December 10, 1946

Thomas Lux (December 10, 1946 to February 5, 2017), the American poet, was popular among English majors, if not the general population. He taught at various schools, as writers must,  and said this about that endeavor:

"When I teach, I do very close, specific readings of poems, talking about the poems line by line, talking about what works and why," he said. "I think poetry can be taught. You can write clearly and lucidly without compromising creativity. It's important that I make this clear that there is great pleasure in this labor. It is not tedious, because along the way, in the process of rewriting, you make discoveries. Anything good does not get made easily."

We have an charming example of his own work, cited in a review of his volume God Particles (2008). That book contained "The Happy Majority" which poem was prefaced by a quote from P. T. Barnum: "before I join the great and, I believe, the happy majority." Lux  begins it this way:

Before I join the happy majority...
.... I have some plans: to discover several new species
of beetle; to jump from a 100-foot platform
into a pile — big enough
to break my fall — of multicolored lingerie;
to build a little heater
(oh not to join the happy ones
until some tasks are done)
beside each tulip bulb to speed its bloom;
to read 42,007 books (list available
on request); to learn to read and/or write
Chinese, CAT scans, Sanskrit, petroglyphs,
and English; .....
....


Thomas Lux was a "former Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, he received the $50,000 Kingley Tufts award for his sixth collection Split Horizon." Lux's last teaching post was at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) where he held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry. 

Now he has joined that "happy majority."