POET

Thomas Lux (1946 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Since his first collections of poetry were published in the 1970s, Thomas Lux has been receiving critical appreciation for his "compelling rhythms, his biting irony and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless," according to Elizabeth Mehren in the Los Angeles Times. A highly regarded poet whose work grapples with the futility of human existence, Lux was the 1995 recipient of the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (one of the United States' richest poetry prizes), for his book Split Horizon. One reason for the poet's popularity is his penchant for "pairing humor with hard-edged serious themes," to quote Mehren. As Lux himself commented in the Los Angeles Times, "I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor."

Contemporary Poets contributor Richard Damashek wrote: "Intensely personal, the poetry of Thomas Lux is tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world." Lux's poetry, Damashek contended, "is devoted to revealing more of the terrible 'facts' of life: its pain, its suffering, and its ultimate emptiness and meanness." The poet often accomplishes his task with humor and accessible language, illuminating his deeper subjects with telling trivialities. A Booklist reviewer called Lux "a biographer of the ordinary, and perhaps because of that, a chronicler of our times."

Lux established his voice and attracted an audience with his second collection of poems, Memory's Handgrenade. Critics noted an intense psychological distress in the poetry, or, as Damashek put it, "poems in which the sane and the insane, the real and the surreal, interpenetrate in juxtapositions of images that create shocking and original insights into the nature of the human condition." Damashek maintained of Memory's Handgrenade: "Although hard to decode, the images are startling and original and suggest an entirely new voice in American poetry."

In his 1979 collection, Sunday: Poems, Lux offers such poems as "Elegy for Frank Stanford," "The Green," "Portrait of the Man Who Drowned Wearing His Best Suit and Shoes," "Gold on Mule," "Farmers," "Barrett and Browning," "Flying Noises," and "Spiders Wanting." The individuals who live in the poetic world created in Sunday share a feeling of being out of place. "Lux's solo native is always strange to the world," observed Elizabeth Macklin in Parnassus, "always on the verge of extradition, always beset with allergies to the native element, 'like a simple vase not tolerating water.'" These characters find themselves expressing anger and humor in their attempts to cope with their world. As Peter Stitt wrote in the Georgia Review, "There is a deep tenderness at the heart of Lux's work, born of vulnerability and terror. It issues in a stance both bitter and cynical, and directs its anger against the imperatives of reality—time, degeneration, death." Stitt found that Lux's strongest poems "are those written in his most difficult tone—an ironic mingling of humor and sincerity which betrays a ferocious anger at necessity."

Half Promised Land, published in 1986, reflects some of the same stylistic and thematic concerns found in Lux's earlier poems but, as Lynne McMahon pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, there are also differences. "The jazzy syncopated phrasings are still often present, as well as the burlesquing of grand emotions," she wrote. "There are still glimpses of the high-wire artist who requires for grounding only the thinnest narrative line. But here Mr. Lux foregoes the collision of the surreal and the mundane, so characteristic of his earlier work, for a more somber tone." Sam Cornish also commented on Lux's style and themes. He noted in the Christian Science Monitor: "Here the poetry has the assurance of a short story, with sharp, focused character sketches, and his observations of human behavior and youth are honest and moving." Partisan Review contributor Stuart Dischell found Lux's willingness to look outside the self to be refreshing. The critic observed that many of the poems in this collection "concern social relations, especially work: not just the dull labor we do to survive in this world, but also the work we must do to survive ourselves." In Half Promised Land, Damashek remarked, "There is a noticeable shift . . . from poems that have little objective reference to poems that have a great deal to say about the external world. Lux demonstrates concern for social problems, for the poor, the hungry, and the homeless, for a society based on money, class, and privilege, and for the inequality and injustice of such a society." Dischell concluded: "In a decade in which much of the poetry being published seems merely decorative, solipsistic, or willfully obscure, it is a pleasure to read poems that quicken the senses and challenge the reader. Half Promised Land is an excellent book."

In The Drowned River: New Poems, which appeared in 1990, Lux once again turns his poetic eye on individuals in conflict with the world around them. As the Nation's Beatrix Gates put it, the collection "tells the story and struggle of plain and magnificent humans." A Washington Post Book World reviewer explained that "among his subjects are lifestyles of the poor and obscure, the powerless, invisible millions who comprise history." And, as Jack Anderson observed in American Book Review, the lot drawn by these invisible millions is far from an easy one. "Lux stares at the world, and what he sees dismays him," noted the reviewer. "Nature is not necessarily kind to human beings." Though his people are poor and obscure, Lux makes their struggles the reader's struggle; and though these struggles seem overwhelming, Lux sees a way out. Gates wrote that the poems in The Drowned River "are made from the lives we cannot ignore. He makes them our own." Moreover, suggested the Washington Post Book World reviewer, "Though selfishness, cruelty and mortality drive him wild, this is a poet who can't stop hoping." Anderson concluded that Lux "makes his small hopes as convincing as his grand doubts."

Lux conveys human struggles against nature in a conversational style. According to Anderson, "These poems often sound like a man talking to himself, recording impressions of events almost as quickly as they occur." A Publishers Weekly reviewer faulted this approach, arguing that Lux's "propensity for repetition and reiteration deflates the impact of his observations." The Washington Post Book World reviewer offered a different evaluation: "Lux's rhetoric is so striking that the subject never becomes ponderous. The most touching poems (and there are many) frame their large questions in riveting terms: . . . Like good conversation, this poetry thinks as it moves. Its urgency is due in part to the poet's fervor and in part to his distinctive style." In Library Journal, a reviewer called Lux's poems "distinctive and outstanding," noting further that the poet "has a notable gift for discerning the difficult and unchanging questions, and his best work offers the illumination and surprise of first-rate writing."

In the end, Lux offers a poetic vision that challenges the reader. "There are terrible songs in this book, terrible because their construction is so beautiful, the message so savage in its demand that the reader is open in kind," commented Gates. She added that "these powerful poems are the deadly currents and riptides of the 'drowned,' a song present in any river if you can hear it. The clear-eyed detail in his poems stuns, and eventually does render a cumulative, unshiny faith." Concluded Demashek: "Such it is in the world of Thomas Lux. There is no place here for the fainthearted, the weak, or the hopeful. Life, it seems, is not to be lived but rather endured."

Split Horizon, Lux's award-winning collection "thrives on dislocations, "to quote Fred Muratori in Library Journal. The book also casts a critical eye on contemporary life and current trends. "Wearing irreverence like a uniform, Lux skewers received literary symbols . . . medical science . . . and God . . . with equal panache," Muratory explained. In the view of a Publishers Weekly critic, "With Lux, the wonders of the world can be communicated in the jangling noise of his language and in his amazing manipulation of tone to suit his poetry's matter. He is singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion."

Lux has been praised for his poetry, but as he told Mehren, "This is not something one chooses to do. . . . It is something I was drawn to. I do it because I love to do it, and because I don't have any choice. If I don't write, I feel empty and lost." He added, "Poetry exists because there is no other way to say the things that get said in good poems except in poems. There is something about the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive that only poems can do. To me, it makes me feel more alive, reading good poetry."

CAREER

Emerson College, Boston, MA, poet-in- residence, 1972-75; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, member of faculty, 1975—. Visiting professor, Columbia University, University of Houston, and Boston University, 1981, Cooper Union, 1987, and University of California, Irvine, 1995. Co-founder and editor, Born Dream Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Land Sighted, Pym-Randall (Roslindale, MA), 1970.
Memory's Handgrenade, Pym-Randall, 1972.
Poems: The Glassblower's Breath, Cleveland State University (Cleveland, OH), 1976.
Sunday: Poems, Houghton (Boston), 1979.
Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light, Black Market Press (New York City), 1980.
Massachusetts, Pym-Randall, 1981.
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy, Ampersand (Bristol, RI), 1983.
Half Promised Land, Houghton, 1986.
The Drowned River: New Poems, Houghton, 1990.
A Boat in the Forest, Adastra Press (Easthampton, MA), 1992.
Pecked to Death by Swans, Adastra Press, 1993.
Split Horizon, Houghton, 1994.
(Coeditor and author of foreword) Robert Winner, The Sanity of Earth and Grass, Tilbury House (Gardiner, ME), 1994.
The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975, Adastra Press, 1996.
New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995, Houghton, 1997.
Street of Clocks, Houghton, 2001.
The Cradle Place, Houghton, 2004.

Words for Lori Laitman, Men with Small Heads: Version for Baritone Voice, Piano Accompaniment, Enchanted Knickers Music, 2001. Managing editor, Iowa Review, 1971-72, and Ploughshares, 1973.