Reviewing The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton in The New York Times Book Review several years ago, Richard Kostelanetz referred to Merton's Columbia College classmate and life-long friend Robert Lax as "among America's greatest poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkable few words. Though a survivor, Lax remains the last unacknowledged—and alas, uncollected—major poet of his post-60's generation."
Since that review was written, Lax, who has lived on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Patmos for the past 30 years, has been recognized as one of our outstanding abstract poets (some say "minimalist" or "concrete"). Although his work had been published in small editions for many years, the first major selection of his poems, 33 Poems, was published in 1988 in Europe by Pendo-Verlag, Zurich, and in the United States by New Directions. In 1985, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany mounted an exhibition of his poetry and drawings—the calligraphic and typographic arrangement of his poems on the page being an integral part of the poetry.
Robert Lax was born in Olean, New York, in 1915. He grew up there and in a New York City suburb. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he was a student of Mark van Doren. An editor of the Columbia humor magazine, The Jester, Lax became friends with an astounding array of young men studying at Columbia at the time—among them Thomas Merton, the painter Ad Reinhardt, and the author and photojournalist Edward Rice.
Born and raised a Jew, Lax converted to Catholicism in his mid-twenties.
Lax worked as an editor at The New Yorker, as a movie critic for Time, as a writer, editor, and roving editor for the magazine Jubilee, and was publisher and editor of Pax. He has contributed to many magazines and anthologies. His first book, The Circus of the Sun, orignally published in 1960 by Journeyman Books, has been reprinted by Pendo-Verlag in an English-German-French edition and is also included in 33 Poems. Excerpts of his correspondence with Thomas Merton were published by Sheed Andrews and McMeel lunder the titled A Catch of Anti-Letters.
—from "Robert Lax, Biographical Notes" in the exhibition catalog.