3
In the reading room of the Merton Archives in Friedsam Memorial Library, a small basement office, one wall is nearly filled with publications on Thomas Merton. This is the primary mission of these archives. The Lax holdings became an offshoot of the Merton scholarly industry. So some shelves have copies of books and some unpublished materials on Lax. One three-drawer file cabinet has correspondence neatly filed and Mr Spaeth showed me my own folder with a few letters I had sent Lax about a year ago. I saw the folder for my friend Rupert Loydell, who has published some Lax chapbooks out of his operation in Exeter, England. Lots of files. Lots of correspondents for a poet who we were told recently in Poets & Writers Magazine “fell off the map.” True and yet not true, depends on which circle of knowledge one has been a member of over the years. Clearly lots of people, a small and select group of New York poets, for one, have known about Lax’s work for years. Richard Kostelanetz for example. You could even say that knowledge of Lax has been spreading wider and wider in the last years of his life.
4
Perhaps the Merton biographies helped most of all to remind a wide audience that Lax was then still alive and writing. I think that is how I first became aware of him. Maybe we were all struck immediately by the pattern that holds these three college friends together. Merton, the painter Ad Reinhardt, and the poet, Lax. Each followed their work in art where it took them and the work of each has a strong “hermetic” quality—the search for silence and solitude. Merton’s writings about the silent life of Trappist monks became most well known. Reinhardt devoted the last ten years of his career to painting extraordinary black paintings, listening as John Berger might put it, to silence’s will-to-be-seen. And Lax’s poems and journals voice the silence of American poetry after World War II from the angle of “exile” in Greece, a silence unlike any other voice in American literature—and yet akin–to Dickinson and Thoreau perhaps. Right in the American grain and groove, the silences of Melville and Ellison, of many perhaps, but Lax’s. An American silence at the start of the age of TV, videos, internet and iphones. A poetry of silence that starts in New York in 1950 and goes through all of the last forty years away from and outside of everything and yet comes from deep within al that we’ve managed to try to cover it over with here on the “mainland” of the cultural continent. Lax heard the silence a few years before Beckett’s tramps would hear it too in their appointment with Godot.
the
world
is
cov
er
‘d
with
waves
of
wa-
ter
