SEARCHING FOR ROBERT LAX
TWICE have I visited Archives of Robert Lax materials. Neither time did I know exactly what I was looking for. Both times I was also looking at the work of a painter. In some way Lax has been a poet who leads me to an shows me how to look at certain paintings. There’s more to it than this, I suppose, but this is the beginning.
Early in the summer 1997 I drove out to Buffalo, NY and to Olean, about an hours drive southwest of Buffalo. That is where Lax was born and grew up. At St Bonaventure University there is a growing collection of Lax manuscripts. I spent an afternoon looking through some of them. The next two days in Buffalo I visited the Albright-Knox Gallery, intent on seeing the painting of Clifford Still. This is one of the few places in the world where his work is exhibited. The paintings shown in the dedicated gallery rotate from year to year. This time there were nine paintings on view.
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(Thing 30)
IN the Lax archives, after talking with the director, Paul Spaeth, about Lax and about the holdings at St Bonaventure’s, I tried to figure out what to do, how to look.
2. There are about ten or twenty videos people have made over the past twenty years, interviews with Lax and with people close to him at different stages of his career. I looked at some of them just to see him talking with people at his house on Patmos and to see some of the people who have known him—William Packard, longtime editor of New York Quarterly, and Emil Antonucci who helped publish him. This was interesting for a while. But it was not much of what I was looking for, even though I still didn’t know what that was. I wasn’t trying to do biographical research. I had no clearly focused or key question. Spaeth showed me some of the boxes of recently arrived materials and that was interesting in the sense that Yes there were notebooks after notebooks—a lifetime now, of notebooks—with each page marked in some way, sometimes with words or half poems or jottings, other times with squiggles or doodles or drawings, other times just with brief marks, sometimes with none. Notebooks. Mostly cheap school type notebooks, spiral or stitched with a thin cloth spine. Sheaves of papers. Some typed. Some long–european size. Some small. Piles of papers of all sorts. Now boxed in archival quality boxes. All lined up on library storage shelves in a room that felt a bit like a large walk-in safe.
