For some time, I have interviewed poets writing in America today with a new slant to make those conversations somewhat different than the "classical" interview: I ask each interviewee to give me a list of five to ten authors and/or friends they would like to be interviewed by – instead of just being interviewed by me. I then invite each person on the poet's list to send me their questions, and send them to the interviewee, who chooses which ones to answer, in writing, and at his or her leisure. Once I receive the answers back, I edit their order – as if I were transcribing a conversation between the poet and his friends. This interview of poet Thomas Lux was conducted in February of 2005.

Thomas Lux was educated at Emerson College and, briefly, The University of Iowa. His books of poetry include: The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The Street of Clocks (2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994),for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Sunday (1979); The Glassblower's Breath (1976); and Memory's Handgrenade (1972). Lux has been the poet in residence at Emerson College (1972-1975), and a member of the Writing Faculty and director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has also taught at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and California at Irvine, among others. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Heather McHugh: Before it got too big for its britches, the country meant something you could distinguish from the city. (Some Brit once defined it as "a damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked.") You and I grew up in that defamed terrain. Do you think that rurality has something to teach urbanity?

Thomas Lux: I did grow up on a farm, in the semi-sticks. Though most of my life I've lived in cities. I think it was the relative solitude and the places to wander, or hide in, that most affected me growing up on a dairy farm. Woods, cornfields, haylofts, a small mountain. Some brooks that led to streams that led to larger streams that could almost be called rivers. Rurality can teach urbanity the smell of manure (horse and cow), silage, cut hay. When I first moved to New York in 1975, I used to go to where the horse carriages gathered on the edge of Central Park – because I missed the smell of horses. It can teach you that people still work with their hands and if their hands hurt it's not because of carpal tunnel syndrome. And it can remind us that a chicken sandwich once was flying or flapping around uncooked!

Billy Collins: You recently relocated from Bronxville to Atlanta. Has this radical shift had any influence on your poetry?

Thomas Lux: I'm not sure yet. It seems ice, snow, cold are not turning up as often in poems. I love this city. Baseball season lasts a few months longer! Today is Feb. 11, 2005 and I'm going to the first game of Georgia Tech's season – we always have an excellent baseball team, ranked 10th or 11th nationally this year. (Note: Georgia Tech was beaten, 5-2, which should not have happened, by Georgia State, which sponsors this magazine and therefore this interview.) I love the speech rhythms here. I grew some sorry-assed tomatoes last summer but was picking them until mid-November. And I'm learning more about the War of Northern Aggression.

Vijay Seshadri: You have always moved around a lot, even when you were teaching year in and year out at Sarah Lawrence. Your poems reflect that – they are about movement, about things seen in passing. Are movement, change, travel necessary to your imagination? How do they inform and conspire with your vision of experience?

Thomas Lux: I guess I have moved around a lot. Usually for jobs: California, Iowa, Houston, New York, North Carolina, Michigan, now in Atlanta. I lived in Boston and worked in New York for 16 years because my daughter lived in Boston and, therefore, so did I, commuting weekly. I used to put on in a month the miles I put on my car this past year. I've never really lived outside the US and I doubt if I ever will. It makes me crazy not being able to communicate, even read signs. One of my greatest humiliations occurred trying to buy a bus ticket in Rome. As my dotage draws closer I'm becoming more of a homebody. I look forward to a time when I don't have to travel so much. I don't know what's necessary to my imagination. I do know that sometimes I want to hit myself in the head with a hammer to quiet it!

Heather McHugh: Poets often wind up housed in the same academics department with, say, historicists – whose humors I think might be much improved by exposure to your moats and catapults... The historical sweep of your imagination seems to me the comic cousin to that of a poet like Jean Follain. Tell me what you make, in short, of human history.

Thomas Lux: Human history: astonishing acts of courage, generosity, and godliness about half the time and unspeakable cruelty, ignorance, and delusion the other half. In short: history proves we're human.

Billy Collins: Can you say something about how you use fields such as history and science as sources of metaphor?

Thomas Lux: Well, I read a lot of history. Not too much hard science but a fair amount of natural history, books about fish, bugs, rats, snakes, etc. I am always on the lookout for metaphorical possibilities that might spark a poem: a word, a few words, that might lead to something that might lead to something else. For example, there's a poem in The Cradle Place called "Dry Bite." A dry bite is when a venomous creature bites you but doesn't release its poison. It's a poem about gratitude and about luck and maybe guilt: why does one person get the dry bite and another the one loaded with venom? Another would be a poem called "The Gletz." A gletz is a tiny flaw in a diamond and its presence and the location of the gletz have a great deal to do with the value of the diamond. Some of us have tiny flaws inside us, sometimes starting in a single cell. I get struck by a phrase or a word like that and have to explore its possibilities. The word itself is wonderfully onomatopoeic. I'm a restless reader, curious about the curious.

Alicia Ostriker: "Pismire Rising," "What Montezuma Fed Cortez," and "Emily's Mom" are convenient examples of the way you mine history, natural history and biography – and it is as if your imagination feeds on exterior information, and bores inside of it like one of your beetles or worms, discovering or fantasizing or speculating what every unknowable thing is like within its own consciousness. I'm curious: do you just read voraciously (as the poem "For My Daughter When She Can Read" implies) and occasionally hit on something you want for a poem, or do you read with some intent or plan, or what?

Thomas Lux: About having an intent or plan in my reading: no, there is none – but there are certain writers whose every word I will read. Three nonfiction writers I greatly admire are Ted Conover, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Redmond O'Hanlon. These people do crazy and brave things and then write about them in exceptionally good sentences. I do have one rule: if I dare to say I even know a little about something I will not say it until I've read at least three books on the subject. At least three biographies, say, of Lincoln, or Stalin, or Hart Crane. Sometimes I discover books from reviews or by recommendation from pals but mostly I just find books in bookstores that look like they want me to read them.

Reg Gibbons: You have satirized small-mindedness, hatefulness, anger, ignorance, and other follies we all share. Toward what targets does this particular historical moment direct you?

Thomas Lux: My targets now, if I'm writing satirically, are "smallmindedness, hatefulness, anger, ignorance..." I'm not trying to be facetious. You could toss in vanity, arrogance, and self-righteousness too. Greed, solipsism. And I don't leave myself out as a target – as you say, there are "follies we all share."

Alicia Ostriker: Rage and despair, public and private, threaded through by love and the need to love, the need for human tenderness – you have to be a damn skillful poet to get away with it, and never seem to be merely ranting, never seem to be sentimental. How do you do it? Or do you just rely on your wits? Or do you even worry about these things? Am I embarrassing you?

Thomas Lux: I think there's a fine line between true sentiment and sentimentality. One never knows where that line is exactly but knowing there is a line might help one stay on just the right side of it. One has to risk sentimentality to achieve true sentiment, I think. Certain words, certain images can be avoided. I'm almost paranoid about clichés, too familiar language. If I do get things right, sometimes, it's probably a combination of wits, worrying about (paying close attention to) everything in the poem, and doggedness. I know how to work.

Mary Karr: Often surrealistic poetry relies on surprise only, seeking to invoke some startle response with no concern for emotion. Do you want to prompt feeling in your readers? Can you speak to that jokey, glib trend that can plague contemporary users of surrealistic techniques?

Thomas Lux: I dunno – I've been around so long that if I still use glimpses of surrealistic technique, I'd have to be called a neo-neo-surrealist. Surprise alone is never enough, one could do that all day standing on one's head. It's the surprise that's somehow also inevitable that's the most pleasurable. There's always been glib, jokey, trendy poetry, and not all of it is surrealism. I think most poets want to prompt feeling in the reader. Roethke says "I think by feeling." Frost talked about "the thought/felt thing." Also: "No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader." I concur with Mr. Keats: the only true test of a poem is "on the pulse." You wrote in an essay that the last thing you want to hear someone say about your poems is that they are "interesting." Ditto!

Vijay Seshadri: How would you classify yourself? Are you a native-American surrealist. A visionary realist? An imaginary fundamentalist?

Thomas Lux: An imaginative realist!

Michael Ryan: Can you talk about kinds of timing that are important to your poems?

Thomas Lux: I think timing, like humor, like timing in humor, is very hard to get too conscious about. Yet you can't be oblivious to it either. Line breaks can be used to manipulate timing, to help control tone, which has a lot to do, I think, with timing. It's easier to make good timing happen if one is reading the poem out loud: a split-second pause, say, that couldn't be set up by even the most exact use of punctuation, can be done with the voice. Teaching the reader exactly how you want something heard is tricky, slippery business. Again: if something comes out right, if sometimes the timing is right on the dime, it's usually the result of a lot of trial and error, and some sweating of blood.

Heather McHugh: The best dark humor tests both darkness and the smile. You're one of the kings of morbid comedy – how do you do it – keep the silliness serious, the jokes from decaying into yucks?

Thomas Lux: I don't like to think of my poems as morbid but things like maggots and corpses turn up enough that I can only blame myself if they are thought of that way. I'd like to think of them as anti-morbid, as rage against and response to the darkness – literal and figurative – that surrounds us. They are anti-death, vehemently, though I understand that death always wins in the end. I think, when I do manage to keep the silliness serious, it has a lot to do with tone: satire, ridicule (when used by the powerless against the powerful), stiletto irony – all of these things might create some laughter but in that laughter there is often a bitter aftertaste. To make the reader laugh and then yank the laughter right out of their throats, or, better, to break the reader's heart and make them laugh while doing so – that's fun to try to do. That said: maybe 10% of my poems try to achieve the above, try to use humor to achieve a kind of seriousness.

Reg Gibbons: How do you manage to keep laughing?

Thomas Lux: I think because I'm fairly intimate with (I read a lot of history) man's inhumanity to woman and man, I use humor to balance my despair. Randall Jarrell, when asked what he wrote about, said: "The laughter and the tears." Since I read or heard that, it's been my answer when asked the same question.

Alicia Ostriker: Pronouns. Let's look at "Tryptich, Middle Panel Burning," a great, mysterious (to me) poem. (In the first part you say "it was 1955/ America was as arrogant as it ever gets," and I wonder if you'd like to modify that statement here in 2004, but that's an aside). In the first part, focused on childhood, the pronoun is "I," in the second part, the animadversions, it's "you" and "I" and "we", so there's a sense of generalization and inclusiveness. In the third part, which explores a suicidal impulse and imagines a symbolic death and rebirth, the pronoun is "he." The form is different in the three sections also: unrhymed stanzas, then something like a loose and fluctuating blank verse, with occasional short lines, then unrhymed stanzas again. Can you comment on these choices?

Thomas Lux: I wrote "Triptych, Middle Panel Burning" over twenty years ago. Early 80s, the Reagan years. My aim was to write a longish poem that took the reader on a kind of psychological/emotional journey. A more literal, autobiographical journey in the first and third sections, and a wilder, denser (it's 100 lines, all one sentence) journey in the middle section. It's a poem of descent and ascent. Choosing and using pronouns is a decision in every poem. I've been leaning more and more away from first person. Second person singular or third person help to distance me a bit in the hope of more objectivity about something that is essentially subjective.

Stuart Dischell: Please tell a little about what motivated you to translate Dino Campana? Have you tried to translate other poets?

Thomas Lux: I loved Campana's poems in the one translation I knew then (late 70s, I can't remember the translator now) and I just wanted to play around with them, attempt to get them into more of a contemporary American idiom. Bill Knott showed me Campana's poems first. I remember him (we were on a bus in Chicago) also introducing me to Marina Tsvetayeva. Introducing me to her poems. Would that she were on the bus with us that day! I didn't call the Campana poems translations (I don't know the language), I called them versions. I used the above-mentioned translation and I also got anybody I knew (there was a kid from Italy at Sarah Lawrence who helped a lot) and some I didn't (a waiter in an Italian restaurant once) to do literal prose translations and then I had my way with them. There are more translations available now. Charles Wright's strike me as the best. Never tried that again but for a handful of poems by a German poet I know. I do think that it is important to try to serve the art form: to translate if one can, get involved in editing a magazine or small press, write reviews, start a reading series, etc. Contribute something to the art form other than one's own poems!

Reg Gibbons: What sort of artistic freedom do you feel that you, as an individual artist, need to pursue, at this point? Is it different from what you sought twenty years ago? Is writing poems a matter of some sort of freedom? Or is it something else?

Thomas Lux: I think the only freedom I need (that all of us need) is time. Twenty years ago I had, it turns out, twenty years of more time, to write, to read. I am, however, one of those blessed people – I get to earn the bulk of my living doing something I love: teaching. Teaching does afford one more time to read and write than, say, being a coal miner. My father refers to college teaching as a "racket," and I'm almost inclined to agree with him. Writing poems is a kind of freedom. It's also a responsibility. It's very difficult as well as highly pleasurable.

Edward Hirsch: I hear the romantic American poets singing. I hear Whitman, I hear Roethke, I hear Crane. Are they important to you?

Thomas Lux: I love Whitman! He's our grandfather, he was one of the two (Dickinson the other) first American poets. I cannot imagine our literature without him. Crane and Roethke I could not live my life without. I taught in the Warren Wilson MFA program for many years and John Skoyles, the director then, used to say of my lit classes: "It's Roethke and Crane and pray for rain." I remember having a spirited discussion with you about Roethke 30 years ago at 3 am in a dormitory room at a college where we'd given a reading, I think. Not even a cheap motel in those days. I also remember our discussion being interrupted by me throwing up into a waste basket. After tossing the waste basket out the window, I believe our conversation continued! I'm drawn to both poets for several reasons: their music, their passion/urgency, their imaginative abilities. I think it was our friend Michael Ryan who said: "Every line of Roethke's is a lesson in good writing." True: in every line something's going on with language, some action, some sounds, something human and alive.

Mary Karr: Did you ever receive a kind of "blessed" period of writing – a time when you felt rained on or guided in some Rilkean way? When was it and what was it like? What ended it?

Thomas Lux: I've had a few hot streaks – about once a decade, now that I think about it – but even those didn't result in whole poems. Several early drafts in a few weeks or a few months, something clicking, the fire in the brain's belly up a few degrees. I only remember one or two poems that came out close to being almost finished after a draft or two. I love reading about Rilke writing the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in a few weeks. He'd been silent for a decade. His head must have been so full that he's lucky it didn't explode before he started writing. Crane wrote three-quarters of The Bridge in about six weeks on the Isle of Pines, off Cuba. Sometimes when I'm writing an article, which I do fairly frequently for a weekly paper in San Diego, I can get hot and write 2000-3000 words in a day. That's fun. When one of these hot streaks end they end for two reasons: 1) tapped out or 2) back to the beloved day job.

Michael Ryan: Do you still make ten poems at a time from lines gathered in notebooks?

Thomas Lux: I do still tend to work on poems in batches, saving up things – scraps, rhythms, images, titles, etc. – for several months and then beginning several poems at once. Then I work on them cyclically – a draft on one, the next, the next, until around to the first one again, and then again work through the batch. This lasts weeks, months. This working method probably evolved from an academic schedule: saving things up until I had time (breaks, summer) to write every day.

Edward Hirsch: You have a bad case of "impingement syndrome"? Does poetry help?

Thomas Lux: My literal impingement syndrome (also known as a frozen shoulder, a rotator cuff injury) was cured by physical therapy. I read that word coupling on a chart of the human body at the physical therapist's office/torture chamber. That rang the metaphor bell: impingement syndrome. I was also attracted by the sound of those two words together. You're right though: I still suffer sometimes from metaphorical impingement syndrome. It causes friction, tension, sometimes good fire, sometimes bad fire. Sometimes no fire at all.

Billy Collins: How are you dealing emotionally with the Red Sox this season?

Thomas Lux: Very well right now, thank you! I believe you asked this question sometime during the first few games of the second round of the playoffs last fall: Yankees vs. Red Sox. I believe, as a Yankees fan, you were asking that question with a little turn of the thumbscrew, which, of course is genetically encoded in Yankee and Red Sox fans, one to the other. We all know what happened after the third game of that series, which even the great Nostradamus could not have prophesized. Some people think Red Sox fans won't know what to do without our angst. Au contraire! We, of the Nation, are happy our angst has turned to exultation. And: we want to do it again!

Vijay Seshadri: You are Pound-like in your involvement with, and promotion of, the work and careers of younger poets, your peers and friends. How does friendship of a peculiarly literary sort affect your idea of yourself as a poet and your sense of your own imaginative possibilities?

Thomas Lux: Jeez, I love my friends! Everybody asking these questions are my friends. How else do you think Laure-Anne got them to ask the questions? I've known you, for example, since you were about 18 and a student at Oberlin. We were and still are colleagues at Sarah Lawrence. Most of my friends are poets, writers. Are most doctors friends with other doctors? Most bums friends with other bums? I don't know. I have three living close relatives (my parents and my daughter) and several friends. What else is more important? Friends "cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams," said Thoreau. And: I have learned most of what I know about poetry from friends. My writer friends stimulate me, bring out the best in me. Longtime friends such as Stephen Dobyns, Michael Ryan, and Ellen Voigt have also been my teachers – with their talk, their ideas, their character, their work ethics, their own poems – for decades.

Michael Ryan: William Maxwell said that in composing a novel, "The material is your friend." Does what you write about dictate the way you write about it?

Thomas Lux: That's a good question. Certainly the subject does have something to do with how one writes it. The choices of which sounds to use come first to mind. I like to play with onomatopoeia. Metrical considerations, lineation. I have a poem called "Irreconcilabilia." It's in blank verse trimeter. Somehow the shorter iambic line, rather than the longer blank verse pentameter, seemed right for it. All of these decisions come up during composition, over the several drafts. I always loved the way Mr. Frost put it: "I write in order to find out what it is I didn't know I knew."

By the way, old friend, that game of pool we played about a third of a century ago in Iowa City for such high stakes: you still owe me a dollar!

Five Points

Georgia State University

Editor: David Bottoms
Executive Editor: Megan Sexton
Poetry Consultant: Edward Hirsch
Fiction Consultant: Richard Bausch


© 2005 by by Five Points, Georgia State University.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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The Cradle Place — Hardcover

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