National Poetry Month: Thomas Lux

"Otomonomania"
(Thomas Lux)

the word for the inability to find the right word,
leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It’s not
the 20 volume OED, I need,
nor Dr. Roget’s book, which offers
equals only, never discovery.
I accept the fallibility of language,
its spastic elasticity,
its jake-leg, as well as prima ballerina, dances.
I accept that language
can be manipulated towards deceit
(ex.: The Mahatmapropaganda, i.e., Goebbels);
I accept, and mourn, though not a lot,
the loss of the dash/semi-colon pair.
It’s the sound of a pause unlike no other pause.
And when the words are tedious
and tedious also their order—sew me up
in a rug and toss me in the sea!
Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry
is a corpse colder than the Ice Man,
they’ve all been dying for thousands of years,
yet people still write, people still read,
and everyone knows that nothing is really real
until it is written.
Until it is written!
Even those who cannot read
know that.

"Otomonomania" by Thomas Lux appears online at the Poets.org website.  Lux lives in Atlanta, where he is the Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He’s also directs the Poetry at Tech program. In a recent interview he downplayed the idea of surrealism apparent in his work, but commented that "Sometimes there are lucky accidents though I think they’re more likely to happen if one has sweat a little blood." His most recent collections are Child Made of Sand (2012) and God Particles (2008).