The Blind Swimmer: Early Selected Poems 1970 - 1975

by Thomas Lux

Poetry. This book is a selection of poems from early in the career of Thomas Lux, who has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Lux has been the poet-in-residence at Emerson College and a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. "He has control, he throws his grenades with deadly accuracy and an almost perfect sense of timing. The poems explode into the reader's brain, permanently embedded"-Cynthia Macdonald. Lux is the author of nineteen poetry books and chapbooks.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Acclaimed poet and teacher Thomas Lux began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. Critically lauded from his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry has gradually evolved towards a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience. Often using ironic or sardonic speakers, startlingly apt imagery, careful rhythms, and reaching into history for subject matter, Lux has created a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. Lux is vocal about the tendency in contemporary poetry to confuse “difficulty” with “originality.” In an interview with Cerise Press, Lux stated: “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.” Known for pairing humor with sharp existentialism, Lux commented in the Los Angeles Times, "I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor."

Born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1946 to working class parents, Lux attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. Lux’s first collections, including Memory’s Handgrenade and Sunday: Poems (1979), were grounded in the Neo-Surrealist techniques of contemporaries like James Tate and Bill Knott. Contemporary Poets contributor Richard Damashek wrote that Lux’s early work was "intensely personal…tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world." Such early Lux’s poems were often portraits of a “solo native…always strange to the world," observed Elizabeth Macklin in Parnassus, "always on the verge of extradition, always beset with allergies to the native element, 'like a simple vase not tolerating water.'" With Half Promised Land (1986), Lux began the turn that characterizes much of his later work. The book foregoes many of the surrealist techniques of Sunday and focuses instead on an increasingly careful and accurate depiction of the real world. In later books like The Drowned River (1990) and the Kingsley-Tufts award winning Split Horizon (1994), Lux utilizes a conversational tone to describe what one reviewer called the “invisible millions” populating the poems. Describing his own progress in an interview with the Cortland Review, he said: “I kind of drifted away from Surrealism and the arbitrariness of that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui or things like that. I got better and better, I believe, at the craft. I paid more and more attention to the craft. Making poems rhythmical and musical and believable as human speech and as distilled and tight as possible is very important to me. I started looking outside of myself a lot more for subjects. I read a great deal of history, turned more outward as opposed to inward.”

Lux’s other collections include New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (1997), The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004) and God Particles (2008), a collection Elizabeth Hoover described as “lucid and morally urgent” in the Los Angeles Times. Thomas Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence for over twenty years and is affiliated with the Warren Wilson MFA program; currently the Bourne chair in poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is a renowned teacher. In the Cortland Review interview, he described teaching’s greatest rewards: “you see people get excited by poetry. You see their lives changed by poetry. You see someone beginning to learn how to articulate and express themselves in this very tight art form, in this very distilled manner. You see all sorts and hear all sorts of really human stuff, really human business.” His many awards and honors include the Kinglsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim fel

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

These selections from two of Lux's first books, Memory's Hangrenade and The Glassblower's Breath, divided by a smattering of previously unpublished poems from that time, not only show us Lux's almost immediate nose for great titles, but his surrealist beginnings, before he strayed away, finding the surrealists 'too random.' These poems make a good case for that split, as Lux makes the surreal vey emotionally familiar, whether we are expressing our joy through concern for the oars in the boats that run through our blood, or malaria that has a name and approaches your door slowly. The unfamiliar becomes second-nature to us in Lux's poetry, even in its early days.

[Michael Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly Mr. Lux has been writing surprising and thought-provoking verse for many years. This little collection demonstrates the strange combination of charm and shocking imagery that would become even more pronounced in his later poems.
It is difficult to compare Thomas Lux to anyone because his work is so unique, but it is not uniqueness for its own sake. There is warmth and bite here, like the cat that purrs and scratches and leaves you to figure out how the motivation for both is the same.