Thomas Lux > Quotes

“No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.”
― Thomas Lux

“THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY



is not silent, it is a speaking-

out-loud voice in your head; it is *spoken*,

a voice is *saying* it

as you read. It's the writer's words,

of course, in a literary sense

his or her "voice" but the sound

of that voice is the sound of *your* voice.

Not the sound your friends know

or the sound of a tape played back

but your voice

caught in the dark cathedral

of your skull, your voice heard

by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts

and what you know by feeling,

having felt. It is your voice

saying, for example, the word "barn"

that the writer wrote

but the "barn" you say

is a barn you know or knew. The voice

in your head, speaking as you read,

never says anything neutrally- some people

hated the barn they knew,

some people love the barn they know

so you hear the word loaded

and a sensory constellation

is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,

hayloft, black heat tape wrapping

a water pipe, a slippery

spilled *chirr* of oats from a split sack,

the bony, filthy haunches of cows...

And "barn" is only a noun- no verb

or subject has entered into the sentence yet!

The voice you hear when you read to yourself

is the clearest voice: you speak it

speaking to you.



~~-Thomas Lux
”
― Thomas Lux

“The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.”
― Thomas Lux

“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.”
― Thomas Lux

“We built new houses on the new riverbanks and our abandoned riverbed became, seen from space (we saw pictures), a long, pale line by day, a deep, black slash at night. Ode to Asa Bundy Sheffey, which was Robert Hayden’s birth name, reduced from three trochees to two. It was a family issue, his unhappy mother giving him to unhappy neighbors, the Haydens, who raised him, and called him Robert Hayden, though they never bothered to make it legal. From time to time, he’d see his blood parents—in a blur, his eyes so bad he never knew what they looked like, nor even what he himself looked like, without his glasses, which were so thick sometimes sight got lost inside them. Might he have left, or found, some poems in those dense lenses? An austere militant of reticence: Robert Hayden Asa Bundy Sheffey. Permissionless, I’m adding three more tumbling trochees, making five in a row, to inject into your name even more velocity. They’re all I can give you, in gratitude for some truths you left, in deep-set ink, on the page.”
― Thomas Lux, To The Left Of Time: A Kingsley Tufts Award-Winning Poetry Collection—Satirical, Humorous, and Insightful

“More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.”
― Thomas Lux