Tom Sleigh
October 2007

The Last Day

I’ve had a blood disease since I was twenty-five. The mean survival rate is ten years after diagnosis, so I’ve been lucky. But I’m conscious of the fact, and have been for many years, of the kind of pressure that might come if you were convinced that today was your last day: now what are you going to say. Of course, the standard response is that you sit down and play a game of chess or go outside and pick tomatoes; that there’s something banal about thinking you’d do anything different from what you’d do ordinarily. But for me it’s an interesting paradox, sitting comfortably at the desk, not suffering in the least, while at the same time feeling the mental pressure of that last day hovering just out of sight. I think this is why I love Proust: he spends 2,000 pages complaining that he can’t write the great work, yet all the while you’re turning the pages that belie his complaint and, in fact, comprise the great work. And then in the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, after having found literature a poor reason to write anything, he discovers a reason to write: to try to reveal to the people around him, whom he’s known intimately, the unlikely truth about their lives—even though it’s a truth that they are likely not to want to read. I don’t think he means unsavory revelations, though there are plenty: rather the lived texture, or what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the inscape” of those lives. And in poetry this can be done in a very un-Proustian, un-autobiographical fashion, the indirection of Wallace Stevens, for example, in “To the One of Fictive Music,” in which you can read a heavily disguised allegory about the nature of Stevens’ marriage while at the same time focussing on the poem as an exploration of the muse as interior paramour. I would also say that the experience of illness and of periods of invalidism create a sense of alienation from the world of the healthy; and often alienation can be an index of originality. Elizabeth Bishop speaks of how greatly prized originality is in a poet’s work, but that nobody ever talks about the depth of alienation that is part of that originality.

In writing a poem, there are infinite numbers of details to choose from: and I imagine that some of the poems I’ve written represent, in a way that is as oblique as Stevens and certainly open to fictional impulses, a momentary balancing of the psychic pressure of that speculative last day against the weight of less extreme experience, something domestic, say, that seems to have nothing to do with anticipating your own death. In other words, it’s an important part of artistic conscience to try to counter alienation with formal intelligence and decorum so that alienation doesn’t overdetermine the scope and range of what you’re capable of responding to in your poems.

At the same time, I believe with Randall Jarrell that poets are rather helpless, that their subjects and orientations toward language choose them: will has never seemed a substitute for imagination, and without imagination you have nothing. Of course, underneath these pronouncements lies the anxiety of not knowing if what you are doing is of value. All of us want to feel that the future will be hospitable to what we make, and all of us fear that it won’t be. Best not to know too much all about it. I’ve often suspected that most of us have had all the “big” ideas we’re going to have by the time we’re in our twenties, and that our lives are spent working out those ideas with ever greater complexity. Again, I choose not to look too closely at those ideas, and when someone tells me what they think they are, I thank them, and promptly try to forget everything they said.

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