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PermalinkMonday, April 9, 2012
Poet Thomas Lux On Writing Non-fiction
Aired 4/9/12
Guest: Thomas Lux, award-winning poet, Bourne Professor of Poetry, Georgia Tech University
What do San Diego's eccentricities, oddities and dark corners look like to a celebrated poet? Essays on San Diego by poet Thomas Lux have appeared over the past decade or so in the "San Diego Reader." Lux was asked years ago by Judith Moore, the Reader's late editor, to cover a story.
He ended up writing several essays on San Diego for The Reader without ever meeting Judith Moore. Lux took on diverse topics from San Diego's crime lab to fire-eaters and native insects. It wasn't easy. Lux had never before written non-fiction, although he had read it extensively.
He was drawn to poetry, as he told the U-T's John Wilkens, because of "its compression, distillation, the metaphorical imagination and the possibilities of the music, the cadences, the rhythms of our tongue, our rich and supple American English." Non-fiction was a different story and he had to learn to write it on the job.
Lux will read his poetry as part of the SDSU Living Writers Series.
When: Tonight at 7 p.m.
Where: Scripps Cottage on campus.
The event is open to the public and admission is free.
Now, those essays have been compiled in a book called "From The Southland."
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