James Laughlin

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This article is about the poet. For the economist, see James Laurence Laughlin.

James Laughlin (1914-1997) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin. Laughlin's family had made its fortune with the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, founded a generation earlier by his grandfather, and this wealth would partially fund Laughlin's future endeavors in publishing.

While a student at Harvard University, he took a leave of absence and traveled to France, where he met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He soon traveled to Italy to meet and study with Ezra Pound, who famously told him, "You're never going to be any good as a poet. Why don't you take up something useful?" Pound suggested publishing, and when Laughlin returned to Harvard, he used money from his father to found New Directions Publishing Corp.

The first book printed by the new press was New Directions in Prose & Poetry, an anthology of poetry and writings by authors such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings, a roster that heralded the fledgling company's future as a preeminent publisher of modernist literature.

Laughlin's son tragically killed himself by stabbing himself multiple times in the bathtub. Laughlin wrote a poem about this, called Experience of Blood, in which he expresses morbid amazement at the amount of blood in the human body. And despite the horrific mess left as a result, Laughlin reasons that he cannot ask anyone else to clean it up, "because after all, it was my blood too." ^[1]

Laughlin won the 1992 Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award from the National Book Awards Program.

He died of complications related to a stroke in Norfolk, Connecticut, at age 83.

1 Style
2 Works
3 Notes and references
4 External links

[edit] Style

Laughlin's style is marked by striking simplicity, with Laughlin himself stating "...They mean what they say, and I don't decorate [my poems] in any way. They are very simple statements of what I want to get across."^[2]

[edit] Works

Laughlin's works include:

In Another Country (1979)
Selected Poems (1986)
The House of Light (1986)
Tabellaie (1986)
The Owl of Minerva (1987)
Collemata and Pound As Wuz (1988)
Collected Poems of James Laughlin (1992)

Probably Laughlin's most anthologized work is "Step on His Head", a poem about his relationship with his children.

Step on His Head

"Let's step on daddy's head",
Shout the children, my dear children,
As we walk in the country
On a sunny summer day.
My shadow bobs dark on the road as we walk
And they jump on its head, and my love for them
Fills me all full of soft feelings.
Now I duck with my head, so they'll miss when they jump
And they screech with delight, and I moan
"Oh, you're hurting, you're hurting me! Stop!"
And they jump all the harder,
And love fills the whole road.

But I see it run on throught the years,
And I know how someday they must jump and it won't
Be this shadow, but really my head
As I stepped on my own father's head.
It will hurt, really hurt,
And I wonder if then, if I'll have enough love.
Will I have love enough when it's not just a game?