James Laughlin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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James Laughlin (1914-1997) was an American poet and book publisher.
He 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 Company, 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."
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.
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."
