In celebration of National Poetry Month, every day we're posting a new poem from the spoken-word album Poetic License, a three-CD set that features one hundred performers of stage and screen reading one hundred poems selected by the actors themselves. From Shakespeare and Dickinson to Lucille Clifton and Allen Ginsberg, the lineup spans contemporary American poetry and classics of the Western canon.
Thomas Lux is a Massachusetts-born poet and teacher whose influences include Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, and James Tate. Lux, who directs the poetry program at Georgia Institute of Technology, has published eleven collections including Memory's Handgrenade (Pym-Randall, 1972); Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), for which he won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize; and God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Alan Campbell, once a member of the Broadway Tenors performance group, has appeared on screen and stage, receiving a Tony Award nomination for his performance in Sunset Boulevard. Campbell also is a founder of Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) Youth Theatre.
"A Little Tooth" by Thomas Lux, from Poetic License produced by Glen Roven. Copyright © 2010 by GPR Records. Used with permission of GPR Records.