections from the Walker Art Gallery.

Bartók, Parry & Lord: a flawed legacy

by Stephen Schwartz

Debunking the myth of "Homeric" Balkan folk songs.

Most popular

view more >

download
first delivery

The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices

Webcasts

Elucidations & Corrections: Arts Criticism
The Goldring Arts Journalism Program S. I. New House School of Public Communications at Syracuse University honors "The New Criterion."


Swallow Anthology Reading at The Grolier


New Criterion-Social Affairs Unit Conference: Part 4
"The Criminalization of Making Money" by Lionel Shriver, Recorded 9/25/09