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Robert Lax and Daniel Berrigan

An old Lax friend, Jose Rafael Revenga, recently sent this newspaper clipping of Lax (at 64) with priest and activist Daniel Berrigan in 1980 when the two were together at a Jacques Maritain Symposium.  According to the caption, the two people with them are poets Anthony Walsh and Therese Lentfoehr.  (Click on Lentfoehr’s name to read about her friendship with Thomas Merton and a listing of the letters they exchanged.)  It was for this symposium that Lax wrote his remembrance “Harpo’s Progress: Notes Toward an Understanding of Merton’s Ways.”

To learn more about Daniel Berrigan’s fascinating life, read Jim Forest’s new book, At Play in the Lion’s Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan, published in November 2017 by Orbis Books.

Another book to look at is: Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings, edited by John Dear.

A Place Where Grace Can Flow

On the website for the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Transformation, author Mary van Balen has posted a lovely meditation on Lax’s idea that we should put ourselves in “a place where grace can flow.”

“Some places of grace remain constants in our lives,” van Balen writes.  “Some change. Lax found them throughout his life, with friends, while traveling with a circus family, with poor fishermen on Patmos, and other people and places in between. Being attentive and open, we find them, too.”

You can read her full meditation here.

FREE Online Broadcast of Concert Based on Lax’s Poetry and Prose–Sunday, October 28

The Crossing’s concert of The Arc in the Sky, Composer Kile Smith‘s 65-minute musical composition using Lax’s poetry and prose, will be on broadcast online at WRTI.org at 4-6 p.m. (EST) on Sunday, Oct 28.  The show will probably not be archived, so you’ll have to listen while it’s streaming.  You’ll find more information about the broadcast at:

http://www.wrti.org/post/rediscover-choral-music-wrti-901-crossings-month-moderns-concert-broadcasts-october
For more about the concert itself, go to:
https://www.crossingchoir.org/mom3

The Circus of Creation: Composer Gwyneth Walker’s Tribute to Robert Lax’s Circus of the Sun

Marcia Kelly, Robert Lax’s niece and literary executor, told me an interesting story recently.  A few years ago, she and her husband Jack (who live in NY) received a message from a composer named Gwyneth Walker, telling them the composition she had written based on Lax’s Circus of the Sun would be performed in Sarasota, FL, in five days.  She had forgotten to let them know…but they happened to be in Florida and had plans to be in Sarasota that weekend already.  When they went to the concert, who should walk in but several members of the Cristiani family who lived nearby!  (Sarasota has long been the winter home for many circus people.)

The concert was fabulous, Marcia says, with a local celebrity dressed as a master of ceremonies reading the spoken parts and a sold-out crowd.

For more about the concert, including a review, Walker’s thoughts on her composition (called “The Circus of Creation”) and PDFs of both the orchestration and the spoken parts, go to Walker’s website.

Interview with Steve Georgiou, Editor of Lax’s IN THE BEGINNING WAS LOVE

For those of you who aren’t on the mailing list for the Robert Lax Newsletter, here’s an interview I mentioned in the August issue, with Steve Georgiou, who has written several books about Robert Lax and is the editor of Lax’s In the Beginning Was Love: Contemplative Words of Robert Lax.  It was conducted by Richard Whittaker, West Coast editor of Parabola magazine.

Reviewer Calls Concert with Lax’s Words and Music by Composer Kile Smith a “Masterpiece”

A few months ago, I poste about a then-upcoming concert in Philadelphia called “The Arc in the Sky,” with music by composer Kile Smith and words (chosen by Smith) by Robert Lax.  By all accounts, the concert was a huge success, with standing ovations and people in tears (really!).  You can read the reviews and a full description of the program, including complete text of the Lax works used, on Smith’s website.

One reviewer called the concert “a masterpiece of emotional expressivity and spiritual revelation” while another called the final section “a bright-as-sunshine shout of ecstasy that looks to the horizon and suggests a broad spiritual quest.”

Happily, a CD is in production.  I’ll be sure to announce how to obtain a copy when it is available.

POETS HOUSE in NYC to Host a Robert Lax Celebration at 7 p.m. on November 30

Poets John Beer and Stacey Tran and Lax biographer Michael N. McGregor will headline a tribute to Robert Lax at Poets House in NYC at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 30, Lax’s 103rd birthday.  The celebration will take place in Elizabeth Kray Hall at Poets House (10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282–Tel: (212) 431-7920).
Admission:  $10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House members

Here’s the Poets House description of the event:

“Thomas Merton, the religious writer and poet, described his friend Robert Lax as “a potential prophet, but without rage” with “a mind full of tremendous and subtle intuitions.” A Roman Catholic convert, Lax abandoned New York City literary life for seclusion on the islands of Greece, where he moved in 1962 and continued to write minimalist poems for 30 years, earning him a following by major poets, from E.E. Cummings to Ginsberg to Denise Levertov, even as mainstream academic circles ignored his work. This tribute reading and conversation honors the late poet on the evening of his birthday and on the occasion of the reissue of his 33 Poems.”

Visit the Poets House calendar for more information.

Video: “Harpo and the Clown of God”: Michael N. McGregor Talking about the Lax/Merton Friendship

A video recording of Michael N. McGregor’s keynote address at the 2017 International Thomas Merton Society conference is now viewable online.  The talk, titled “Harpo and the Clown of God: The Seven-Storied Friendship of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax,” explores the extraordinary lifelong friendship of these two intelligent, spiritual, creative, and often silly men.  To view the presentation, go to the Merton Center Digital Collections.

A New Musical Composition with Text by Robert Lax and Music by Composer Kile Smith To Premiere in Philly June 30

Composer Kile Smith, whose spiritually-inspired work has been praised by publications from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the Miami Herald to the Boston Classical Review, spent much of the past year working on a new composition featuring poems and other writings by Robert Lax.  The work, called “The Arc in the Sky,” will premiere as part of the “Month of the Moderns” at 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 30 at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia.  For tickets or to learn more about the premiere, go to the website for The Crossing, which is sponsoring the show.

You’ll find a long write-up about the show’s origins and contents, as well as Smith’s thoughts on Lax’s work and some of the Lax poems featured in his composition, at Smith’s blog.

 

Composer Kile Smith