Introduction

In the fall of 1962, at the rather late age of forty-six, Robert Lax left his native New York to try living in Greece. Except for short excursions to earn money or give readings or, for one longer and more painful period, escape the threats that came from being thought a spy, he lived on various remote islands there, among fishermen and sponge divers, for the next thirty-eight years. As a result of his long absence and his concurrent turn in a more experimental direction, his poetry remained less known and less appreciated in the US than it might have been. By the time he died in 2000 he had long been, as Richard Kostelanetz once wrote, “among America’s greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words.” But only a few perceptive critics and a handful of readers knew it.

The year Lax left for Greece, Journeyman Press, an imprint Emil Antonucci founded to publish Lax’s work, issued only his second book, the somewhat cryptically and blandly titled New Poems. A slender volume of daringly spare, experimental verse, the book perplexed those like Denise Levertov who had praised the lyricism, 
imagery, and sonic quality of his first collection, The Circus of the Sun.

“Robert Lax’s work of recent years saddens me sometimes,” Levertov wrote in 1968, “because I believe so deeply that the mainstream of poetry is aural — sonic — not visual; and I found in ‘The sunset city    ...    ’ [from The Circus of the Sun] and others of his earlier poems such especially impressive examples of the sonic.” She went on to say, however, that some of his more recent poems were pleasingly sonic in nature. “I am thinking particularly of ‘Sea/Sun/Stone,’” she wrote,

in which the repeated words, when the poem is read aloud properly, bring about in the imagination a more profound sense of their meaning till by the end of the poem we are hot with the sun on stone and our [ears] are filled with the susurrations of the sea and our eyes with its dazzle.

What Levertov was hearing and sensing was a new kind of stripped-down, rhythmic approach to poetry evoking an ancient world, a simple amalgam of sights and sounds and sensuous feelings as old as the Bible or Homer.

Poem found by archivist Paul Spaeth in one of Robert Lax’s notebooks

For those who knew Lax only from his early and far more mainstream New Yorker poems (over a dozen starting in 1940, when he was twenty-four) or his Circus collection, in which he transformed the spectacle of the circus and the lives of acrobats, freaks, and roustabouts into metaphors for creation, the shift Lax made around 1960 was certainly bewildering. Instead of lush lines like “Once more now they are with me, the golden ones, / living their dream in long afternoons of sunlight; / riding their caravans in the wakeful nights” he offered starker, simpler, edgier images such as:

every
night
in the
world

is a
night

in the
hospital

These “new poems” (a term he used because they represented a new style for him and were unlike poems he’d seen before) arose from unhappiness — with stale poetic conventions, with life in commercial New York, with his own inability to articulate a truer vision — 
but they could not reach their purest form until they were purged of the world that gave them birth, until he had moved to the age-old world of the Greek islanders. He said later that he could not have written the first of them anywhere but in late-fifties New York, a place where experimentation and America’s obsession with materialism and violence were intertwined. But they would never have reached the heights attained in his masterwork Sea & Sky — an epic that, in the words of poet John Beer, “through its repetitions    ...    works to dismantle the boundaries between time and 
timelessness” — if he hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t found somewhere like Greece, where the land and the people, the sun and the sea, the work and the way of life were as simple as his poems.

Because of the striking appearance of his poetry on the page, thin columns with only a word or two or sometimes a syllable per line, Lax has often been grouped with the concrete poets, but the label never quite fit. It is the “verbal magic of the rhythm” Lax uses that keeps him from being “a mere concrete poet,” wrote R.C. Kenedy in an extended critique of his work in the Lugano Review in 1971.

His insistence on minimal typographic blocks, floated as these are into the airy and skylike spaces of near-blank paper, convey optical impressions of a deliberate character — but Lax’s is a poetry which has aural traits strong enough to overcome its self-imposed (concrete?) limitations.

(Kenedy was one of an increasing number of European poets and critics who discovered and embraced Lax’s work during the decades he lived in Greece, including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Maurizio Nannucci, David Miller, and Nicholas Zurbrugg.)

In Kenedy’s view, Lax’s thin vertical columns “stress, if anything, the ultimate solitude of the voice which pierces a categorical emptiness. Whether the emptiness belongs to silence or to a yearning for some sort of communication.” Finally, though, it is the attentiveness and humility of the person observing the world and crafting poetry from his observations that gives the poems their power: “These compositions have the force to imply that everything is capable of being transformed into symbolic meaning by coming into contact with a passionate human being.”

Lax’s passion was more of a spiritual and intellectual passion than a physical one, an intense concentration on what exists as a means to understanding life as it is, as well as what lies beyond it. In Lax’s poetic world, Kenedy writes, “nothing is too small and nothing is too great to be comprehended — or to transmit the meaning which is behind meanings and which defines itself by remaining incomprehensible.”

Postcard sent to Michael N. McGregor on May 13, 1986

Lax, who was born a Jew, became a Catholic, and lived the last half of his life among Orthodox Greeks, was greatly influenced by the same Hindu holy man (Mahanambrata Brahmachari) who influenced his close friend Thomas Merton, as well as the Zen Buddhism Merton championed, the Kabala, and Chinese philosophy. He believed, in the words of the mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that “everything that rises must converge.” Or, to put it another way — one more reflective of his poetry — that knowing the essence of one thing helps you to understand the essence of others.

During his peripatetic early days, Lax, who had been a star writer 
and editor at Columbia University, sampled the writing life in a 
variety of ways. He worked as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker, a movie critic at Time, a freelance reporter for Parade, an editor for the Paris-based journal New-Story and the New York-based Jubilee magazine, a writing professor at the University of North Carolina and Connecticut College, a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and a writer in residence at General Beadle State College in South Dakota. What he always wanted to do, however, what he thought he was best suited to do, was write freely and simply about the life around him. In order to do that, he did what few writers are willing to do: gave up having possessions, a family, and any kind of respect or regular place in the world.

When he moved to the remote Greek island of Kalymnos, Lax found what he thought was the perfect place to live cheaply and simply among humble yet clever and spiritually oriented people. His trust in those people was shattered when tensions between Greece and Turkey caused some of them to think him, a foreigner who was always 
writing and taking pictures, a spy. He recovered, though, moving eventually to the nearby island of Patmos, a holier-seeming place where he lived out his days in peace.

Lax wrote and published many different kinds of writing — 
fables, aphorisms, spiritual meditations, and reportorial observations among them — but his reputation, now and in future years, will always be closely tied to the kind of lean, columnar writing found in the following poem sequence. This previously unpublished piece — 
written on Kalymnos on November 29, 1968, the day before he turned fifty-three — showcases the environment and people he wrote about, his careful separation of images, his use of repetition for emphasis or a sense of duration (“at mid- / night // mid- / night”), the subtlety of his metaphors, his rhythmic line breaks and spatial decisions, his close observation and fidelity to lived experience, his focus on external things and activities (with explanations in parentheses), his contrasting of the earthiness of Kalymnos with the holiness of Patmos, and his preoccupation with what he calls here “the endless city,” the place, both imagined and real, where all of humanity and maybe even the angels come together.

Sent to Michael N. McGregor with a letter on May 14, 1995