Love it Hard: Thomas Lux on Poetry

Thomas Lux
BY Jeanne Morris

THOMAS LUX‘s latest collection is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). Other titles include New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Split Horizon, winner of the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. He taught for twenty-seven years on the writing faculty and as Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and has also taught at Emerson College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and other universities. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and recipient of three NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.



“The most important elements in making a poem are diligence, the craft, imagination, passion, and you need to be a little nuts. Read everything, dig in for the long haul, work on your stamina, love poetry, love it hard.”
— Thomas Lux

What is your sense of the contemporary American poetry scene?

Burgeoning, chaotic, many, many good poets, a growing cultural profile, a healthy, squawking, boisterous, fractious, inclusive, tradition and (true) innovation marrying or colliding. It’s a good time for poets and poetry in our culture and the only people who can fuck it up are poets.

What is it like for a poet to teach at a school like the Georgia Institute of Technology?

Georgia Tech is best known for engineering and the sciences but it’s an all-around world class university, both in research and teaching. I teach in Ivan Allen College, which is Tech’s liberal arts college, in a department called Literature, Communication, and Culture. A relatively new major, called STAC (Science, Technology and Culture) is one of the fastest growing majors on campus.

What is your writing routine like?

I don’t really have a routine. Writing is 80% reading so I read a great deal. I tend to work on poems in batches (that way if I get stuck on one I move on to the next). I do most of my writing over the summers and during breaks from teaching. I write doggedly, 15-20 drafts. I’m not prolific but I’m pretty steady: each slim volume takes about four years to write.

Thomas Lux
(2009 Palm Beach Poetry Festival)
BY Molly Sutton Kiefer

You once gave a reading where you read from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Did his work influence your writing?

Sure, he influenced my work. Every poet you love, and even some you hate, influence your work. I love the texture, the intensity of his emotions and music, and his crazy, crazy heart.

What other writers influenced you?

About 500, too many to name and even if I did I’d leave somebody out.

You’ve said elsewhere that poets should “balance originality and accessibility” — could you please comment further on that?

Billy Collins says he prefers the word “hospitable” rather than accessible. I think I do too. Obscure or “difficult” poems are often neither. They are merely arbitrary. Quite often arbitrariness emitting from a quite brilliant mind, but arbitrary all the same. There’s plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.


What do you think the real meaning of “innovative writing” is or should be?

Was it Paul Valéry who said, “Ah, the avant garde, the only thing that never changes.”? That said: People should write whatever the hell they want, however they want. All kinds of poetry. Room for all kinds. What’s good will stick around for a while, what’s not will dry up and blow away.

When it comes to reading poems for an audience, you’re considered a rock star — it is definitely a sharing, the delivery too honest and direct to be called a performance…

My reading style has certainly evolved, but more or less has been the same for a few decades. My poems are meant to be read aloud. They are written to be human speech. Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated, a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he’s goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude. I make it a point to read loud enough and to enunciate as best I can. It would be rude to do otherwise. I also make a point of never reading too long.

God Particles

God Particles
BY Thomas Lux
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)

Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994) has a tighter focus than God Particles, your latest book. The poems in God Particles are looser in their connective tissue, and darker, mixing the physical and intangible in a humorous and satirical way. Has your writing gotten edgier and less linear over time?

My connective tissues do not always connect, I know, but they try to. That’s a risk one takes and when it fails then it is my failure and not the reader’s. Edgier and a little less linear: yes. God Particles IS a darker book. It was written in dark years — post 9/11.

I think one uses humor/satire to help combat the darkness. I do.

The title poem, “God Particles,” begins: “God explodes, supernovas, and down upon the whole planet / a tender rain of him falls.” Then, toward the middle of the poem:

Who just asked: Why did God explode?
And why ask this far into the story?
I believe He did it to Himself: nobody
walks into God’s house, His real house, on a hill
in Beulah Land, nobody
walks into His house wearing a suicide belt.

These lines (as is the entire poem and collection) are simultaneously funny, sad, ironic, compassionate, mocking, and spiritual. There is such emotional and tonal range, from “Toad on Golf Tee” to “The Gentleman Who Spoke Like Music” yet a definite common-sense, serio-comic down-to-earthiness lurks throughout the collection as if implying that we humans should know better, be above all the nonsense to which we seem endlessly addicted (war, cruelty, superficial spirituality, etc). Could you say something about the impetus behind this collection?

Please write the first two sentences of your last question into a review of God Particles!

I believe you’re spot on and probably have a better grasp of the poems than I do. One impetus of the book, particularly the 10 poems in the middle, is my quarrel with, my loathing of, religious intolerance, of any kind, any religion. Or, any non-religious intolerance. I define religious intolerance as having a range from someone simply proselytizing on a level that produces annoyance in the person to whom it’s directed to someone who believes they have the right to kill someone who doesn’t believe what they believe. A lethal (and tedious) combination: ignorance and certainty. The book pays attention to the world, which is dark. It has some sweet notes too, I hope, and love.

View with Pagination View All

Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com

Permalink URL: https://www.cerisepress.com/01/01/love-it-hard-thomas-lux-on-poetry