SOURCE: "Lucien Stryk's Poetry," in Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk, edited by Susan Porterfield, Swallow Press, 1993, pp. 279-92.

In the following essay, which originally appeared in 1977, Mills surveys the thematic range of Stryk's poetry, maintaining that the reader will find "the profound satisfaction of true poetry, and the tug and shift in his own feelings and perspectives which only art of proven quality can bring about."

Among the poets around or nearing the age of fifty now active in this country—a group in which I'd include such influential figures as Wright, Bly, Levertov, Simpson, Creeley, Rich, Ashbery, Justice, and so forth—Lucien Stryk is a somewhat elusive, independent figure: a writer, translator, scholar, and teacher, widely respected, admired, yet also provocatively and attractively a solitary, who lives in the middle west but frequently visits the Orient and Europe. Stryk's professional interests and his aesthetic convictions...