Poems

by Robert Lax, John Beer (Editor)

"One of the great original voices of our times—a pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence."—Jack Kerouac

"Robert Lax's poems [prove] yet again that the gift to be simple is the gift to be free, that less is more, and that least may sometimes be most."—John Ashbery

Poems (1962-�1997) gathers thirty-five years of Robert Lax's work, rarely published and largely composed in solitude on the island of Patmos. Compiled and edited by the poet's former assistant John Beer, this selection reflects—through meditative sequences in striking vertical columns—Lax's rigorous attention to the world around him and his relentless aspiration to new ways of writing.

love &
death

are blood
& bone

love &
death

are bread
& stone

love &
death
are rose
& thorn

(love &
death

are sheep
& shorn)

Robert Lax (1915�-2000) published dozens of volumes of poetry and prose with small presses and worked as an editor for the New Yorker, Jubilee, and PAX. From 1962 to the end of his life, he made his home in the Greek islands.

John Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. For two years in the late 1990s, he served as literary assistant to Robert Lax. He currently lives and teaches in Oregon.

Genres: Poetry

375 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2013

About the author

Robert Lax (30 November, 1915 in Olean, New York – 26 September, 2000 in Olean) was an American poet, known in particular for his association with Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. Another friend of his youth was the painter Ad Reinhardt. After a long period of drifting from job to job about the world, Lax settled on the island of Patmos during the latter part of his life. Considered by some to be a self-exiled hermit, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.

Reviews

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book while sitting by the ocean. I didn’t realize how much it was getting to me until I went to float in the waves. Overhead, 10 pelicans were flying. (I am the sort of person who always has to count them.) The last 2 were lagging slightly behind. I looked up and thought, “That space is where you breathe. Those last 2 pelicans are a stanza.”

This collection of Robert Lax’s poems -- which seems to privilege the most “abstract” and spartan of his work -- is a godsend. Wave Books deserves huge praise and respect for taking the risk of publishing it.

Reading this book brings to mind the sensation of wandering alone through an almost empty art museum: just a few objects, perhaps prehistoric, with an immense space around them. To me, that is a divine and longed-for sensation. Others, in a hurry, might look around and think “There’s not much here!” Certainly, if you shell out for this book, you must be prepared for the fact that you are buying a big book with remarkably few words in it! Still, I promise you can wander for hours and hours.

I had the good fortune to read this book in tandem with ‘Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax’ the biography by Michael McGregor, and I recommend this combination. That book reveals that a large amount of Lax’s work remains unpublished. His journal, excerpted in the bio and in tiny long-lost magazines, seems particularly rich. Therefore, please allow me to plea: Wave Books, you’ve done something grand! Grant us now an accompanying text! The journals, perhaps some of the looser, jotted poems, or the earlier ones? Pretty please!

2 pieces of random advice: Lax and his biographer both emphasized the need to look at the typed poems as a musical score. They are meant to be read aloud. Especially since Lax gets labelled “a concrete poet”, you might think the poems are meant only for the page. Not so. In that spirit, you might find it useful to search out a few of the Lax videos on YouTube, especially the hourlong ‘chamber film’ titled “Why should I buy a bed when all I want is sleep?” I am smitten with it. I hope this assists you to enter the space and wavelength of Robert Lax: it is a place full of sensitivity and redolent with joy.

[M- S__ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love the poetry of Robert Lax, dull though it may at first glance seem. It requires patience which is a lot to ask from any modern reader (myself included), and it requires a willingness to just "go with it" when you're reading. Some of the imagery was beautiful. In one poem the air is the hand of a great giant sandwiched between the distant sky and roar of the ocean. Some of the poetry will give you a headache: large blocks of the same word written over and over to very little purpose. But I think Lax understood his poetry not as individual pieces, but as a body of work. In this way, parentheticals or slight changes in words or themes would wake me up from the trance of reading this & that & that & this. I would find myself suddenly aware of the relationship of word and subject. Suddenly the sea would seem to be crashing out before me and the word sea would look so small on the page. And seeing it stacked atop itself a hundred times would both trigger this intense pleasure at knowing there is something bigger that I can experience outside of these words and in the same breath an intense pain at the knowledge that in some larger context (unknowable to me) my experience of the sea is just as small as the word. If nothing else, Lax's minimalist poetry (which is all you get in this collection) creates an impossible kind of blank canvas: one so bare that it frightens its audience not to paint something on it. And that's an experience I've never had with any other poet.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly not everyone's cup of tea, and not my usual poetry leanings. As the intro points out, Lax was linked with the concrete poets in the mid-20th century, but not really of them. Lax's attention to layout, the incorporation of layout as part of the poem, wasn't however a kind of shaped poetry or poetry as visual, as with the concretes. He was writing in columns instead of lines, again as the intro points out, and this--it seems to me--makes his poetry (and its layout) more a matter of music than visual art. Words as notes or sounds, but not in the Dada sense of senselessness. Rather, rhythmic and extremely simple or basic images repeated in a musical manner.

[John Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read slowly and feel it. Maybe read "problem in design" first. That piece brought it all home for me. Not just simple. Not inscrutable. Essential.

[cy · Rating 4 out of 5]

meditative… easy to want to start skimming, but the whole point is to sit with each word as it is and as it is becoming, so i did a lot of backtracking, a lot of intentional slowing down. whispered out loud to myself, the sea the sea the sky sky the air the air the sea

[Kevin Bertolero · Rating 4 out of 5]

a perfect meditation.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Ross (Editorial Assistant, Tin House): I’ve been reading three books from our friends at Wave Poetry in Seattle in preparation for a reading in Portland this weekend. Cedar Sigo’s Literary Arts makes the personal lyrical, covering love affairs, creative relationships, and life as an artist with an energetic music to its lines. In Etruria, Rodney Koeneke drops cultural references from the ancient Etruscans to Frank O’Hara to the internet, managing to sound brilliant even as he ends the collection with the line “drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk.” However, it’s Wave’s big, important collection/reissue of Robert Lax’s New Poems, Sea and Sky, and a handful of other poems that has most of my attention. Poems (1962-1997) makes Lax easily available in the US for the first time in a good long while. Wave reached out to currently Portland-based poet John Beer, who spent two years as Lax’s assistant on the island of Patmos in the late nineties. The simplicity of Lax’s poems can be surprisingly overwhelming—their repetitive language and narrow, columnar forms belie not a hidden complexity, but a meditative, expansive power. Beer’s introduction places Lax historically, personally, and spiritually with Lax’s friends and contemporaries like Merton and Reinhardt.

[Aseem Kaul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taken individually, the poems in this collection of Robert Lax's work are intriguing, combining radical simplicity with an almost meditative use of emptiness and space to offer a style that is utterly unique.

Collected in a single volume, though, the poems seem to me to lose much of their power, their utter lack of stimulation making the enterprise seem inherently trivial, a brilliant party trick repeated too often to remain interesting. Lax may be one of the rare poets whose work is better read in isolation than all together in one place.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

What started out as fun, playful, rhythmic and songlike suddenly became madness-inducing and somehow exhausting. I literally began to tense up and feel scattered as I neared the end of the volume. I can't say this is bad poetry, as it is certainly interesting, but I will not be reading more. These poems are more about form and what they lack than about what they contain.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like nothing else I've read. Quiet, slight, gorgeous, and resonant. These poems will change the way you read poems, and maybe (hopefully?) the way you see the everyday as well.

[Lucas Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry stripped bare, very minimalistic. Reading it is almost meditative. I would pause sometimes, looking up at the sky while outside. Lax writes a lot about the sea and sky, but that was partly because he lived on a Greek island. Some of his poems are just one or two words, such as one that is "is" repeating. The poems are arranged vertically, sometimes in many vertical columns, so the page is near blank. It was different, experimental, and a good change for those looking for a 'different' poet. Lax is still unknown, but this book may help newcomers find him.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sense of spaciousness and freedom. This feels like a book of poems I would read sitting in the middle of a salt flat if the world had ended yesterday and I were the last person left. It's rain and silence after awakening and rupture; it's watching the world go by. Not meant to be engaged with intellectually. Just read it and notice how it makes you feel. The repetition, the blank space surrounding the words, the line breaks. Minimalist but profound and evocative.

[Andrei Mocuţa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Repetitive and exhausting:

in me
in me
in me

is the
watcher

in me
in me
in me

is the
watcher

in me
is the
watcher

in me
is the
watcher

in me
in me
in me

is the
watcher

Or:

river
river
river

river
river
river

river
river
river

river
river
river

[Clement · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a busy noisy world, Robert Lax's poetry is a rebellion of stillness and an invitation to slow down. Reading each poem out loud slowly and quietly, and breathing in the spaces felt, in a way, like a cleansing of haste and busyness.

[Zach Burba · Rating 5 out of 5]

"are you a visitor?" asked
the dog.

[Eleanor Francis · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful

[Margaret Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously divinely inspired

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

rhythm and repetition and spacing and space. made me calm and think.

[Felix L.G · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last poem reads like waves feel

[stephanie roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is as if the poet unlocked the secret of transferring the experience of sun and wind at his temporal location into the mind of his reader such that the effect of reading each word subverts physiology the way "box breathing" forces a body alarmed by imagined disaster back to the correct cardiac rythym. A magical work of enchantment.

[Rachel B · Rating 5 out of 5]

big flowers!!

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is truly a stunning book. Robert Lax takes poetry to a transcendent level that is rarely achieved.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow