Craft: Robert Lax
Robert Lax (1915-2000) was a minimalist poet who was not part of any school or group. He grew up in Olean, New York, and was close friends with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. He graduated from Columbia University in 1938 and joined the staff of the New Yorker as the poetry editor. In 1962 he became a self-described hermit and moved to Patmos in the Greek islands where he remained most of the rest of his life. He continued to write poetry, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.
Lax composed hundreds of poems in a highly minimalist style. Described by William Maxwell as “saintly”, and by Merton as “a potential prophet, but without rage” with “a mind full of tremendous and subtle intuitions,” Lax used simplicity, repetition, and space in highly original ways.
This film (approx. 53 minutes) called Why Should I Buy a Bed When All that I Want is Sleep? shows Lax living and writing poems in Greece, in spartan conditions that echo his use of the page:
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