The next meeting will be on March 2, 2017.
The assignment for the next meeting is to write your own obituary and/or birth announcement. This offers great opportunities for humor but I'm going to try to take it seriously although I may end up with two versions of the same thing.
I forewent an assignment to translate a poem from another language into English. Nonetheless Rich Anderson wants to do that so that is an option too.
See you in two weeks!
By way of explanation, Thomas Lux was a little more than acquaintance of mine, We met a few times and I had a short email exchange with him. I have long liked his poems and was more upset than I expected to be when I stumbled across his obituary on line.
http://www.ajc.com/news/local-obituaries/thomas-lux-esteemed-georgia-tech-teacher-and-poet/wewY41fQeneWb0Ey8CxoIM/
Thomas Lux, esteemed Georgia Tech teacher and poet
Bo Emerson The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
6:21 p.m Monday, Feb. 6, 2017 Atlanta Obituaries
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OBITUARIES
Thomas Lux, poet and professor at Georgia Tech, published 14 collections of poetry, and influenced a generation of writers. Photo: courtesy Georgia Tech
Distinguished by his booming laugh, his arresting poetry readings and his passion for baseball, Bourne Professor of Poetry at Georgia Tech Thomas Lux, was a self-described “literary oddball” who threw himself into teaching while remaining a dedicated master of the craft.
After weekly readings at Georgia Tech, “he would invite everyone who was at the reading to come to his house, and everyone would,” said Jericho Brown, associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. “I would say he was an idol of mine.”
When Lux, 70, died Sunday, the internet came alive with reminiscences from those who held him and his work in high esteem.
“I was desperate to belong somewhere and Tom said, ‘Well, you can belong here, because I say you can,’ ” wrote Vijay Seshadri on Twitter. Lux, on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence for 25 years before coming to Georgia Tech in 2001, encouraged Seshadri and brought him to Sarah Lawrence.
“Only to my parents do I owe more than I do to Tom Lux. I can’t imagine being in the world without him,” Seshadri wrote.
Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to a dairy farmer and a Sears, Roebuck & Company switchboard operator. He attended Emerson College in Boston and, according to the Poetry Foundation, “began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s.”
His poetry received critical praise for his first book in 1972, “Memory’s Handgrenade.” He eventually published 14 full-length collections. He was featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” radio spots, was published in the New Yorker, and won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994 for the collection “Split Horizon.”
Kevin Young, University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and an accomplished poet, said “Tom Lux was not only a great poet, but a great poetry friend and friend to poetry. He was a terrific literary citizen, dedicated to trumpeting the power of poetry and championing the music and many moods of language.”
Said Young, “I once invited him to read in a Southern Poetry Festival at Emory as part of the Danowski Reading Series — he made clear from the stage that he wasn’t a Southern poet, but I can’t help but say that he became an Atlanta one, integral to the community. He will be deeply missed.”
In addition to his teaching Lux was director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as the director of Poetry@Tech.
He told the AJC in 2006 that teaching poetry at Georgia Tech was no mismatch — that poetry and science both require careful observation and creative thinking. “We’re trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration,” he said. “Poems are made things. They have everything to do with intense emotions … but poems are made things. They don’t just happen.”
There was no information yet available about arrangements and services.
I love you sweatheart
A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work...?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the world.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed--always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work...?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the world.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed--always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.
Refrigerator, 1957 - Poem by Thomas Lux
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.
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.
The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball
each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets his jaw to: tight.
His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue,
a shattered apron. As if
into her head he drove a wedge of shale.
Years later his daughter goes to jail.
Mow, mow, mow his lawn
gently down a decade's summers.
On his other side lived mine and me,
across a narrow pasture, often fallow;
a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood
and baseball, but one could not cross his line
and if it did,
as one did in 1956
and another in 1958,
it came back coleslaw -- his lawn mower
ate it up, happy
to cut something, no matter
what the manual said
about foreign objects,
stones, or sticks.
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip. Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.M., every day,
spring, summer, fall. If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets his jaw to: tight.
His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue,
a shattered apron. As if
into her head he drove a wedge of shale.
Years later his daughter goes to jail.
Mow, mow, mow his lawn
gently down a decade's summers.
On his other side lived mine and me,
across a narrow pasture, often fallow;
a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood
and baseball, but one could not cross his line
and if it did,
as one did in 1956
and another in 1958,
it came back coleslaw -- his lawn mower
ate it up, happy
to cut something, no matter
what the manual said
about foreign objects,
stones, or sticks.
