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Fans of Lax will welcome this new cluster of poems that
Sarah Katherine McCann has gathered from the archives in Olean, NY. Catholic
communities especially will read it as an alternative prayer book, a help for
spiritual reading and devotion. It seems to emphasize the early, young Lax,
the convert to Catholicism. Poem titles suggest this, from the Latin title of
the whole collection to pieces such as 'In Lumine', 'Faith',
'Truth Compared To the Light of Day', 'praise god, though he's
not place in any', to 'the Lord and 'The Vigil of the Tree'.
In this light, Lax is the holy juggler, the acrobat of God, and/or rather
Christ is, and Lax his devoted servant, praying and meditating on the
mysteries of love and creation. The funny lining of the poems, the skinny
vertical, is an aide to reflection and prayer, a typological devotional
assist.
of
whom
shall
I
be
afraid
?
('the
Lord')
Catholic, young, Lax is crucial to our understanding of his work, but it is
early Lax and not at all the Lax of Patmos, of thirty and more years of life
as experimental poet in exile on Patmos. So while we welcome this volume, it
offers us little that is new or that expands our comprehension of his
achievement. We need about 800 more volumes of this size to fully unfold and
massive work of Lax and demonstrate his achievement and standing. The
archives at St Bonaventure are packed with notebooks and papers. Considerable
scholarly effort over the years is what we want to get out all of Lax. It is
unfortunate that we have no editorial preface by McCann explaining what her
charge was, what guided her selection. Her selection is fine. We wish we
could commission someone - but who? a young and energetic John Kinsella
perhaps? - to work for a few years at Olean and bring out a big Selected
Works. Someone, that is, who
understands contemporary poetry and poetics.
The cover of the Lax book features a painting by David Miller, a suitable way
to show the spiritual links between these two poets. Miller's painting is a
miniature tryptych, a blue central panel of loosely beautiful calligraphic
brush strokes, framed by two black gestural marks.
Miller continues his series of Spiritual Letters in this chapbook. He has
mastered the prose poem and fans will wecome these twelve new installments in
the sequence. Miller continues
to amaze. He weaves his letters on a quiet weft of subtle themes and motifs.
One, for instance, concerns the illness of a young boy, announced in Letter
2: 'More and more incapacitated, his head snapping backwards in spite of
himself, the boy was stranded in the waiting room.' In 11 we leave him: 'The
boy's limbs now affected by the medication, he found that he could move only
with difficulty; so his mother helped him to walk the short distance to the
hospital.'
Reading through the twelve texts, one barely notices any one theme. Only in
afterthought and analysis can we seek the strategies of Miller's magic. The
richness he achieves defies all analysis, however. Let me compile a faux
Letter or an anti-Letter by a random re-shuffling through Miller's art. The
demonstration will be what such a gathering does not achieve:
A cloth ready for the dyeing, lines etched into the waxed surface. You should
try writing a novel, he told me. Desire's thrown into confusion; overwhelmed.
The motherfuckers won't let me sing, the woman said at her friend's funeral.
Around the frame, a pattern of stars, or the names of angels. Pieces of
paper, messages, were threaded through the boxes that the boy made after the
woman's death. A man walked into
the hall with a cat on his shoulder. She was afraid that what she'd written
was the wreckage of empty description. She had hung sheets of black plastic
over the shelves, covering all of the books. The bowls, upside down on the
floor, were traps, magic inscriptions on their interiors. He asked his
daughter to help him choose which paintings to send through the post as a
gift. False apprehensions: a form of constancy. During her parties she would
play recordings of Gregorian chant.
His earliest book, never finished, was entitled We Shall be Friends
in Paradise.
Like Lax, Miller has faced
the problem of how to move beyond piety. And both poets realized they had to
move beyond many pieties. Miller puts one such question directly, in
the middle of Letter 8. 'Don't you realise, he said, that I'm the most
important avant-garde poet in the world?' The implicit counter question,
'Don't you realise that I'm also the least important apres-garde
scribbler in the town?' would be welcome in Miller's embrace of the
spiritual. A Blakean realisation of the ironies and inversions necessary
to carry us into the spiritual lies just below the scenes of Miller's
music.
Both Miller
and Lax invite us into friendship in the same Paradise - and both know
how to play the
words of this world against themselves
to create
images
and sounds showing us how as yet unreal can be the real performed in their
words.
© Robert Garlitz
2005
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