That Which Rips Your Heart With Joy

Art by Benedikt Luft. I. The First Word

In “Solo Native,” the opening poem of his third collection, Sunday (1979), Thomas Lux imagines the very first human—“the one thing upright / on hind legs, an imaginer, / an interested transient”—emerging from a primeval idyll. It’s a place where “the crabs walk sideways / as they were taught by the waves.” Solo Native settles “in a hut on the green and gray belly / of the veldt” and dances his dance “in the dirt-colored dirt.” Then, one day, everything everywhere changes at once:

from your throat a noise,

an awkward first audible

called language.

Lux grew up in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the son of a milkman and a housewife who once worked as a telephone operator. He was his own Solo Native, wandering off to Boston’s Emerson College in the late ’60s and—under the influences of James Tate, Bill Knott, and alcohol—into an unlikely world far afield from the farm. During nearly fifty years of teaching and writing poetry, Lux confronted the babbling legacy of Solo Native’s “awkward first audible.” Through poems marked by rare clarity and emotional honesty, he reckons with language as a tool that humans use to construct their often-ridiculous, stultifying realities. In “Onomatopoeia,” he identifies the mechanism behind this process:

The word sounds like the thing.

The sound of the word next to

the sound of another word

sounds like the thing feels

or you desire it to feel

We build worlds from words, and our Solo Native knows that this convergence of feeling and language is a uniquely human power. He intuits how language ontologically separates us from the elegant sidewinding crab “taught by the waves.” Autodidactic wordsmiths all, we humans, linguistically empowered, venture forth and go not where the waves take us, but wherever we damn well please.

Our choices aren’t always the best. Consumed by wealth, power, and fame, driven by fear and greed, Lux’s subjects find themselves domesticated into amoral numbness. They react to their sad conformity by starting barn fires, committing suicide, getting drunk and rowing a boat home from a wedding and drowning, organizing a genocide, enslaving the innocent, indulging in matricide, inventing torture devices, poisoning horses, trafficking in cadavers, dropping Walt Whitman’s brain on a lab floor, and blowing the heads off of birds with a pellet gun for fun. If the stars align, they’ll use a Kalashnikov.

As if matters could not get worse, the physical world hosting this Babel of self-afflicted mayhem is not inclined to rescue us. More often than not it seems set on revenge. Volcanoes, forest fires, plagues, monsoons, hurricanes, and blizzards are common events in Lux’s poems, as are locust infestations, spiders galore, polio and scarlet fever, rat poison, and, once we become corpses, maggots. And even then, stone dead, we still make it all about us. As Lux notes,

what the maggots do

they do for you.

Thankfully, mercifully, there’s another side to Lux. The words that Solo Native unleashed can also remind us of the wild beauty that domestication often obscures, leading us toward what a Luxian type like the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.” Indeed, the irony in Lux’s attention to tragedy is that he is essentially an artist, like Herzog, bursting with infinite tenderness for the human condition. We love poems, Lux once wrote, not because they are “well made, smart, or deep.” We love them “for their crazy hearts.”

Lux’s ultimate ambition as a poet is thus to document the horror of everyday life while shielding the joyousness. In “Ode to the Joyful Ones,” he declares as much:

That they can walk, even stumble, among us is reason

to praise them, or protect them—even the sound

of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,

is music.

The result for Lux is a lifetime of work—14 books of poetry and one nonfiction account of San Diego—that grapples with a defining question: How do you observe the world as a poet is called to do without wallowing in suffering or drowning in sentiment?

II. The Wild

Lux relies heavily on animals to find that balance. Not since D.H. Lawrence has a poet so lovingly honored the animal world, much less integrated its lessons into his work. Surely no poet has lavished so much love on that one animal humans are most conditioned to hate—spiders—than Lux. In “Spiders Wanting,” he evokes his sense of precious intimacy with these creatures in order to feed on their innocent wisdom:

I want you, spider: walking-on-the-ceiling,

creeping black thumb.

Here’s my forehead, the pad

or your landing. So slip

down your rope, that purest advance

of saliva, settle close

enough to my lips.

Gently, almost erotically, the speaker asks the spider to “Put your fur / next to mine,” to “relax down here / on the pillow.” The spider is told by the speaker, “You look like a priest,” but he knows that in reality

. . . We’re beasts,

twelve limbs between us,

sharing one house, the same desires

and industry: to design

the web, live on what we catch

from air, and always returning,

always, to the spun eluctable cave.

Human and spider undergo a less sanguine, but equally intimate, moment in “A Streak of Blood that Once was a Tiny Red Spider.” The streak of spider

is all there is left of it which walked

down the page of a book

and which I meant only to brush away

but crushed

to this miniscule skid mark—4 mm high, ½ mm wide: baby

red scar, somewhat askew

Lux, an inveterate reader of obscure nonfiction, personalizes the poem when he writes that the blood-colored spider became a “hyphen forever / on page 211 of Lost Tribes and Promised Lands .” However accidentally, the tiny crimson strip is sacrificed on a battlefield epitomizing the essence of human distinction: the printed word.

How to memorialize this red dot that’s now a permanent part of the book? After testing out “skid mark” and “red scar,” Lux settles on “hyphen” to describe the visual aftermath of the tiny spider’s demise. But while technologies of domestication—in this case, again, words—might try to reduce this unruly smear to a grammatical function, Lux knows this effort will fail. Pondering this massacre, this spider-turned-hyphen, he declares, “Some version of a heart must have been in there.”

Lux’s arachnophilia continues in “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy.” “For some semitropical reason,” the poem opens, “bright and scary / arachnids” are dropped by rainstorms into swimming pools where—even though they “can swim / a little”—they “can’t climb the ladder out.” “They usually drown”—an outcome that is, for most people, easy enough to ignore. But for Lux that sad fact reveals an opportunity to rewild the world and “leave a lifebuoy / or two in your swimming pool at night,” and then “haul ashore / the huddled, hairy survivors / and escort them / back to the bush.”

Saving these innocent creatures might have the benefit (“if you believe there is justice”) of ensuring that the saved spiders “would not turn up // again someday / in your hat, drawer, / or the tangled underworld // of your socks.” But the underlying motivation is more sublime, less self-serving, closer to truth that’s more ecstatic than conventional:

. . . these saved,

as individuals . . .

. . . may tell the others

in a sign language

four times as subtle

and complicated as man’s

that you are good,

that you love them,

that you would save them again.

This poem is not only a paean to the wildness of the wild, or a nod to the unexpected. I suspect that Lux was contemplating a resident of nearby Northampton who weaponized similar imagery to spread a very different and deeply controlling message.

In 1741, the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards (who was scientifically fascinated with flying spiders) drew heavily on arachnid imagery to castigate humans in a fire-and-brimstone sermon called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In the process of damning his congregation for their inherent impurity, he lashed them with lines like, “The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you.”

Lux delightfully flips Edwards’s script. Rather than dangling from the hand of God over a fire pit, his spiders descend into an artificial pool to be rescued by the hand of man. Rather than evil humans requiring salvation, we are, without the need of divine intervention, benevolent souls who rescue spiders on little arks of our own design. Ushering them into the sanctity of the woods, we allow them to be born again.

Lux offers a similar historical callback in another poem honoring the quiet power of a wild animal. “Wife Hits Moose” captures an autobiographical snippet of life with matter-of-fact simplicity: “Wife / hits moose, hard.” But the poem’s effectiveness derives from Lux’s primary focus on the moose more than his wife. Before contact, “Sometime around dusk,”

. . . moose lifts

his heavy, primordial jaw, dripping, from pondwater

and, without psychic struggle,

decides the day, for him, is done: time

to go somewhere else

Note the way Lux’s multiple commas slow the stanza’s tempo, as does the description of the moose existing “without psychic struggle.” The scene feels like a deep breath and is relaxed by the total absence of human intervention. But that peace dramatically ends when, suddenly, wife in car hits moose. And then it’s pure noise:

. . . moose rolls over hood, antlers—

as if diamond-tipped—scratch windshield, car

damaged : rib-of-moose imprint

on fender, hoof shatters headlight.

Annoyed moose lands on feet and walks away.

Wife is shaken, unhurt, amazed.

The moose’s nonchalant “annoyed” reaction to getting smashed by a vehicle barreling down a highway reiterates Lux’s reverence for the wild over the domesticated. Demonstrating chagrined coolness as it walks off, the moose wins this round. The poem suggests how these looming creatures tolerate our twitchy existential hubris—our roads and speedy cars—much more than we appreciate their untroubled majestic presence.

The poem is also a playful way to engage with the most Platonic moose poem of all: Elizabeth Bishop’s 1972 masterpiece, “The Moose.” Bishop’s premise surely inspired Lux’s. In her poem, a moose appears from the woods onto a rural New England road and encounters a passing busload of people. Whereas in Lux’s poem, contact with the moose occurs with a bang, in Bishop’s (also purportedly autobiographical), there’s a slow buildup that evokes being lulled to sleep by the hum of the bus at night. The violent collision at the core of Lux’s poem has a languid and tranquil counterpoint in Bishop’s, where the bus stops in the presence of the moose:

A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather,

in the middle of the road.

It approaches; it sniffs at

the bus’s hot hood.

I’d venture that “Wife Hits Moose” was Lux’s love letter to Bishop for a poem that, even if he tried to run it over with his own poem (out of jealousy? to test its strength?), proved to be as lasting and dignified as the beast it honors. Either way, the outcome in both poems is inescapable: a sense of awe through an encounter in the wild. In the aftermath of the crash, Lux’s poem asks:

—Does speaker believe in a Supreme Intelligence?

Yes. Thank you.

And Bishop, after the tender fender moose-bus moment, wonders,

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?

We feel it because modernity’s reduction and mechanization of human language and behavior mean that, as Lux writes elsewhere, civilized humans “weren’t built to let the sunlight in.”

And so, when a flash of uncivilized wisdom manages to break through, when we encounter (even if it takes a car crash) that epiphanic example of untamed beauty disturbing our complacency, we are drawn by the poet back into an ancient understanding of ourselves, one that is less refined, less rational, more like the crab to the wave, and more inclined to declare, as Lux does in “Ode to the Electric Fish that Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,” that, “I defer to biology’s genius.”

III. The Domesticated

Of course, we rarely defer. Evolved Solo Natives all, armed with confidence and language, we are increasingly less conditioned to seek wisdom in wild things. Pursuing safety and preservation, pursuing plastic surgery and fame, pursuing gold and land, we have tended toward domestication as a default mode of “progress.” For the human species, the outcome has been technologically triumphant but inhibitive of creativity. As much as Lux’s poems admire the untamed world, they also scrutinize the soul-crushing consequences of ignoring it. His poems warn that with domestication comes the flattening of language into its most replicable and predictable forms.

Lux begins by knocking the shine off a subject central to the Anglophone poetic tradition: agriculture. In “Farmers,” the speaker recalls with dread the backbreaking labor required to run the family farm (“Force-feeding swans—let me tell / you—was hard.”). He then denounces the trade-off we’ve made with nature to sow and reap (rather than hunt and gather) our bounty from it. Just after remembering “Auntie Bones” harassing him to work harder and faster, the speaker declares:

I’ll tell you—I understand

how come the dancing bear tore off his skirt

and headed back to the Yukon

Even the humble compost heap comes in for a tough cross-examination. In “The Garden,” the speaker opens on a conciliatory note:

The basic metaphor is good: blend dead,

redolent things—dried blood,

steamed bone meal, dried hoof and horn

meal, slag, dolomite,

bat guano—into the dirt,

wait; live things will emerge.

This kind of passive cultivation is good; it leaves room for flirtation, surprises, unexpected developments to discuss and maybe marvel over. There’s metaphorical breathing room in it, which is fine for the soil, better for the language, and supreme for the soul. The problem arises because we are impatient with unpredictability, and so, while we wait to see what happens in the hot heap, we just cannot help ourselves. Lux notes, “In between, of course, you insert a seed.”

Next thing you know, it’s a flag. With that momentous, irrevocable hack (the seed), planted in the interest of cultural advancement (the state), human thought and behavior are channeled into the singular rut of dominance and productivity. Still, in Lux’s rendering, the experiment begins with legitimate aesthetic excitement, and more than a little grist for the poet to ponder:

So fragile, at first—I examine rows

of lettuce seedlings with a reading glass,

their green so barely green

they break your heart.

But soon the novelty yields to the monotony of labor. Tools are acquired and used—shovel, rake, hoe (“peasant tools”), but in the end, “mostly you pick, pull, and pinch by hand, / the green stains and stinks clinging / to your fingertips.” Living becomes working. Then an ethic of control sets in:

. . . Turn the dirt

and comb it smooth.

Plant what you like to eat.

Feed the birds—but not so much

that they get lazy—

and they will eat the bugs,

who should get their share

but not one leaf of basil more.

The poetic impulse for most of the 19th and 20th centuries was to find beauty in this balancing act. But Lux is not on board. His sensibility is more primal and attentive to the way this domineering relationship with the wild world enslaves the enslaver. And in this case, our reward for all the stress and labor is a product that nobody who is honest with themselves has ever, in the entire history of eating, truly wanted to eat:

It’s all a matter of spirit, balance,

common cruel sense: something dies,

something’s born, and in the meantime,

you eat some salad.

Lux explores how our compromises with nature affect the way we use words. As Solo Native knew, the inherent power of language exists in its radical openness, its diversity and lack of predictability, its nuances and unruly vernacular. Solo Native was once ready to describe anything the wild world delivered.

But these qualities have become specialized and narrowed with excessive domestication. Think of it: the range of expression required to make sense of a two-hour foraging expedition with a tribe of equals far exceeds the language required for a full day of repetitive agricultural labor, alone on the farm, wishing the day would end. Lux gets at this loss in “The Crows of Boston and New York”:

No longer wild—of the cornfield, or resting high

in rafters of deserted tobacco barns. They venture

to the borders, but will not cross, where city sends

its last tendrils out and park gives edge

to woods, where the first lawns

larger than billiard tables grow

each block a little larger

with the houses

The birds invade, knowing that “laws exist / against the discharge of shotguns upon them,” and, like the other bourgeois residents with the law on their side, they “steal what lesser birds hold dear.” Like “Old blue-black aristocrats” turned rapacious gentrifiers, “They are everywhere where they never used to be.” The final lines link the crows’ atrophy to our own:

I hate to see it: a bird so crafty, so sure,

moving in where it’s easier to eat

and they grow dim. What logic

sends them here and not so far away

only fieldhands know them? Maybe

they come to us, to live among us

so they can claim it as their choice—

which makes them proud and bright,

though does not cease their doom,

nor preserve their haughty, haunting cry.

As with the crow, so with the human. Mired in complacency, we justify our progress as the result of free choice, all the while failing to see the cost—losing our uniquely powerful voices—when we colonize and settle the wrong neighborhoods. The rich and famous offer no better examples of the empty-shelled vanity wrought by an escape into conformity. In “Frankly, I Don’t Care,” Lux, writing before the rise of social media, assumes an acerbic tone that belies the bulk of his otherwise buoyant poetry:

Frankly, I don’t care if the billionaire is getting divorced

and thus boosting the career

of his girlfriend, a “model/spokesperson” with no job

and nothing to promote; nor does my concern

over celebrity X undergoing surgical procedures,

leaked as “primarily cosmetic” if it can be measured

quantitatively, reach the size of the space

inside a hollow needle.

The fact that the rest of us so easily yield to this charade of self-importance perturbs Lux, to say the least. It’s a betrayal of the heroic Emersonian notion to “believe your own thought” and “speak your latent conviction.” Instead,

We the people, day-laboring citizens, need to love

those of you larger than us, those whose teeth

are like floodlights against loneliness,

whose great gifts of song, or for joke telling,

or thespianly sublime transformations

take us, for whole moments at a time, away

from ourselves.

When we are this far gone down the road of alienated detachment (“away / from ourselves,” as opposed to Bill Knott’s “I am flying into myself”), the only hope of escaping the alluring trap of fame is death. No other Lux poem, to my knowledge, ends on such a cold note, with the deceived masses awakening to exact revenge for what the feckless elite have done to them:

And on those cruel days when death has its way

and takes two or even three of you

at once, three of more or less equal fame, we will,

in the obituaries, the newscasts, the front pages

we will list your departures alphabetically;

your popularity will not, on this day, be tallied

or polled. Because in death, although still not anonymous,

you will be like us: small

equal, voiceless, and gone.

Happily, in the Lux cosmos, even celebrities cannot escape at least some connection to the beautifully disgusting underworld of wild things. In “Commercial Leech Farming Today,” Lux discovers a form of domestication he can gladly abide. One can almost see him squirming with delight as he reads his weird books and comes across this unexpected link between leeches and fancy humans:

. . . they’re used to reduce

the blood in tissues

after plastic surgery—eyelifts, tucks,

wrinkle . . .

Don’t you love

the image: the Dr. lays a leech along

the tiny stitches of an eyelift . . .

I like the going backwards

to ignorance

to come forward to vanity

IV. Real Life

Some of Lux’s antipathy toward over-domestication may be a callback to his safe but dull childhood. Young Lux worked on his family’s dairy farm. He was decently fed, housed, clothed, and loved. He was popular, stayed out of trouble, had friends. His primary form of rebellion in the 1960s, before college, was to smoke cigarettes. Ron Egatz, a former student of Lux’s at Sarah Lawrence College who is writing a book on his mentor, writes in a draft he shared with me that Lux told him after reading Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars’ Club (1995), “I can’t write one of those books. I didn’t have an uncle who molested me—I never had anything bad like that happen when I was a kid. We didn’t have addicts or criminals in the family. It was a pretty banal, benign, simple childhood.”

It was a childhood surrounded by milk jugs and cows—icons of Lux’s youth that appear in his poems without a hint of nostalgia. “The Milkman and His Son,” which Lux dedicates to his father, is a poem that would lead any parent to do a victory lap, but the central conceit involves the father shattering the tools of his trade—glass milk bottles—over a dump. When cows wander into another poem, “Cow Chases Boys,” written later in Lux’s career, the beasts are pelted with balls of anti-nostalgic dirt.

Lux shot like a cannonball from the rural farm to the urban poetry workshop. His unruly velocity blurred through the 1970s. He drank aggressively, won awards for his poetry, spent a year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, womanized serially, landed a job teaching at Emerson for three years, cofounded a press, and published three books of poetry—two of them early experiments in surrealism ( Memory’s Handgrenade in 1972 and The Glassblower’s Breath in 1976) followed in 1979 by the book that launched the Lux we know today, Sunday .

A decade later, when he published the poem “So You Put the Dog to Sleep”—perhaps the most unsentimental take ever on an old dog’s demise—Lux himself was settling down. In 1983, he married the writer and activist Jean Kilbourne (whom he divorced in 1994). A few years later, he received tenure at Sarah Lawrence College, and, at age 40, saw the birth of his only child, a daughter named Claudia. While never exactly sober, Lux moderated his drinking. He was growing increasingly dedicated to mentoring students and earning a stable income, and to fatherhood. The wild poet was becoming a tame adult. His reputation as a poet skyrocketed to something like fame.

Like a good dog, a tenured professor with a family and students to tend has to give up his wolfish tastes. The rewards are indeed ample:

You love your dog and carve his steaks

(marbled, tender, aged) in the shape of hearts.

You let him on your lap at will

Dedicated and loving owner calls him “pooch-o-mine, lamby, honey tart” and other coos of sweetness. In return, the good dog obeys: “He loves you too, that’s his only job, / it’s how he pays his room and board.” But domesticated dog, like Solo Native, never forgets what he’s sacrificed:

Behind his devotion, though, his dopey looks,

might be a beast who wants your house,

your wife; who in fact loathes you, his lord.

His jaws snapping while asleep means dreams

of eating your face: nose, lips, eyebrows, ears

In 2001, Georgia Tech hired Lux at $140,000 a year to lead its “Poetry@Tech” program. “I’m making more money than I ever dreamed,” he told a friend. “Poetry,” he added, “has been very good to me.” He stayed down South until his death from lung cancer in 2017. “So You Put the Dog to Sleep” ends:

But soon your dog gets old, his legs

go bad, he’s nearly blind, you puree his meat

and feed him with a spoon. It’s hard to say

who hates whom the most. He will not beg.

So you put the dog to sleep. Bad dog.

Great poet.

V. Refrigerator, 1957

Lux’s dogged explorations of the wild and the domesticated allow us to return to that aforementioned challenge: How do you observe the world as a poet is called to do without your language wallowing in suffering or drowning in sentiment? Well, to start, you toss both into the same cauldron and, to cite “Render, Render” from Lux’s The Cradle Place (2004), you “Boil it down . . . boil and skim . . . render it / down . . . boil and boil . . . render / it down and distill, / concentrate.”

On the best days, you’ll end up with more than lipstick “to plant as many kisses upon the world / as the world can bear!” You’ll also get a poem that condenses into a few dozen lines the vast sprawl of your entire poetic mentality. “Refrigerator, 1957,” first published in The New Yorker and included in New and Selected Poems, 1975–1995 , is exactly that poem. It opens with a scene set inside a hulking appliance that epitomizes the conformity of suburban domestication:

More like a vault—you pull the handle out

and on the shelves: not a lot,

and what there is (a boiled potato

in a bag, a chicken carcass

under foil) looking dispirited,

drained, mugged. This is not

a place to go in hope or hunger.

The image tracks nicely with Lux’s suspicion of domestication. Things here are manufactured and empty, repetitive in their emptiness—so much so that, later, Lux repeats his opening detail: “see above, / boiled potatoes.” As with the contents of the fridge itself, this scene leaves us without language, speechless and drab. Bored in a bad way.

But then, in a “wife hits moose” moment, the speaker notices “just to the right of the middle / of the middle door shelf,”—

. . . on fire, a lit-from-within red,

heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,

shining red in their liquid, exotic,

aloof, slumming

in such company: a jar

of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters

full, fiery globes, like strippers

at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,

the only foreign word I knew.

The discovery of this hot wild thing inside the cold grey vault immediately turns the language of the poem feral. Five versions of red explode down the page—sex, neon, wetness, the stripper crashing the church social! And all because the bored/hungry/restless Solo Native yanked open the fridge to find that an object, alien and alive, had migrated into his numbed consciousness and, like smelling salts, yanked him back to life.

It’s appropriate that Lux locates the origin of these “fiery globes” in the past, before refrigeration, when the routines of comfort were less entrenched and the world more ripened to the vagaries of chance:

. . . Maybe

they came over from the old country,

family heirlooms, or were status symbols

bought with a piece of the first paycheck

from a sweatshop

No matter their origin, Lux, having more than dutifully grounded this poem in all the thrill of a chugging refrigerator in 1957, lets out the throttle and, taking one last look at that jar aglow, allows his contained heart to go for broke:

They were beautiful

and, if I never ate one,

it was because I knew it might be missed

or because I knew it would not be replaced

or because you do not eat

that which rips your heart with joy.

This is more than a poem about a sweet childhood memory barricaded inside a dull and indifferent upbringing. It’s a poem that epitomizes how Lux saw the world: acknowledging the suffering of routinization while relentlessly seeking some hint of crazed Herzogian ecstasy, some foreign trigger that might explode the possibilities of language, mind, and reality. That it could be something as common as a jar of cherries (granted, foreign ones), as creepy as a spider, or as quiet as a pissed-off moose should give us all hope.

V. Coda

We need such hope. I’m comforted that Lux died before slimy algorithmic worms began to inch into his email account and attempted to complete sentences for him. Lux’s poetic worldview raged against the dying of linguistic unpredictability and celebrated words that are uncouth and rude, words fired from loose cannons that Solo Native aimed at the bastions of conformity. He raged, in other words, against forces constraining our freedom to speak our actual minds.

How sad Lux would be to know that, when Silicon Valley sucked up entire libraries of language, internalizing our verbal patterns and crutches and spitting chunks of them back out at us in the form of AI chatbots, we would turn to them whenever we needed to write a college essay or send a note to Dad—and be so utterly boring . Lux spoke for all poets when his poems shouted to the world that we were better than that. And that we need to be saved.

That Which Rips Your Heart With Joy

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