Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

Poet Daisy Fried recently lamented how “very little of [poetry published in the past year] has any sense of fun.” This reminded me of Thomas Lux, one of my favorite poets whose works were often sardonically funny yet possessed a deep poignancy and empathy. Lux was a master at blending humor and pathos to capture the absurdities of the human condition.

Lux played minor subjects in a major key. He was a keen observer, and like a bower bird, he collected quirky details of everyday life into a wide-ranging body of work. The music critic Ted Burke once called him “the Laureate of Unintended Results,” as Lux’s poems often start with a simple observation that spirals into unexpected revelations. He could be tender and funny in the same piece, as in “Upon Seeing an Ultrasound of an Unborn Child,” “I Love You Sweatheart,” or “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy.”

In 1998, Lux selected my work for the Larry Aldrich Emerging Poets Award. Having grown up on a Massachusetts farm, he seemed drawn to the rural, straightforward voice in my poems about country life. I was fortunate his sensibilities resonated with my writing.

A generous man and masterful live performer, Lux taught for decades at Georgia Tech, holding the Bourne Chair in Poetry. His poem “Refrigerator, 1957” illuminates the juxtaposition of delight and melancholy he captured so well. The opening lines present an ordinary relic of mid-20th century American kitchens — “the jar of maraschino cherries/on the third shelf…” But Lux transforms this mundane image into a profound meditation on the passing of time and the contradictions of memory:

“…I’m eight, and time                                                                     

is both endless and negligible…”

In reflecting on this ubiquitous 1950s object, the poem evokes the depth of humor, nostalgia, and loss that Lux could unearth from the artifacts of everyday life. His poetry revealed the extraordinary in the ordinary in a voice that, as Daisy Fried yearned for, is undeniably fun.

Here is Tom Lux’s poem:

Refrigerator, 1957

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.

But, 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. Not once

did I see these cherries employed: not

in a drink, nor on top

of a glob of ice cream,

or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.

The same jar there through an entire

childhood of dull dinners—bald meat,

pocked peas, and, see above,

boiled potatoes. 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,

which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,

handed down from my grandparents

to my parents

to be someday mine,

then my child’s?

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

and because you do not eat

that which rips your heart with joy.

–Thomas Lux

(This poem originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, and subsequently in Tom’s New & Selected Poems, published the same year. Here is a recording of Tom reading his poem at the Robert Creeley Awards ceremony in March of 2012: “Refrigerator, 1957”.)