Kenneth Rexroth lived many lives in the avant-garde
of six decades--first in Chicago as a precocious actor, cubist painter,
and soap-box poet of revolution after World War I, then on the west
coast as Wobbly, cowboy-cook, and mountain-climbing naturalist
committed to the protection of the planet long before ecology became
a popular concern. Exploring Mexico, New York, Europe, and later
Asia, he won international fame as a poet of vision and protest, an
erudite and popular essayist, a translator from half a dozen languages,
Asian and Western, and an original thinker whose anarcho-erotic-
Buddhist-Christian worldview united worldly and transcendental
wisdom.
He was a contemplative activist, a lyricist of love and nature, a
fierce satirist and preacher against injustice, a rowdy comedian and
tragic playwright, an erudite sage and countercultural critic. His work
was a struggle for revolutionary hope and then to mourn its defeat in
World War II. This tragic view of the War as a worldwide collapse of
values, along with a deeply religious sense of "total responsibility,"
ennobled Rexroth's character at a time when most Americans
uncritically, simplistically, and self-righteously supported the "good
war" against fascism. Long before the public woke up to the
worldwide ecological crisis, Rexroth expected it to finish us all off
eventually if a nuclear Apocalypse did not.
Recognizing the worst, he celebrated the best in love and art. A
founder of the international Objectivist Movement and the San
Francisco Poetry Renaissance, an early promoter of Beat poetry and
major pioneer of the 1960's Counterculture, he expanded the
audience for poetry of high artistic and intellectual calibre, his
performances of which were often accompanied by live jazz and later
by Chinese and Japanese music. Befriending many poets, thinkers,
artists, musicians, journalists, workers, feminists, priests, nuns,
prostitutes, politicians, bankers, communists, and fellow-anarchists,
he wrote from a kind of worldly wisdom unique among intellectuals.
He collaborated with writers all over the world, assisted many before
they became famous, and supported small presses with some of his
finest work, while at the same time being published extensively by
New Directions and other major publishers. The influence of his
mother's feminism helped motivate his promotion of many women
poets, especially those of China and Japan. His lifelong absorption
and interpretation of Asian culture advanced the East-West tradition
of Whitman, Pound, Yeats, and Waley. Rexroth's poetry of visionary
love, at once erotic and spiritual, earthy and transcendent, revealing
nirvana in this world, has changed many minds and many lives.
Orphaned in childhood, he grew up with minimal repression;
and with little formal schooling he learned and created as he wished,
an uninhibited adventurer who always refused to knuckle under to
government, church, business, even to those he loved. He lived in
poverty during his youth in Chicago and for many years in San
Francisco, though international fame eventually brought him the
comfort of a spacious home in Santa Barbara. A conscientious
objector during World War II, he aided Japanese-Americans
threatened with incarceration and performed alternative service in a
mental hospital, where he suffered permanent injury at the hands of a
violent inmate. He seems to have had fits of madness, temptations to
suicide, the unstable temperament of a romantic poet. He went out of
his way to encourage young poets, to publicize their work, to help
spread a counterculture throughout the world. At times he seemed
superhuman, mythic, challenging in poetry, prose, and speech the
permanent war-mentality that has ominously clouded modern
civilization. His ideals of universal liberation and of holy matrimony
were unrealized. Were his assertions of "total responsibility" effusions
of saintly modesty, guilt, the wish to save the world, or symptoms of
hubris, the pride of a hero that drove him to the heights of visionary
ecstasy before his fall into a final year of agonizing immobilization
and silence?
Because much commentary on Rexroth's writings and ideas
has appeared in Asia, Europe, and the United States, how is it
possible in some surveys of modern poetry for his work to be ignored
or only casually mentioned? [1] We must
not forget that critics were slow to recognize Whitman, Dickinson,
Pound, Williams, Stein, and other major innovators. In addition, some
academics have been put off by his sweeping attacks on the Ivory Tower,
the New Critics, and the New York literary establishment, as well as upon
other vested interests, right and left. His position on the west coast at
first led to the misconception that he was a regional poet; and Asian
influences in his work alienated him from some specialists unfamiliar
with them. There are those who find him more interesting as a personality
or thinker than as a writer of poetry. But while emphasizing that
poetry is fundamentally vision, Rexroth was as devoted to
craftsmanship as were other modern masters. Much of his poetry is
intellectually and stylistically complex, requiring serious involvement
with world literature and thought, but no more so than Pound's,
Eliot's, or Zukofsky's. On the other hand, much of his writing is so
direct and personal that he seems to be speaking to us in the same
room, or in the mountains overlooking the Pacific, or in a Japanese
garden.
Perhaps because Rexroth was younger than the classical
modernists, not publishing his first book until 1940, when he was
thirty-four, and yet more rebellious than the post-war generation
associated with the New Criticism, he has never fit into familiar
periods, movements, and trends. After promoting the Beat rebellion,
he quickly disassociated himself from the movement, as he had
withdrawn from Objectivism over two decades previously. Some
literary historians had difficulty keeping up with his development.
Incessantly independent and changeable, often alienating friends and
allies, he never won the massive following enjoyed by Pound, Eliot,
Ginsberg, Olson, Snyder, and others. Admirers are sometimes on the
defensive about his work, for he could be an outrageous trouble-
maker, and he was self-righteously ideological and artistically
uneven, but so were many lesser writers.
More important than fitting him into an academic canon is to
read his work empathetically and carefully, interpret it insightfully,
and evaluate it philosophically as well as aesthetically. Perhaps he
will receive better treatment from critics and professors as his work is
increasingly explored in literary and academic publications.
Ellmann''s inclusion of his poetry in The Norton Anthology of
Modern Poetry was a kind of canonical blessing.
[2]
Indeed, since his death so much has been published by and about him
that we might speak of a "Rexroth boom," but it is more accurate to
speak of his persistent popularity. His poetry, translations, and prose
have attracted large and varied communities of readers, several
generations of them, ever since his first book, In What Hour,
appeared in 1940. Like his I. W. W. hero Joe Hill, we might well say
of Rexroth, "He never died!"
Rexroth has been hailed by Lawrence Clark Powell as "our
greatest man of letters," by Leslie Fiedler as "the last of the great
Bohemians," by Hayden Carruth as "our best nature poet," and by
George Woodcock as "one of the major poets of our time." [3]
In For Rexroth he is celebrated by editor Geoffrey Gardner
as "the most accomplished and deeply religious poet to write in this
country since Whitman" (xi), "the American poet who best
understands the Japanese culture" by Professor Sanehide Kodama of
Kyoto (47), a "polymathic didact" who is "one of the great love poets
of all time" by critic and editor Justus George Lawler (53), an
"anarchic libertarian Wild West magician sage" by poet David
Meltzer (56), and "a great love poet in the most loveless time
imaginable" by the poet James Wright (95).
[4]
According to Robert Bly, Rexroth was "the most intelligent literary
man in America..." [5] Gary Snyder has confirmed
his indebtedness to Rexroth; and his great friend and editor James
Laughlin has said that "Rexroth had a tremendous influence on New
Directions and on me... Rexroth partly took over the role of Ezra
[Pound] in my life, in that he advised me what to do and put me on to
things." [6]
When published in 1986 this book was the first to evaluate
Rexroth's lifework and worldview as a whole, based upon his more
than fifty volumes of poems, plays, translations, essays,
autobiographies, Japanese and American criticism of his work, our
correspondence from 1957 to 1979, and our conversations from 1964
until just before his death on June 6, 1982. Accompanying him on
poetry and lecture tours of Japan, where I taught at Osaka University
from 1975 to 1979, was especially helpful.
My thinking has evolved beyond that of my Kenneth
Rexroth, published in the Twayne United States Authors Series
in 1972, which was the first book on Rexroth by anyone.
[7] Before Revolutionary Rexroth first appeared fourteen years
later, no other critic had produced a whole book about him excepting
Daniela M. Ciani Forza, who covered his work only to 1956 in her
1982 Italian study. [8] My 1972 volume, placing
him in traditions of "religious anarchism" and "erotic mysticism" (his terms)
that include classical, Christian, oriental, and modern prophets, seers,
and poets, could not cover the Buddhist poetry of the last decade of
his life, his immersion in Japanese culture, some of his best
translations and essays, and judgments of his achievement as a whole.
In the present volume, which is for the general reader interested in
books and ideas as well as for the literary specialist, I have tried to
make judgments of his work as objectively as possible while
enriching them with insights from our friendship. All I can ask is that
readers judge without prejudice the theory and practice of Rexroth's
lifework, both for its own sake and for its illumination of Asian,
European, and American traditions, reconceived and synthesized.
Not until after Rexroth's death did I realize how his work from
beginning to end embodies a contemplative way of interacting with
other beings. Rexroth's stormy life was full of anguish from many
mistakes, as he mournfully admitted; but his visionary writings
suggest how all beings are created, transformed, and united in love,
despite massive hatred, violence, and destruction; how we live in
universal community, human and cosmic, without usually knowing it;
and how human life can be liberated through a revolution in
consciousness. This worldview revitalizes and ennobles the human
spirit, dangerously threatened by pathological military, technological,
political, and corporate regimentation that toys with ecological
disaster and nuclear annihilation. Denouncing the Social Lie that
depersonalizes and destroys, Rexroth offered an alternative way of
life, of waking up to the interacting plenitude of creative existence, in
a spiritual tradition going back to Shakyamuni, Lao Tzu, Sappho, the
Hebrew Prophets, Jesus, and other heroes of truth, love, and freedom.
I have not tried to write a detailed biography, as Linda
Hamalian has done; but my second chapter, "Lives of a Poet," based
on that intellectual adventure-story An Autobiographical
Novel, letters, and other sources, shows how Rexroth's
personality, art, and thought took various forms as they evolved from
contemplative and worldly experiences. My third chapter, '"Poetry Is
Vision'--'Vision Is Love'" presents his three poetic modes,
symbolism, cubism, and "natural numbers," in a coherent philosophy
of literature in which poetry is seen as interpersonal communication,
originating in contemplation (communion, vision) and re-creating
community. In Chapter 4, "The Poems," are detailed discussions of
his original lyrics, elegies, satires, and revolutionary polemics in
The Collected Shorter Poems (herein abbreviated CSP,
1966), philosophical reveries in The Collected Longer Poems
(CLP, 1968), Buddhist lyrics in New Poems (NP, 1974) and
The Morning Star (MS, 1979). These volumes and the handy
Selected Poems (1984), all issued by New Directions, contain
virtually all of his published poetry, exclusive of plays and
translations. Chapter 5 deals with his greatest whole work, the
dramatic tetralogy Beyond the Mountains (BM, 1951), on the
collapse of ancient Greek civilization, foreshadowing the collapse of
modern culture. In Chapter 6 I treat his translations as "Acts of
Sympathy." The seventh chapter, on his "Cultural and Countercultural
Criticism," his essays to his theory of literature and to major traditions
from which it emerges. In Chapter 8, "Discovering the Anarchist-
Buddhist Poet," I have included most of Rexroth's letters to me from
1957 to 1979, with the story of my deepening understanding of his
life and work. "In and Out of the Academy," the final chapter, deals
with his ambivalence towards the universities, Rexroth in the
fourteen years since his death, the need for more philosophical
interpretations of his work, and news of the Kenneth Rexroth East-
West Collection at Kanda University of International Studies in
Japan. The Bibliography includes all items about him worldwide that
I could find.
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Copyright © 2000 by Morgan Gibson
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry