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Robert Lax’s PAX and the Politics of Art and Peace

(Note: These thoughts and other Lax-related news and commentary were included in the December issue of the Lax Newsletter, sent out last week.  If you’d like to receive the newsletter, which is mailed to your inbox once every two months, just fill out the form on the Home page.)

“I may be wrong about Pax, but keep feeling that through good poems and pictures, peace can travel.”
–Robert Lax to Thomas Merton, 1953

The image here is from the third issue of Robert Lax’s broadsheet Pax, which he published sporadically between 1956 and 1962, adding three new issues in 1985.  I’ve been thinking about Pax in the wake of the American election because Lax’s idea in publishing it was to spread peace by sharing the work of writers and artists.  The work didn’t have to be about peace per se; the simple act of making art, Lax thought, is a peaceful–and therefore peacemaking–activity.

I don’t know any more than anyone else what the coming months and years will bring, but I’ve seen the agitation and rancor the election has fostered already.  I’ve seen people say on Facebook and elsewhere that everyone should take to the streets or get involved in politics.  A former writing student of mine said over tea the other day that she was unsure about writing in these times, worried that writing an essay about something other than current issues might be trivial.  I’m pretty sure I know what Lax would have told her: that we need people thinking deeply and imaginatively about life right now; that we need those people to put their observations and intuitions into words and images; that we need books with those words and images in our hands and on our shelves and in our beds at night when we’re prone to worrying about where our world is heading.

When I was on my reading tour for Pure Act, an audience member asked me if Lax was political at all.  I said no.  But two or three days later, someone who had been at the reading suggested (gently) that I was wrong.  Lax’s politics, like Thomas Merton’s, were the politics of peace, this person wrote.  And he was right.  Pursuing peace through whatever means, even a fragile newsprint broadsheet that few people read, is a political act.

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”  –Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”  –Thomas Merton

(You’ll find information on all Pax issues, including a list of the poets and poems in each one, here.)

A Found Recording of Robert Lax & Robert Wolf Reading “Sea & Sky” and “Black & White”

I received a message this past week from a man named Edouard Jeunet, who said he’d found an old cassette of Robert Lax reading his “Sea & Sky” and “Black & White” poems in Italy in 1978 and uploaded a digital version to the Internet.  I passed the message on to Lax’s niece and literary executor, Marcia Kelly, and she asked some of Lax’s old friends if they knew of it.  Judy Emery, who knew Lax for decades and edited a couple of his books, sent the following reply: “I thought this tape had been lost.  It was not made in Italy but right here in New York in September 1974.  Three people: Emil Antonucci, Robert Wolf (nee Kachnowski) and Bob Lax spent an entire day recording Sea & Sky and other Lax poems.”

Here’s a link to the digital version.  The first voice you hear is Robert Lax; the second voice is Robert Wolf.  The recording copyright belongs to the Robert Lax Literary Trust.

 

 

Robert Lax Talks About Art as a Guide to Love and Understanding

Robert Lax in conversation with Michael N. McGregor, March 12, 1996 (an excerpt):

RL: I think that evolution, and all of history, moves through three classical stages: from power to wisdom to love.  The ultimate one is love.  You can say the reason for gaining some power is so you can gain some wisdom; the reason for gaining some wisdom is so you can finally understand or live in a state of love.  We talk about going from earth to paradise and we think of paradise as being the whole kingdom of love.

MM: So where does art fit into that movement?  What is the purpose of art?

RL: Well, I’ll talk figuratively for a second.  Just as Virgil could lead Dante into hell and up as far as he could, and Beatrice could lead Dante the rest of the way up to heaven, art is a guide.  Art is a bridge or a guide that leads you along to upper levels.  It doesn’t drag you along by any means.  At most it coaxes you or invites you.  You might think, if you’d never seen any art or read any poetry, that your dreams and things that go beyond the ordinary were yours alone, and you might consider them a problem.  Or you might consider your reactions to what someone said, which seemed so elaborate and so much beyond what, in the ordinary course of things, you’d expect them to be—she slammed the door; she didn’t slam the door, she just shut it a little quietly but still I’ve been thinking about it all day, the way she closed that door—if you’re alone with those thoughts and have no art to open up that world to you, you could be in trouble.  But fortunately somebody learned to write about these things.  Somebody learned to put them on stage.  That helps the whole community know how to understand those moments—not just to deal with them but to understand and even appreciate them.

MM: I’m thinking about that phrase from Blake: the doors of perception.  Is that what you’re talking about with art?

RL: Yes.  I think that’s very apropos.  I think that’s exactly it.

A Quote from Robert Lax on His 101st Birthday

Today is Robert Lax’s 101st birthday.  Picturing him as a child all those years ago, it’s interesting to contemplate something he wrote in the late ’60s:

 

“…the meaning of our lives, and what we write, and what we do,

is somehow in us from the beginning:

in this sense, the child’s only duty is to live and grow”

–p. 304, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

 

Happy birthday, Bob.

Concrete Poetry Conference in Honor of Robert Lax: Mar. 31-Apr. 1, 2017

St. Bonaventure University in Robert Lax’s hometown of Olean, NY, will be honoring him March 31-April 1, 2017 with a conference called  Never Abolish Chance: The Concrete Poetry Conference.

Poets and critics who were part of the Concrete Poetry movement in the later part of the 20th century embraced Lax as a kind of forefather and included his work in books and articles about the movement.  This helped to bring his work greater attention, including more serious critical study.

The keynote speakers for the conference will be John Beer, Renee Gladman, and Evie Shockley.

John Beer is the editor of poems (1962-1997), a selection of Robert Lax’s  poetry published by Wave Books in 2013.  His own works of poety include The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium Books, 2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; a chapbook, Lucinda (Spork Press, 2013); and the full-length verse novella of Lucinda (Canarium Books, 2016).

Renee Gladman‘s works of prose include Juice (Kelsey Street Press, 2000), The Activist (KRUPSKAYA, 2003), Newcomer Can’t Swim (Kelsey Street Press, 2007), and To After That (Toaf) (Atelos, 2008). Her recent title include Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), and the Ravicka novels Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013). In 2014-2015 she was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she worked on Prose Architectures, an interdisciplinary project exploring the continuum between sentences and drawings. Gladman has taught at several U.S. universities, most extensively as a professor of creative writing at Brown University from 2006-2014.

Evie Shockley is the author the new black, winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, a half-red sea, and a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa University Press, 2011). Her honors include the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Shockley is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, NJ.

Proposals

Please submit 300-word abstracts for papers or 500-word abstracts for panels/roundtables to Concrete@sbu.edu. Proposals will be accepted until January 10. Accepted participants will be notified by January 25.

Kerouac Tries his Hand at Lax’s Vertical Style

I thought I’d end my summer hiatus (lasting into fall) with this short piece of writing by Jack Kerouac, in which he tries his hand at Lax’s vertical style.  This is a letter to his girlfriend at the time, Joyce Johnson (who, coincidentally, was one of my professors in graduate school at Columbia University 40 years later).  The “Robert” Kerouac refers to is no doubt Lax himself.  The letter was sent in January 1958, four months after the publication of On the Road, when the friendship between Kerouac and Lax was strongest.

Kerouac’s letter to Johnson is from p. 116 in the book Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-58 by Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson

I’ll be adding more new posts to this site in the days ahead.

PURE ACT a Finalist for a Washington State Book Award

Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax has been named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir.  You’ll find a full list of finalists and information about the awards ceremony here.

If you live in the Seattle area and are interested in attending, the awards ceremony will take place 7-9 p.m. in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Seattle Public Library’s central branch (1000 Fourth Avenue).

The ceremony is free and parking is $7 in the library garage.
wsba_auditorium

A Look Inside Lax’s Patmos House: His Wall of Inspiration and Memories

The first photo here is of a long table in the main room of Lax’s house on Patmos and the wall above it, where he taped photographs, cards and children’s drawings sent to him by friends and strangers.  He said once that all of the things up there told him to put them there.  He used the room this table and wall were in for most activities, including sleeping and entertaining guests.

Lax wall--Patmos

On the table itself, you can see a stack of the notebooks Lax used for jotting down poems and observations, a large supply of airmail envelopes for the many letters he wrote, and the pens he used to make drawings and yellow dots for friends.  The blue denim coat in the foreground and the straw hat to to the left were regular garb when he went down into town.

The wall items are a bit hard to discern but they include an icon of St. John the Theologian (a copy of which hangs above my own writing desk), a pontillist painting of a circus, two cards with images of St. John on Patmos, and a photograph that might be of Jack Kerouac.  The items stretched much further down the wall and across the next wall to the left.  When you sat in that room and talked with Lax, you had the feeling that you were surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

The second photo is of a poster that hung in Lax’s entryway in later years, just inside the frosted glass door.  The words on it capture the feeling during summer days when friends of all kinds streamed in and out.

Greece 2006 (Patmos & Kalymnos) 157