Thomas Lux’s parable, The People of the Other Village, about tribalism, suspicion, paranoia, reciprocal violence, and dehumanization particularly speaks to us today. Tit-for-tat attacks have escalated to genocidal levels and guaranteed generational revenge or preemptive strikes against any imagined threat. Likewise, the Russian war on Ukraine, and to varying degrees dozens of other simmering conflicts across the globe.
Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1946, and attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa.
His books of poetry are To the Left of Time (Mariner Books, 2016); Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin, 2012); God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975–1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (Ampersand Books, 1983); The Glassblower’s Breath (Cleveland State University Press, 1976); Memory’s Handgrenade (Pym-Randall, 1972); and The Land Sighted (Pym-Randall, 1970).
Over the course of his career, Lux moved from angsty, introspective surrealism to plain spoken pieces rooted in the real world with humor and irony—a social critic without seeming preachy.
The late Stanley Kunitz noted that “[Lux is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time.” Rita Dove, writing for the Washington Post Book World, has said, “Try Lux on for size. He’ll pinch in places, soothe in others, but I predict one thing: you may never fit the same way in your own skin again.”
Lux died in Atlanta, Georgia on February 5, 2017.
The People of the Other Village
hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
—Thomas Lux
The People of the Other Village from New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995. Copyright © 1997 by Thomas Lux.
No comments:
Post a Comment