LAX, Robert

A Columbia College chum of both Ad Reinhardt and Thomas Merton , Lax has sought linguistic purity comparable to the visual purity of the former and the spiritual purity of the latter. It is fair to say that Lax writes the poetry that Merton should have written, were he a true Trappist artist. Lax's poetry is extremely reductive, sometimes with only a few words arrayed in various ways. In his great long poem Black and White (1966), the total vocabulary consists...