NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS& VIEWS Robert Lax It took New York Times book reviewer Richard Kostelanetz 850 labored words to tell us something we knew from Robert Lowell in a single phrase: that Thomas Merton...
...Actually it's easy enough to understand that not too many should...
...Too bad, really...
...Mostly he's been on an i...
...Kostelanetz took the measure of Merton the poet while handling The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, recently issued by New Directions for $37.50...
...The bliss belies the appearance...
...But mostly he's written and published in near anonymity...
...When Merton came into Catholic ism, Rice was his godfather...
...A potential prophet, but without rage...
...The national literary magazine Voyages devoted a special double issue to him in 1968, and magazines like the Columbia Forum have published extracts from his journal...
...Kostelanetz was remarking that Merton's best passages occurred in "curt prose paragraphs," like the Original Bomb Child, Chant to be Used in Processions Around a Site With Furnaces and Cables to the Ace...
...The years have a way of getting away from us...
...A mind full of tremendous but subtle intuitions, and every day he found less and less to say about them, and resigned himself to being inarticulate...
...In fact, she rejoices in them...
...The next year BBC-Radio did a special broadcast on Bob Lax and his poetry...
...They were a triumvirate, Lax, Rice and Merton...
...The secret of his constant solidarity I think has always been a kind of natural, 'instinctive spirituality, a kind of unborn direction to the living God...
...land called Kalymnos...
...But if Denise Levertov is dismayed by the visual poems, she is not by Lax's "concrete" poems...
...Of course Van Doren's poem is titled Woe, Woe: Woe, woe...
...Lax's poetry is atypical, iconoclastic, dependent on the imagery of the eye as much as that of the mind...
...Though a survivor, Lax remains the last unacknowledged—and, alas, uncollected—major poet of his post-60s generation...
...Kostelanetz would quibble with her on that, and so would that small group of devotees who receive Lax's poems in an aerogram or envelope of irregular size, marked with a colorful foreign stamp...
...I am thinking particularly of Seal Sun!Stone" she explains, "in which the repeated words, when the poem is read aloud properly, bring about in the imagination a more profound sense of their meanings till by the end of the poem we are hot with the sun on stone and our eyes are filled with the susurrations of the sea and our eyes with its dazzle...
...Noting that Cables was dedicated to Lax, Kostelanetz observed that he regarded Lax "among America's greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words...
...God is long./ Maybe that: he really mourns./ The night comes...
...And when Ed Rice started Jubilee magazine, it was natural that Lax should have come aboard...
...But since there has not been a whole lot heard about Lax...
...Van Doren put Lax in one of his own poems, a poem that took its cue from Merton's portrait of Lax in The Seven Storey Mountain...
...Mark Van Doren, for one —although it is uncertain whether Van Doren was less captivated by Lax's poetry than what he called his "chief secret": "a sort of bliss that he could do nothing about...
...better to be recognized when we can relish it...
...His judgment was fair enough...
...He must be pleased, over there on his Greek island...
...It was kind of a shock to realize that Lax was post-60, as indeed Merton would be had he not died so tragically ten years ago...
...How many know his poetic evocation of a traveling European circus— with which, incidentally, he appeared as a clown—The Circus of the Sun...
...ceeded, Lax's poetry has grown more and mote sparse...
...4 Times Book Review...
...Good, good: how get it said/In man's time...
...Not that Lax has not known praise and recognition...
...Lax's arrival at Jubilee followed stints at The New Yorker, Time and in Holly, wood as a script writer...
...He deals in inks of varying colors, in word arrangements, in jottings, a single sentence, a single line of verse...
...It's difficult, but Lax has his admirers...
...Denise Levertov wrote that a decade ago...
...The long face,/ Patiently, in hoarse wind,/ Meditates, meditates,/Without a word that men hear...
...He and his work are too valuable to be known but to a Mediterranean sun and to that handful of lucky people who receive those aerograms and irregularsized envelopes with his songs and messages inside...
...It follows from this, and the pulses that throbbed in Merton and his crowd, that Lax should have become a Catholic...
...Still, Kostelanetz did strike one stimulating note in the Feb...
...I just happen to have found it wordy and redundant...
...Lax's face is that of one seeming to be caught in some inexplicable woe...
...In the early 1960s he took off for Greece, and since then he 'has been here and there, sometimes even in New York, but never for Jong...
...So much unmentioned...
...NEWS& VIEWS Robert Lax It took New York Times book reviewer Richard Kostelanetz 850 labored words to tell us something we knew from Robert Lowell in a single phrase: that Thomas Merton was "a modest, not altogether satisfactory poet...
...Whatever, the post60's reminder made it especially appropriate that some nice words, however brief, be said of Lax...
...When they do, and I have,/ What a seeing, what a song,/ Not a thought but thanks God/For bird and leaf and Sunday morning...
...A king, but a Jew too...
...As the years have prq...
...Interestingly enough, it was not in connection with Merton, but in a parenthetical aside having to do with Merton's close friend Robert Lax...
...Of Lax, Merton wrote that "he was a kind of combination of Hamlet and Elias...
...JOHN DEEDY 130...
...Lax has always 'been afraid he was in a blind alley, and half aware that, after all, it might not be a blind alley, but God, infinity...
...Denise Levertov once wrote that this saddened her, because she felt deeply that the mainstream of poetry was aural, sonic—not visual in the Lax sense...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 5
