One should always honor one's teachers, preferably before they pass away. You don't always make it.
I was fortunate to begin my undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops with two very strong poetry teachers in St. Louis, Missouri. Howard Schwartz was a master at teaching mechanics. In class we often debated poems word by word, even down to the advantages of using 'and' or 'the.' Steve Shreiner taught about feeling and persuasiveness and encouraged us to read other poets. I also had a big crush on him, which I vowed never to let happen again. And Steve Schreiner introduced me to the poet Tom Lux at a local reading Lux was giving. I never would have ended up at Sarah Lawrence College had I not heard those Tom Lux poems back then. They were funny and I wanted a teacher who was funny. Although I had some good classes with Jean Valentine, David Rivard and Joan Larkin, Tom Lux was the professor who sent me to Sarah Lawrence.
Thomas Lux passed away last week from cancer and many of his students have been posting tributes and commentary about what an important mentor he was to them, what an inspiring teacher and friend. In the mid 1990s, Lux was my "don" (or dedicated advisor) at Sarah Lawrence and I took two of his classes, a craft class and a workshop class. Lux had a larger-than-life presence. He was charismatic. His voice boomed during readings. He seemed comfortable in his own skin. He was the celebrity of the writing program. My friend and I called him poetry’s Daryl Hall. We loved to hear him recite the Refrigerator poem and we'd imitate lines of it to each other the way Tom read it: "because you do not eat / that which rips your heart with joy!"
And herein lies the rub for me because I've always had a hard time with celebrities. They walk around with such an impenetrable veneer, it makes one feel smaller. Tom's office at Sarah Lawrence was set up that way, too. It was a beautiful office, especially by the looks of the dives my other professors inhabited (basements were common). It was large and multi-textured, intellectual and full of stuff like Lux had lived a pirate's life. I scanned the New York Times photograph to the top left from a photocopy just to illustrate the scene: Tom in a large chair, his imposing shoulders and head towering over you as you sat uncomfortably in the lower chair. To be uncomfortable is a choice to be sure. But there it was.
I had a big blow up with Lux in that office. The fight wasn't even over poetry. It was over standards of behavior. He called me petty and another word which I can’t remember and can't believe now that I can’t remember as it was so upsetting to me at the time and I've carried that phrase around, ("petty and something"), like a big memorial gravestone all these years since. My eyes opened wide and I stood up to leave his office dramatically. He stopped me and we dialed the whole thing back into civility. He walked me from his office to Slonim Hall. After that I knew I would never be one of his favorites.
But he told me my poems were brilliant, (whether they were or not), and he took the time to tell my family at graduation that I was a good poet, (I don't think they believed him), and the first time I ever had greens was as a party for the students up in his NYC apartment. He was like my difficult relative or the antagonistic mentor, the best kind of mentor probably, something you must push up against until it's gone. Despite the fact that I don't have the same connection to Tom Lux that other students had, despite all the drama at Sarah Lawrence, I've always been proud to have been one of his many doe-eyed students.
The obits
Thomas Lux, esteemed Georgia Tech teacher and poet (The Atlanta0-Journal Constitution)
Campus, Atlanta communities mourn the loss of Thomas Lux, director of Poetry@TECH (Georgia Tech)
Rest in Peace, Thomas Lux (1946–2017) (Poetry Foundation)
Sarah Lawrence College Mourns the Loss of Longtime Writing Faculty Member Tom Lux (Sarah Lawrence College)
Thomas Lux, 70, poet known for his generosity as a writer, teacher (The Boston Globe)
Renowned poet Thomas Lux, an Easthampton native, dies at 70 (MASS Live)
Remembering Thomas Lux (Technique)
Remembering a One-of-a-Kind Poet (The Atlantic)
The Old New York Times piece from which the photo above came: If Poetry Is Puzzling Who is to Blame?
Yeah, Lux once said to me, in a weeklong seminar he did at my local university, that I was “a fucking amateur.” (this was a year or so before my first chapbook won an award). I watched him court the prettiest young things in the class and just shook my head at how they fluttered around him. The poet who’d organized his visit, who was at the time poet laureate of our state, was aghast. I can only imagine how he wielded this personality at SLC.