Robert Lax (November 30, 1915 – September 26, 2000) was an American poet, known in particular for his association with

Trappist The Trappists, officially known as the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (, abbreviated as OCSO) and originally named the Order of Reformed Cistercians of Our Lady of La Trappe, are a Religious order (Catholic), Catholic religious o ...

monk and writer

Thomas Merton Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915December 10, 1968), religious name M. Louis, was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, Christian mysticism, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion. He was a monk in the Trapp ...

. 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 Patmos (, ) is a Greece, Greek island in the Aegean Sea. It is famous as the location where, according to Christian belief, John of Patmos received the vision found in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and where the book was written. ...

during the latter part of his life. Considered by some to be a self-exiled

hermit A hermit, also known as an eremite (adjectival form: hermitic or eremitic) or solitary, is a person who lives in seclusion. Eremitism plays a role in a variety of religions. Description In Christianity, the term was originally applied to a Chr ...

, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.

Life

Lax was born in

Olean, New York Olean ( ) is a Administrative divisions of New York#City, city in Cattaraugus County, New York, United States. Olean is the largest city in Cattaraugus County and serves as its financial, business, transportation and entertainment center. It is ...

, to Sigmund and Rebecca Lax. His father had immigrated to the United States from Austria at the age of sixteen. When Robert was in eighth grade, the family moved to Elmhurst, Queens, New York. He first met the future painter Ad Reinhardt at Elmhurst's Newtown High School. Lax attended

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

in New York City, where he studied with the poet and critic

Mark Van Doren Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thin ...

. As a student there in the late 1930s, he worked on the college humor magazine ''

Jester A jester, also known as joker, court jester, or fool, was a member of the household of a nobleman or a monarch kept to entertain guests at the royal court. Jesters were also travelling performers who entertained common folk at fairs and town ma ...

'' with a classmate who became a close lifetime friend, Thomas Merton. Others on the ''Jester'' staff were Ed Rice, founder and editor of ''Jubilee'' magazine (to which all three men contributed in the 1950s and '60s) and Ad Reinhardt.McGregor 2017 In his biography, ''The Seven Storey Mountain'', Merton describes Lax at a meeting with other ''Jester'' staff: "Taller than them all, and more serious, with a long face, like a horse, and a great mane of black hair on top of it, Bob Lax meditated on some incomprehensible woe." Mark Van Doren has commented that "The woe, I now believe, was that Lax could not state his bliss; his love of the world and all things, all persons in it". After graduating in 1938, Lax joined the staff of ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'', working his way up from assistant poetry editor; he was also poetry editor of ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' magazine, wrote screenplays in Hollywood, and taught at both the

University of North Carolina The University of North Carolina is the Public university, public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referre ...

and Connecticut College for Women. Around 1941, he and Merton volunteered for a couple of weeks at Catherine Doherty's Friendship House in Harlem.Whittaker, Richard. "Remembering Robert Lax—A Conversation with Steve Georgiou", ''Conversations'', May 11, 2017
/ref> Lax converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1943, five years after Thomas Merton, and Rice was godfather to both men. But Lax desired a simple life, so he wandered, working in circuses in Canada as a clown and expert juggler. It was travelling with the Cristiani Brothers circus in 1949 that enabled him to generate material for his collection '' The Circus of the Sun'', although that was not published until 1959. Meanwhile, Lax had helped Rice start ''Jubilee'', a lay Catholic magazine, in 1952 and became its roving editor. In 1953, he was in Paris, writing for a small literary magazine, ''New Story''. By 1962, he found his way to the Greek islands, initially settling in Kalymnos, then moving on to

, where he spent his last years. Seeking relative solitude, Lax said it was important to "put yourself in a place where Grace can flow." The 1962-67, correspondence of Lax and Merton, written in a kind of comic argot, covered his early years in Greece and was first published as ''A Catch of Anti-Letters'' in 1978. Later, their correspondence over the years 1938–68 was published as ''When Prophecy Still Had a Voice''. In 1969, Lax received the National Council of the Arts Award. In 1990 he received an honorary doctorate from

St. Bonaventure University St. Bonaventure University is a private university, private Franciscan university in St. Bonaventure, New York. It has 2,760 undergraduate and graduate students. The Order of Friars Minor, Franciscans established the university in 1858. In ath ...

, a Franciscan institution near Olean, and became its first Reginald A. Lenna Visiting Professor of English, spending three weeks giving readings on campus. The university now houses the main Robert Lax archives. Additional collections of his papers are at Columbia and Georgetown University. During his final years on Patmos, Lax was the subject of Nicolas Hubert and Werner Penzel's 1999 film, ''Why Should I Buy a Bed When All I Want Is Sleep?'' He moved back to Olean in 2000, leaving Europe by ship from Southampton, accompanied by his niece and her husband, as he would not travel by air. Shortly after, on September 26, 2000, he died at age 84.

Writing

Lax wrote hundreds of poems and dozens of books in his long career, but never reached the level of recognition that some of his peers say he deserves. Jack Kerouac, whom he knew in New York, called Lax "one of the great original voices of our times ...a Pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence".Hirschfield, Robert. "Robert Lax: A Life slowly Lived", ''Beshara Magazine'', issue 12, 2019
/ref> ''Circus of the Sun'', a collection of poems metaphorically comparing the circus to Creation, was one of his most acclaimed works. On its publication in 1959, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' hailed it as "perhaps the greatest English-language poem of this century." An excerpt was later distributed to those attending Lax's funeral at St. Bonaventure University on 29 September 29, 2000. Over the years following the composition of ''Circus of the Sun'', Lax's poetry became more and more stripped down to essentials, concentrating on simplicity and making the most out of the fewest components, a technique common to artistic

minimalism In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...

. Sometimes these pieces consisted of single words, even single syllables, running page after page. As a consequence his work was perceived as sharing the characteristics of

Concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...

and was included in Stephen Bann's defining ''Poetry: An International Anthology'' (1967) and mentioned in Mary Ellen Solt's study, ''Concrete Poetry: A World View'' (1968). Lax certainly shared an interest in artistic procedures with his friend Ad Reinhardt and reflected that artist's series of black paintings in his own "Homage to Reinhardt": Specialist presses supported such gestures and brought out limited editions, such as the series of hand-written color poems that appeared as silkscreens from Edizioni Francesco Conz. Even words were dispensed with in some of the 1971 publications from Journeyman Press. ''Mostly Blue'' consists of graph paper filled in with colored squares, while ''Another Red Red Blue Poem'' is composed of thin bars of those colors. In an interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Lax later commented on his adoption of minimalist abstraction that "conversations with Reinhardt, and his directions in painting, certainly had an influence on my writing. Sometimes not specifically, but the general direction that he was working in certainly did—towards reducing the number of colours, reducing the form, and repeating the theme." On another occasion he explained the creation of thin vertical columns of a few numbers or a single capital letter as arising from the wish to adopt the methods of abstract painters, "trying to find what the essence for me of a traditional poem is, and getting it down to that. . . . I wanted to see what it would be. I wanted to do it with the simplest elements." In other instances, Lax used repetition of a few words either as a device for instilling a sense of serenity or to create a sense of surprise in the reader when a change in the pattern occurs. Despite the limited vocabulary of his poems, some create narratives, while others seem more like examples for use in meditative practice or even spiritual discipline. This can be experienced in the tape made of a 1974 performance of Lax's poems given by himself and Robert Wolf in 1974, resembling an uninflected incantation. When Mark Van Doren expressed his doubt about Lax's change in direction, the poet suggested that he might appreciate them more by reading them aloud in this way. Karen Alexander comments on Lax's 1985 "Dark Earth Bright Sky", in which just those four words are repeated in different permutations: "We could not be more familiar with the simple contrasting elements in this poem, but we often allow the clutter of our lives to obscure our awareness of them. Lax meditates upon them and presents them anew… This is truly essential poetry, poetry with its roots deep in the universal foundation of the human consciousness". And Ryo Yamaguchi, in drawing a parallel between Lax's poetry and the minimalist procedures in the art of

Donald Judd Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism.Tate Modern websit"Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Donald Judd" Retrieved on February 19, 2009. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for ...

and in the music of

Philip Glass Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimal music, minimalism, being built up fr ...

and

Steve Reich Stephen Michael Reich ( ; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer best known as a pioneer of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich descr ...

, also acknowledges the overlap into spirituality characteristic of the latter two.

Spirituality

In the blurb for ''33 Poems'', William Maxwell, who had worked on ''The New Yorker'' with the poet, is quoted as commenting on Lax, "To the best of my knowledge, a saint is simply all the things that he is. If you placed him among the Old Testament figures above the south portal of Chartres, he wouldn't look odd." But although his output embodies a spiritual outlook, Lax was not a doctrinaire writer. He owed as much to eastern as to western systems of spirituality. For several years, Lax practiced the method of

meditation Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique to train attention and awareness and detach from reflexive, "discursive thinking", achieving a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state, while not judging the meditat ...

developed by Eknath Easwaran, and near the end of his life, Lax's only reading each day was from Easwaran.

Interpretations

Lax composed a 35-minute ''Black/White Oratorio'' using only nine colour-words and 'and'. This, as it was later arranged by John Beer, was to be performed by a chorus of nine to fifteen people. Since 2014 there have been performances by the Los Angeles-based Readers Chorus. Between 2011 and 2015 there have also been four visual interpretations of Lax poems by German animator Susanne Wiegner, three of them based on readings by Lax and another interpreting the printed text. In 2018 Kile Smith composed ''The Arc in the Sky'' on nine texts of Robert Lax, described as a 65-minute pilgrimage for unaccompanied choir. The following year it was released commercially by Navona Records.Short excerpts
/ref>

Principal poetical works

* '' The Circus of the Sun'' (1959) * ''New Poems'' (1962) * ''Sea & Sky (1965) * ''33 Poems'' (1988) * ''Rooster'' (1991) * ''A Thing That Is'' (1997) * ''Circus Days and Nights'' (2000)

Poems online

''Circus Days and Nights''
The Overlook Press 2000
''Poems (1962–1997)''
Wave Books 2013

Light & Dust
"Kalymnos: November 29, 1968", an 11-part poem
Poetry Foundation
''Red Circle Blue Square''
Journeyman Press 1971

2001
"the port/was longing", ''Less'' #2
Edinburgh, Essence Press 2009
"Alley Violinist" read by Garrison Keillor

"Aphorisms"
Assembling magazine, Assembling Press 1970

References

External links

Finding aid to Robert Lax papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Robert Lax.com (McGregor's website dedicated to Lax)

Robert Lax profile
PoetryFoundation.org. Accessed April 5, 2024.
Robert Lax's Contributions to ''The New Yorker''
newyorker.com. Accessed April 5, 2024. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lax, Robert 1915 births 2000 deaths American hermits Columbia College (New York) alumni People from Olean, New York Poets from New York City People from Queens, New York 20th-century American poets American male poets 20th-century American male writers American people of Austrian descent