Lives of the Great Poets

When I was an instructor in the English Department at Auburn University, a man called John Nist taught old English and associated courses. (Lawyer friends: yes, that’s his real name, but he’s deceased and as you know can’t sue me in defamation. These facts are the sad truth anyway.) He also wrote poetry.

I knew little about him, as our paths didn’t cross academically, and he was a forbidding presence, not one to encourage small talk: shorter than medium height, a broad chest, but it was his face that stopped you. He was entirely bald, with heavy-lidded eyes and thick lips, with a bloodless face, beyond pale—really, you read about people who seem reptilian, like Mitch McConnell, but he really was. And his expression was blank, no smile, no frown. He was known to be prominent, probably one of the best-known and respected scholars in the department.

There was another poet in the department, my friend R.T. Smith. We both started in 1976, hung around a lot together laughing and drinking over our inside jokes. He’s had a great career. I never asked Rod whether he had much truck with Nist; and I also don’t know what Rod thought of him as a poet, oddly enough, though I think there was at least the disdain that one poet will hold for another one. Rod and I figured to be in general contact till 1982, when our last contract would end. (The life of the adjunct instructor today is much much worse; we weren’t adjunct, for one thing, but real W-2 employees. We had excellent health insurance.)

In those days, everyone wore a suit and tie, but there are suits and then there are suits: just as his name suggests, Budge Breyer wore rumpled thin houndstooth productions, but Nist’s suits were pressed, expansive, and, to my untrained eye, very well made.

He appears to have published poetry prolifically, but then Rod would tell you that there are poems and then there are poems. I was unaware of his publications till his last book, The Garden of Love, an incongruous title for a man so cold and grey and unseeing.

It’s been too many years now, so I don’t recall whether I heard about this book from others or from Dr. Nist himself. But sometime in the spring quarter of my penultimate year at Auburn, I recall walking down the hallway to the departmental office, which path would have taken me by his office. Suddenly he was there staunchly in front of me: “Would you like a copy of my recent book?” he asked.

I’m not sure that he had ever addressed me before; I was, after all, a lowly instructor, not even tenure track, and there would have been no reason at all for him even to know that I was there as soon enough I wouldn’t be. Yet here he was offering me a copy of his book.

Always pathetically conscious of my political standing in the department even when it was utterly irrelevant to anything in the real world, I was not going to insult this powerful man.

“Sure,” I said, “thank you.”

He handed it over, a small, thin, paperback collection. “It’s five dollars,” he informed me.

“Oh, right, of course,” I said.

“I’m going out of town,” he added. “I need the money before I go.”

Even I was savvy enough to know that Dr. John Nist didn’t need my Lincoln to stave off his starvation in a distant city. “Sure,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and was fortunate enough to have such a greenback. Who carries bills like that today? I’m lucky if I can dig up a ten; ATM’s in my town, which didn’t even exist in those days, expel only twenties.

He took the bill without comment, turned, and disappeared into his office. I never read the poems.

Later I heard that our department head, Bert, wondered whether Dr. Nist should be required to obtain a City of Auburn vendor’s license. Bert’s sense of humor surfaced seldom but was suitably dry. And for the carefully political Bert to say anything tells you that Nist wasn’t well loved by the rest of the faculty. Was he as cold with them as he was with the rest of us? Did he act superior due to his many publications? Further he probably thought he was absolutely a scholar AND an artist thus twice the personage of anyone.

Rod and I both taught summer term in the summer of 1981. If you were young and feckless like we were, and nothing better to do if you were writing anyway, why not teach a course in the summer and earn whatever that was? One summer, I played golf at least twice a week.

It was an easy term, hot of course, but you had the sense that you could practice new material over the summer, make the joke you wouldn’t in the fall, or do something daring: like teach Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” and say “orgasm” during class. In Alabama in the late ‘70’s! It felt like revolution in the air.

But one of those carefree days, there was shocking news: John Nist had gone to Italy for the summer and had dropped dead of a heart attack. He was in his 50’s, for chrissakes.

But he didn’t come to play for the faculty softball team, so there was that.

More news: some powers that be had met virtually overnight and voted my friend Rod tenure. Suddenly he was Poet-in-Residence. Or as he liked to put it, Poet-in-Reticence. What a stunning change in fortune! Rod, slated to be cut free along with me in Spring 1982, was suddenly, as of Summer 1981, tenured. No one deserved it more.

A morning later, I stopped by the faculty break room, and there was Rod. He broke out into a big grin. “Curare,” he said. “South American poison. Looks like a heart attack and leaves no trace.”

Pretty tasteless, yes, but I LOL’ed at the time. I suppose it may have been a measure of how people felt about Nist that Rod felt like he could make such a joke and in the coffee room at that.

If the senior faculty mourned, they did it in private. It’s probably a sign of me being a self-centered 20-something, but I don’t recall much of anything made of Dr. Nist’s death.

What an odd thing! He was a really first-rate scholar. A lot of his scholarship had to do with poetry. Is that why he was so keen to be a poet, and recognized as one? I wonder if he really was any good? This obituary by an admiring student won’t enlighten us any:

http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/print.php/memorials/nist/Array

Finally, the really interesting point to me, why did he feel compelled to corner me, an instructor to whom he had never spoken, and coerce me into buying his book, for quite minimal cash? What was going on in his head? I can’t even speculate.