Thomas Lynch on Sex, Death, and Poetry

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“All the women in my life have been powerful, powerful women with strong medicine—dangerous people. I just don’t see them in any way, shape, or form as having ever traded on victim status.”

On missing bodies:

“Part of my professional life has been marked by the disappearance of corpses in the funeral ceremony. Our culture is the first in a couple generations that attempts to have funerals with no bodies. We just disappear them. If you read the death notices in the paper today, you’ll notice that most of them are going to involve some type of memorial event, sans body, sans corpse. Also, most likely, without the gloomy stuff that comes along with having a corpse in the room. But the way to deal with mortality is by dealing with the mortals. And you deal with death, the big notion, by dealing with the dead thing.

“We’re very good when it comes to cats and dogs. We just don’t have a clue when it comes to our people. We have them disappeared without any rubric or witnesses or anything like that. And then we plan these ‘celebrations of life,’ the operative words du jour. These celebrations are notable for the fact that everybody’s welcome but the dead guy. This, to me, is offensive and I think perilous for our species. There is an intellectual—an artistic and moral—case that can be made for not only fruit and flowers in a bowl on a table, but also a dead body in a box.”

Excerpted from Willow Springs (Spring 2009), a literary journal that publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews and “engages its audience in an ongoing discussion of art, ideas, and what it means to be human”; http://willowsprings.ewu.edu.

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