Роберт Лакс: Американдық ақын және рухани ізденісші

American poet

Robert Lax (November 30, 1915 – September 26, 2000) was an American poet, known in particular for his association with Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. Another friend of his youth was the painter Ad Reinhardt. After a long period of drifting from job to job about the world, Lax settled on the island of Patmos during the latter part of his life. Considered by some to be a self exiled hermit, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.

In the blurb for 33 Poems, William Maxwell, who had worked on The New Yorker with the poet, is quoted as commenting on Lax, "To the best of my knowledge, a saint is simply all the things that he is. If you placed him among the Old Testament figures above the south portal of Chartres, he wouldn't look odd." But although his output embodies a spiritual outlook, Lax was not a doctrinaire writer. He owed as much to eastern as to western systems of spirituality. For several years, Lax practiced the method of meditation developed by Eknath Easwaran, and near the end of his life, Lax's only reading each day was from Easwaran.

Lax composed a 35 minute Black/White Oratorio using only nine colour words and 'and'. This, as it was later arranged by John Beer, was to be performed by a chorus of nine to fifteen people. Since 2014 there have been performances by the Los Angeles based Readers Chorus. Between 2011 and 2015 there have also been four visual interpretations of Lax poems by German animator Susanne Wiegner, three of them based on readings by Lax and another interpreting the printed text. In 2018 Kile Smith composed The Arc in the Sky on nine texts of Robert Lax, described as a 65 minute pilgrimage for unaccompanied choir. The following year it was released commercially by Navona Records.