Larry Thomas: The Texas Poet Laureate Essay

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The Person and His History

Larry Thomas

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This is Larry Thomas, born in west Texas in 1947. The picture is from his website. I included it because it fits both his poetry and what he did for most of his working like: worked in the Houston Department of Corrections, beginning as a parole officer and retiring from the position of Branch Director in 1998. Over the years he wrote on weekends and published in many respected literary journals, but did not publish his first book until after his retirement. (About Larry Thomas 2008) This portrait from his website is exactly what you see there, with the exception of the left-side navigation bar. He stands out with his book against the pure white, empty background, and his poetry stands out from others in just the same way. It has a flavor all its own.

There is not a lot to find about Thomas yet in peer-reviewed journals etc. but some are on the web. His guest appearance at WF Poetry Society was decidedly successful, as Doc’s Space relates. (2008) Larry recounts his beginnings as a poet in an interview with Susan Winter (2008). “I felt compelled to get a pencil and tablet from my apartment, and I wrote the following: “A dusk sky studded / with cotton candy clouds / where myriads of birds / swift in flight / race a fleeting sun / toward infinity.” And I have written poetry on a consistent basis since that fortuitous incident.” This poem shows his natural talent for poetry.

Larry Thomas got his BA from the University of Houston in English Literature in 1970 and was drafted immediately after graduation. He served in the Navy corrections department in Norfolk, Virginia, and was hired after his discharge by the Harris County Probation Department. He wrote on weekends until his retirement. He published poems here and there and kept writing.

He is quite old-fashioned when he writes. He uses a fountain pen and recycled printer paper and plays Beethoven. However, he is not computer illiterate. He actually stated in the interview with Winter (2008) that he believes the Internet is the future of poetry publishing. It uses no trees, is cheap and easy, and reaches niche audiences. So we will very likely see a great deal of Thomas online for some time to come.

The subjects he writes about most are in Texas, especially West Texas near his birthplace, Alpine. It is in the desert and the landscape is both start and beautiful. He remembers many things from his growing up there that get into his poetry. His style is very personal like he is talking to you, telling you his secret observations, gossiping. Sometimes it is like you might expect to read an interesting letter to a friend. The Red Raging Waters is like this. It starts out just like you might expect your friend’s letter to begin: “For weeks on end it has rained in Texas.” (2001)

There is really not much else I can say about Larry Thomas as far as biography goes, except that he has two children by the same wife he married right out of college. He really does not fit the cliché vision of the tortured poet, society misfit, etc. He seems like any ordinary good person, but he has a talent for words and a really well-trained poetic eye. In fact, all his senses seem to be trained to kick out words and images for him to use. He was picked from a selection of over 400 nominees for Texas Poet Laureate for 2008. In an interview with NPR on May 29, 2008, Thomas said it was unfortunate that many schools no longer teach poetry as part of the curriculum. (2008)

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The Poet’s Work

Larry Thomas’s poetry is very visual. He doesn’t say much about how he feels. He just shows you how he sees and hears. He uses color and texture and even smell and taste, as in Light of Apricots. (Thomas, Larry D. 2007) The latest book is New and Selected Poems published by TC Press. I was pleased that when I heard him read (there are many files available online from his website and in interviews) the voice I heard when I read his poetry was very close to reality, even if his looks were not what I had pictured.

He writes five days per week for about 6 hours and does not leave his desk until he has at least one full new draft. He writes about whatever he sees or remembers. I see a sense of humor in his work. It is not the “HA HA” humor of the stage or the backroom poker game, but more like seeing the oddly humorous things even in disaster. From The Red Raging Waters(2001), he talks about how the serpent and the snake get together for a communion finally as a Diamondback takes refuge from the flooding of the Brazos River on the sculpted bible of the statue of Jesus. He sees beauty or humor everywhere he looks, even in graveyards.

He has not written about the prisoners and parolees of his work, except for the book The Fraterntiy of Oblivion (2008), which is about bikers. Texas is home to one with a long history: The Bandidos. (History of Biker Gangs 2008) In this book he examines the totally different culture of the Bandidos. He said he “was privileged” to work with them as part of his job with Harris County in the interview with Susan Winter (2008).

Thomas uses ordinary language and does not rhyme his poetry, but the rhythm is sometimes conversation and sometimes like reciting a dream. He is very easy to understand and yet he touches on ideas that are very complicated. I guess that is the job of the poet, to interpret the world and its complicated cultures through imagery. He uses metaphor symbolized by the things common to the desert. He puts things in front of the audience and then turns them or puts things that are opposite together, like the “serpent and the saint” of The Raging Red Waters.

The book, Amazing Grace, sounded to me like it would touch on religion, because of the popular hymn, but he says in one of the introductions to poetry from the book that he would never presume to name a book after that wonderful piece of music. Instead, the book is about the amazing grace of the people around him as he grew up. He does touch on religion here and there where it is appropriate, but only because it is part of the culture.

His language stays out of the way of the images it creates and the images create a reaction in the audience that makes a change, sometimes very small, and sometimes almost a total shift of understanding. He is trying to make sense of the world for us. He is trying to show us its beauty and its power. He is, most of all, showing us the amazing resilience of people, which is something that fascinates him.

Thomas uses tiny clues which he lines us carefully as in a diaspora for a museum or a mural on a huge wall. As we look at the images inside our heads we see something more that cannot be expressed in words. He uses all the senses as part of each created image to recreate the scene which touched him and communicate that touch to the audience.

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Analysis of The Crabber from The Lighthouse Keeper (2001)

This poem is vivid with imagery and symbolism. The poet starts by describing the ninety-year-old woman’s appearance, permanently brown from ninety years of Galveston sun. Then he shows us the necklace of “perfect shark’s teeth”. We somehow know that this was not a gift, but that she collected these perfect teeth herself. It tells us that she has caught dozens of sharks since few of the teeth of any living shark are perfect. They are punished as the shark will bite anything that moves and so they get broken and cracked, worn with misuse. Sharks keep growing new teeth to replace the ones which become useless. He describes the teeth as hard and imperturbable and likens them to her gaze. We feel like he is seeing her like a shark. Sharks are seldom angry. They simply spend their lives feeding and reproducing. That is all they do.

The next four lines show her as she strings chicken necks as bait by tying a string around them and pulling it “tight as tourniquets”. This detail makes us think of those chicken necks as somehow alive since a tourniquet is meant to stop bleeding and save a life. We watch the old woman “prance” while carrying a bucket, the bait, and her net to the edge of the water. He says she prances the few steps from her shanty to the surf. Now we know a great deal about the woman. She is either homeless and squatting on the shore or she lives simply in an old shanty she owns, which is just beyond the reach of high tide. We watch as she slowly pulls in the stringed bait and slips the net under the bellies of “greedy crabs”, using only her sense of touch. She is an expert at this, working her “stringed necks like a master” a true carnivore.

The chicken necks hold a symbolism in the deep south of voodoo magic and this poem plays on that idea, making her seem powerful and a little scary. There is a lot of sexual innuendo in each scene as she “prances”, “works her stringed necks” and “easing the net under the bellies of greedy crabs”. We understand why in the next two stanzas.

She shakes the crabs “violently” into her bucket from the net, and keeps “fishing”. She waits with an icy stare for the next strike, just like a silent predator. The crabs make noise scuttling around in the bucked “like dominoes shuffled by the age blotched hands of old men.” This image takes us to a public park where old men gather to play dominoes and wait to be captured. She is a master at this too we see in the last stanza:

fueling her dream of dropping big blue males

into a bubbling stockpot flaring her nostrils

with crab-boil, reddening their blue

in but minutes, their sweet, white meat

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but briefly satisfying to her appetite

as the seven feckless husbands

whose cremated bodies she’s dumped into the sea.”

She will drop the large blue males into boiling crab boil and they will die and change color from blue to red. Then she will dine on them, but be ready for more soon after, as her appetite for “large blue males” is insatiable, as proven by the fact that she has outlived seven “feckless” husbands, had them cremated, and “dumped” their useless ashes into the sea. The word “feckless” is the most telling detail here. It means incompetent, ineffective, irresponsible, or lazy. So we understand why she is here in a shack living on the crab she catches. She did not marry these men for money and, in the end, she outlived them. Perhaps she consumed them (figuratively) with her need, her passion, and her endless hunger. That she had them all cremated is one last detail that makes us wonder.

This poem uses these symbols to paint this woman’s entire life, and she is part of the landscape that Thomas observes. He does not conjecture about her history, but he makes us do that by the symbols he shows: perfect shark’s teeth, the net, the crabs, how she will cook and consume them, the image of old men playing dominoes, and the final cremation and “dumping” of their ashes. The Crabber is like the sharks which owned the teeth that now adorn her neck, still living, unlike the chicken necks which are “adorned” by string tight as tourniquets. This is a poem about survival.

References

, 2008. Web.

Culver, Susan, 2007, An Interview With Larry D. Thomas.

2007 issue of Lily Literary Review “Never… stop believing in its worth.”

History of Biker Gangs, 2008. Web.

Lu, Catherine, 2008 – Larry was interviewed by for The Front Row Blog at KUHF-FM. (written text)

Podcast of KUHF/The Front Row interview. 2008. Web.

Ruffin, Paul, 2007, “A Conversation with Larry D. Thomas” Texas Books in Review.

Thomas, Larry D. 2007, With the Light of Apricots, Lily Press (published online/Lily Literary Review, 2007). Web.

Thomas, Larry D. 2002, The Woodlanders (Pecan Grove Press).

Thomas, Larry D. 2004, Where Skulls Speak Wind (Texas Review Press).

Thomas, Larry D. 2005, Stark Beauty (Timberline Press).

Thomas, Larry D. 2007, Eros (published online/Slow Trains Literary Journal).

Thomas, Larry D. 2008, The Fraternity of Oblivion (Timberline Press).

Thomas, Larry D. 2008, New and Selected Poems (TCU Press).

Susan, Podcast of KUHF/The Front Row interview, 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Larry Thomas: The Texas Poet Laureate." October 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/larry-thomas-the-texas-poet-laureate/.

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IvyPanda. "Larry Thomas: The Texas Poet Laureate." October 29, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/larry-thomas-the-texas-poet-laureate/.

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