An Introduction & more...

                       

Thomas Lux was born in 1946 in Northampton, Massachussets to working class parents. He was son of a milkman and a Sears & Roebuck switchboard operator, neither of whom graduated from high school. Lux was raised in Massachusetts on a dairy farm. He was, according to those who knew him in high school, very good at baseball, basketball and golf. Classmates also recall that he had a "terrific sense of humor."Lux attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa.

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.” 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. 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.

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” . 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 fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.