Every minimalist poet must come to terms
with Lax.
At first, Robert Lax was a poet of the
syntactic word:
The silver morning shifts her
birds
From tree to tree;
Young green fires burn along the
branch;
The river moves but each wave holds a
place,
Pattern of knives above the juggling
tide.
(from “Circus,” 1949)
Although there were early signs of what was
to come. . . Take this heavy-handed bit of anaphora from “The Man with the Big
General Notions” (1939):
And so did the shell
And so did the gum
And so did the tape
So did the bar
So did the beam
So did the box
So did the bone
So did the glue
So did the stone.
Jump to the year of my birth (1960) and Lax
was becoming himself:
the port
was longing
the port
was longing
not for
this ship
not for
that ship
not for
this ship
not for
that ship
Lax became the poet of great reserve,
dispensing with syntax, dispensing with complication, dispensing with what we
would usually call variation. Here, one of his better known poems,
complete:
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
river
Sometimes, his poems, sometimes, shock me
with their power, their power. How can such, how can such, a simple phrase, a
simple turn, cause my skin (my skin) to creep?
in me
in me
in me
is the
watcher
Occasionally, these brevities are parables.
Occasionally, these brevities are epigrams:
every
night
in the
world
is a
night
in the
hospital
Lax wrote about nature (you can sense a man
on a Greek island surrounded by sea, by sand, by sky) and thought (he watches
for and reproduces the smallest change to force us to force ourselves to
think):
the
sea
the
sea
the
air
the
air
the
sky
the
sky
the
sky
Sometimes associated with the concrete
poets—for their central interest was examining the concreteness of language—Lax
often wrote poems in mirroring columns, each often a perfect en face translation
of itself into itself (which you will have to imagine):
hill
hill
shad
shad
ow
ow
hill
hill
shad
shad
ow
ow
cloud
cloud
shad
shad
ow
ow
cloud
cloud
shad
shad
ow
ow
Lax’s purity of phrase
and line, of word and word and word, calls all us minimalist poets to task, asks
each of us to write the tighter poem, forces each of us to search for our
minimalist voice to replace the prolix vox pop of our times.
Somehow, Lax was born. In
Olean, along on the Southern Tier of
New
York.
Lived in Greece for years, but returned. To
Olean just in time to die. In the year 2000,
without my ever knowing. Before tonight, he died in my
state.
Every minimalist poet must come to terms
with laxness.