Poetic Man

I knew little about Greece, and Patmos was the first stop for the next boat leaving the harbor.

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A Greek man told me it was beautiful, so I decided I would write my novel there. The ferry ride was nine long hours of wind and seas, but I still thought the island would be warm and magical.

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Magical it was, in its own way — sinuous and sloping, sheltered coves, spills of sugar-cube houses — but it was cold and hard as well, the constant wind forbidding. What I found instead was somewhere that would challenge me, humble me, declutter my life, and only then reveal its truer beauty. Its beauty lay less in the place itself than in what happened there, in my encounters with the land and sea, with God, with myself and with the poetic man of God named Robert Lax.

You could view the three-part rock that split when he had visions, touch the place he laid his head. But it was something more that gave the land its loving aura: I perceived it in the people, but it was meeting Lax that made it manifest.

The Man He Killed

I had seen a reference to it in a book and then, while waiting for my ferry, found a copy on a bookshelf in Athens. His story of a would-be writer finding his spiritual path inspired me, but it was a college friend of his, a poet named Robert Lax, who captured my attention. A Jew, he seemed to understand the Christian faith much better than Merton, and he was wiser than other people in the book. I made a note to look for him in later Merton writings. Did I mention that the island was cold?

My apartment was colder still, without a thing besides a stack of blankets to heat it.

I heard a voice inside me, though, say to persevere, and minutes later I was boarding a boat beside an older Australian. When he learned what I was doing there, he told me many writers had come to Patmos to write. His name is Robert Lax. Williams and Merton himself, he has never been well-known. When he was young, it seemed he was headed for public acclaim. While studying with Merton at Columbia University in the s, he edited two of its literary magazines and won every award the school offered for poetry.

While still in his 20s, he published a dozen poems in The New Yorker , then worked there for a year. He went on to review movies for Time magazine, teach at two colleges, write scripts in Hollywood and edit a literary journal in Paris. But something happened along the way. Some might call it a tragedy, the way he turned his back on American ideas of ambition and success, but he saw it more as an escape. Instead of accumulating dubious things like status or fame, he found a finer way of living he would call pure act.

The origins of his pure act were jazz musician jams he and Merton watched while still in college. He noticed at these jams that the musicians were playing for themselves alone, yet their playing attained a higher level. Each one played his best, and when he did, the playing of the others rose as well. No one had to tell them when to solo or fade back. Their playing had a natural, ineffable flow. All creation, Aquinas wrote, languishes in potential, yearning toward the is-ness that is God.

This ability, this nearness to the essence of God, came not only from physical ability and mental acuity but also a spiritual awareness, a fullness of love. The family was Catholic and close, trusting completely in the skill and the intention — the whole person — of each other. For years he sought a way of writing that embodied his ideals and a community that lived the kind of life he envisioned.

He found the first in a simple, stripped-down, looser style he felt expressed the things his soul was saying to itself and the second on the island of Kalymnos in Greece, where an entire society of fishermen and sponge divers seemed to live a traditional and yet spontaneous life. They were Christians, too, Greek Orthodox. He settled among them to write his poems and learn their wisdom, edging closer to pure act.

Fired by The New Yorker that November, just days before Merton entered the cloistered life, Lax fled to Harlem, where the previous summer he and Merton had worked at a charity called Friendship House. Embracing rather than rejecting poverty, he devoted himself to being a loving presence.

Poetry Man - Wikipedia

When he left Harlem, he searched for years to find his true vocation before realizing that being a loving presence was a vocation itself. When Lax moved to Greece at age 46 in , after experimenting with living as a loving presence among immigrants and outcasts in dangerous Marseilles, his intention was to live and write as simply as possible.

No longer concerned about his reputation as a poet, he turned his attention to recording the world around him and inside him as accurately as he could. By the time he died at 84, Lax had published more than 25 books and poems. But mainstream publishers never embraced him, and he was happy living in his island world. Lax had moved from Kalymnos to Patmos just five years before, when he was in his 60s.

There, for the first time in his life, he had a small house of his own, purchased for him by his niece and her husband. The night we met, he invited me up the stairs and corridors that led to it. In its way, it was as simple as he was, mostly just a whitewashed room in which he slept and wrote and entertained guests. One that seemed especially apt came from Saint Seraphim: Top Pop Singles, December 27, Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 13 December , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

US Billboard Hot [9]. US Billboard Adult Contemporary.

Poetry Man

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