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Chapter 8 (Part One)
DISCOVERING THE ANARCHIST-BUDDHIST POET:
REXROTH'S LETTERS TO GIBSON (1957-79)
Discovering the Anarchist Poet
Four poems in Selden Rodman's A New Anthology of
Modern Poetry (New York: Modern Library, 1946) alerted me to
the revolutionary genius of Kenneth Rexroth when I was discovering
modern literature on my own at the University of Chicago just after
World War II. In the work of no other poet had I found radiant
perceptions of nature infused with advanced scientific, philosophical,
mythological, and literary ideas. Planning to specialize in physics and
mathematics, but upset by the nihilism of the Atomic Bomb, I was
astonished that a poet could think passionately and ethically in
poetry. I do not mean that Rexroth made ideas "poetic," but that he
philosophized in the act of composing poems. "Now, On This Day of
the First Hundred Flowers" celebrates cycles of birds and flowers,
fog and lovers that transcend fate in imagination. "Here I Sit,
Reading the Stoic" brings classical satire up to date, with tragic
acceptance of the decay of civilization. "Remember That Breakfast
One Morning" sensuously resurrects the Lost Generation at a time
when the lives of millions were being ruined during World War II.
And the melodiously mythic "Adonis in Summer" gathered me into
the evolutionary chain of creation through a vision of Adonis,
castrated among lotus-eaters.
The Lotophagi with their silly hands
Haunt me in sleep, plucking at my sleeve;
Their gibbering laughter and blank eyes
Hide on the edge of the mind's vision
In dusty subways and crowded streets.
Late in August, asleep, Adonis
Appeared to me, clutched in his hand, the plow
That broke the dream of Persephone.
Without the inspiration of these and other poems by Rexroth, which
reveal deeper truths than science, I would not have left mathematics
to become a poet, and many others would have had much less
meaningful lives. I came across these four poems again in the
visionary book in which they had first appeared, The Phoenix and
the Tortoise (1944), and in The Collected Shorter Poems
(1966), retitled respectively "We Come Back" (163), "Gas or
Novocain" (151), "Between Two Wars" (150), and "Adonis in
Summer" (160). The last poem, a passage from The Homestead
Called Damascus, was also reprinted in The Collected Longer
Poems (1968, 11-12)
No one mentioned Rexroth in writing workshops and classes at
the University of Iowa, where I went for graduate work in 1950, for
his work conformed neither to the conservative norms of the New
Criticism nor to the McCarthyite atmosphere of the Korean War,
when any rebellion was subversive. A conscientious objector, I
wondered whether he had died with revolutionary hopes of the
1930's.
Soon after October 13, 1955, I heard about the famous Six
Gallery reading in San Francisco, in which Allen Ginsberg, who had
organized it, premiered "Howl. "Gary Snyder, Philip Whelan,
Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia also read powerfully
visionary poems; and Kenneth Rexroth as M. C. introduced to
America the "generation of revolt." The audience included Jack
Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky, and
other celebrities of what the media would soon both promote and
ridicule as the "Beat Generation," a term that Kerouac had invented.
The next year Ferlinghetti published "Howl" as #4 of the City Lights
Pocket Poets Series, the first volume of which had been Rexroth's
Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile. The censorship trial
of "Howl" brought the new, highly personal, prophetic, erotic,
rebellious, anarchistic, pacifistic poetry--my kind of poetry at last--to
international attention. Like many other young poets disenchanted
with the establishment, I consumed all the new poetry that I could--
not just Beat poetry but many kinds unimagined in academic
workshops--from City Lights books, Robert Creeley's Black
Mountain Review (North Carolina), Paul Carroll's Big Table
(Chicago), Robert Bly's The 50s (Minnesota), cid corman's
Origin (Kyoto), and from New York Barney Rosset's
Evergreen Review and Grove Press books (which in 1960
issued Donald Allen's substantial anthology, The New American
Poetry). In 1957 recordings of Ginsberg, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti,
Patchen, and others, with jazz accompaniment, convinced me of the
radical public force of poetry performances that were attacking the
destructive American system and revealing the growth of alternative
outlooks and creative communities.
During the 1950's, Rexroth's countercultural essays in
Evergreen Review and elsewhere (eventually collected in
Bird in the Bush, 1959) interpreted the San Francisco
Renaissance in radical terms that conjoined the art of poetry with
personal liberation, political protest, visionary ecstasy, erotic
freedom, philosophical illumination, and cultural transformation. He
praised the original rebellion of the Beats and their best poems but
soon condemned their commercialization. I read all of his books as
they streamed forth and heard his prophetic voice for the first time
from the recording of "Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Memorial for Dylan
Thomas" (San Francisco: Fantasy Record #7002, 1957), his raucous
voice accomapnied by a funky jazz band. This eloquent polemic
against the world-wide culture of death stunned and stirred me as I
played it for groups of students, poets, and auto workers in Detroit,
where I was then teaching at Wayne State University and writing for
an interracial, revolutionary newspaper called News and
Letters. He rallied me, comrade to comrade, when I worked up
nerve in 1957 to send him a substantial literary and political letter
with my poems. He read them on his weekly program at KPFA in
San Francisco and wrote me the first of many letters and cards
affirming the kind of humanistic revolution that many of us believed
possible throughout the 1960's.
His enthusiasm and modesty surprised me. I had expected
nothing at all, or at most a sarcastic rebuff in the tone of his essays on
the Beats. I had hesitated to write this enemy of academe, of
workshops, and "midwest metaphysicals," but his prose polemics
and visionary poetry were heartening. His first reply to me had been
lost in the mail--one of the many dirty tricks that he blamed on the
government; but his second letter arrived intact sometime in 1957.
Undated, written in his famous flat, the center of poetry and
revolutionary thought in San Francisco, it was the first of sixty-one
letters and cards that he sent me during the next twenty-two years,
between many visits and phonecalls:
250 Scott St SF
Dear Morgan Gibson - Something has gone wrong. I
wrote you at length about your poems, the book about the
Negro, News & Letters, and general observations.
Too bad. I don't feel up to a long letter at this precise
moment but I can say again that I was very impressed &
deeply moved - that you should have known about me &
liked what I write enough to send me the things - and by
the poems, book & papers themselves. I doubt if, in all my
years in the labor movement I have ever read a paper I
agreed with more. This is precisely my point of view &
always has been. The novel or autobiography is the only
convincing study of a proletarian Negro I have ever read -
it sounds like it was written by a worker - not a novelist.
The poems are not the work of a professional poet - but
again - of a worker in constant contact with life and are
very moving. I am very flattered that you sent the bundle
to me. Incidentally I devoted a 15 minute book review
program to the whole thing & passed the News & Letters
on to the Pocket Bookshop where Ferlinghetti in time has
given them all away to people he thought might be
interested.
Faithfully K Rexroth
"Something has gone wrong" was so often repeated by Rexroth
that it came to sum up his view of human affairs, that the noblest
hopes and aims of humanity had been tragically perverted and
betrayed by men out of tune with nature--a view arising from his
struggles in the Industrial Workers of the World and the John Reed
Clubs, as well as from his meticulous study of history. The poems
that I had sent him were not those from the Iowa Workshop but some
of my work published in News & Letters, the Marxist-
Humanist newspaper directed by Raya Dunayevskaya. Having been
Leon Trotsky's secretary in Mexico, she had later condemned the
USSR as a state capitalist tyranny, counting on the self-organization
and spontaneous rising of oppressed people worldwide, instead of on
a vanguard party. In acclaiming News & Letters, Rexroth did
not mean that he was a Trotskyist--neither was Dunayevskaya at this
time--but that he agreed with one of Marx's fundamental ideas,
derived from Hegel, that people had become alienated from nature,
from work, from the products of work, and from themselves,
especially through the capitalistic exploitation of labor. Rexroth also
agreed with Dunayevskaya in going beyond Trotsky's condemnation
of the USSR for betraying the revolution, and in her original thesis
that the USSR had come to adapt a state-capitalist economy, not
fundamentally different from western economies, though even more
repressive. However, calling himself an anarchist instead of a
Marxist, favoring communities of free-association over coercive
collectivities, Rexroth argued that a betrayal of humanistic revolution
had been inherent in Lenin's leadership of the Russian Revolution.
The "book about the Negro" was Indignant Heart (New
York: New Books, 1952), the autobiography of Matthew Ward, a
Detroit auto worker up from the south and editor of News &
Letters. Ferlinghetti's Pocket Bookshop was of course City
Lights.
After moving to the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee I carefully
garnered support, as the first poet on the faculty, to invite him to
teach there. His reply of 25 October 1963 indicated a serious interest
in teaching and a wish to revisit the midwest. Growing up in the
Midwest, he had visited Milwaukee many times during his youth.
Dear Morgan Gibson:
Yes, indeed, I would be very interested
both in the position as writer-as-residence for 1964-65 and
in participating in the Summer Fine Arts Festival.
I think it should be possible for us to
come to agreement fairly easily on the formal duties of
such a position. My own feeling is that there should be
enough work to prevent the kind of stultification which
results from being handed a sinecure and being told to
create. I for one enjoy a moderate amount of teaching and
am reputed an infectious pedagogue.
At the present time I am working as a
columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. I am
not an employee but what is called in the newspaper
business a contract writer. For this reason it would
probably be wise to start working toward a decision
before I have to make another year's commitment. I also
teach a course in art history and appreciation at the San
Francisco Art Institute but nothing has to be done in that
matter until late spring. I would certainly prefer to take a
leave of absence in both of these positions rather than
abandon them entirely and this will take some
arrangement both here and in New York with the
newspaper job. My work is of such a nature that I could
fly to Milwaukee for a visit if you think that is
desirable.
I was born in the middle west and grew
up in Chicago but the pattern of my life has been such that
I never expected to have the opportunity to return there for
any length of time. Your invitation is more than welcome.
It is welcomed with enthusiastic anticipation. I don't think
I would be happy spending a year in the scenes of my
childhood, a small Indiana town or the Chicago South
Side, not as they have become today. Milwaukee is the
ideal solution for something I've always wanted.
Thank you very much and believe me I
am most pleased and flattered to be considered.
Faithfully, Kenneth
Rexroth
On 28 May 1964, in a letter beginning "Dear Fellow Worker
Gibson," he suggested how he liked to live, described his flat in San
Francisco, and recalled old haunts in Chicago:
To give you an idea of my standard of living -- I live in a
great, big Victorian flat in the moderately hincty section
of the Black Belt, a sort of combination of the Near North
Side and South Park... What I would prefer is a big room
and kitchenette in an old house in Bohemia... It would be
nice if it was big, like an ex-drawing room or so-called
double drawing room so it could be used for seminars and
such... Faithfully, Kenneth Rexroth
Negotiations resulted in Rexroth's coming to Milwaukee for the
summer, 1964, Fine Arts Festival, but not for the whole year. I had
assumed from his belligerent essays and protest poems that he would
be ferociously polemical at all times; but when we first met, on
campus, he was staring at clouds over the library as if he had lost his
senses, and I could not get him to speak as we toured the university.
He was a tall, powerful man who looked down upon ordinary mortals
like a tragic actor, sighing as if life had broken his heart. As his sad
but sharp eyes peered intently at everything, he moved with great
care, as if decades of mountain-climbing had warned him against
slipping into crevasses. He vaguely muttered about insects and plants;
then suddenly stopping near the ivied walls of Downer College across
the street from my office, as tears filled his eyes he told me in a soft,
trembling voice, as trustingly as if he had known me for years, how
he had climbed that wall to spend the night with a girlfriend forty
years before, during visits to Milwaukee from his home in Chicago.
Generally, he was quiet in the mornings, as if sleep had passed
into meditation. As we walked through wooded parks that summer
near the mansion overlooking Lake Michigan where he was staying,
he would whistle bird songs and compare each flower with those in
California and Europe, meticulously describing forms and colors. He
got into conversations slowly, cautiously, then let 'er rip, the best
talker I ever knew, outlandishly joking, bantering, arguing, recalling
voluminous details about poets, revolutionists, forests, oceans, and
lovers, playing back his life so I could see it unroll before my eyes
just as it did later while reading An Autobiographical Novel, which he
was planning then. His voice closely echoed his writings, but with
dramatic extremes impossible in print, ranging from roars to
whispers, sometimes rumbling like a mountain land-slide, sometimes
soft as a forest breeze, unlike the urban voices of Eliot, Stevens, and
Pound.
As we hiked around Milwaukee, he showed me hangouts of his
youth, which he had visited while living in Chicago off and on from
1916 until 1927: German restaurants, the Pabst Theater, and the
Turner Hall where he had debated socialists and communists before
World War I and during the Red Scare after it--the years of
"revolutionary hope" that he recounted in "For Eli Jacobson" and
"The Bad Old Days," when he vowed to help save the world after
seeing the ruined faces of children and workers near the Stockyards
(CSP, 244-45 and 258-59). Recounting those dialectics, he seldom
stopped discussing politics, literature, religion, history, or philosophy
till long after midnight, bursting into songs from the Industrial
Workers of the World and Spanish Anarchists. Here was a whole
human being in which body, feeling, thought, and imagination
creatively harmonized, the kind of person that universities are
supposed to produce, but almost never do.
When I introduced him to my colleagues, I expected collisions,
but the man who had condemned academics as "vaticides" (killers of
vision) in "Thou Shalt Not Kill" conversed politely with them,
impressing them with his encyclopedic knowledge, which most of
them had been glimpsing in his many popular essays, if not from his
poems and translations. He nearly always listened with patient
attention to whatever was said, no matter how silly, and replied with
measured words unless, occasionally outraged, he exploded, most
often at pompous authorities in academe, government, and literature.
But he urged me to criticize his ideas and poetry: "Go on," he would
say, "tell me I'm full of shit!"
This enemy of academic conservatism, without any degrees,
was perfectly at home in the classroom, introducing with immense
erudition poets ancient and modern as if he had known each one face
to face and dramatically reading aloud poetry of six centuries from
the Auden/Pearson anthology, with tears in his eyes. Classroom
teaching flowed in and out of his daily conversation with friends.
After a poem, his voice would trail off as he stared at sunshine on a
windowpane or leaves of a tree, lost in reverie.
Rexroth's relation to academe was as ambivalent during his
lifetime as it is now, after his death. Despite his attacks on the
narrow-mindedness of many academics, he was not above teaching at
various universities, where he rigorously interpreted poetry in the
spirit of communicating ideas that matter. He confided to me that he
had even once considered going for a Ph. D., though he had dropped
out of high school.. He admired true scholarship, which he practiced
more conscientiously than many professors, and he became close
friends with certain scholars in Japan, Europe, and the United States.
His scholarship always nourished his poetry and his radical
philosophical commitments.
He favored intellectual people over provincial radicals and
Beats who had read no poetry before Howl. Asked at a poetry
reading in Milwaukee if Allen Ginsberg were not the greatest seeker
in the world, Rexroth replied, "Well, he sure ain't no finder." When a
dignified lady asked his opinion of the arts in Milwaukee, he
muttered, "Cultural wasteland. Not enough rich Jews." The audience
gasped at this blunt praise of Jewish philanthropy. And when another
lady asked reverently whether he had known Spender, he groaned,
"Never ride in a VW bug with Stephen Spender. His breath will kill
you." Attacking the commercialization of literature, he proclaimed
that poetry is "the avocation of a gentleman," adding paradoxically
that he wrote it "to fuck women and bring down the capitalist
system." Also paradoxically, he had promoted feminism since his
youth. Distrusting most men, he favored the company of women,
whom he normally treated with old-world gallantry which is now
condemned by feminists but which then attracted many liberated
women.
After leaving Milwaukee, Rexroth fed ideas to me for Arts
in Society, the journal published by the University of Wisconsin,
for which I was poetry editor. On 15 February 1965 he wrote:
Dear Morgan:
Would you like an essay on Literary
Cubism and Pierre Reverdy and a selection of Reverdy's
poems? This is my next book.
Please write to Ruth Witt Diamant and
Mark Linenthal for the Poetry Center. I think Ruth is in
Japan. For years the Poetry Center was in fact the poetry
readings and seminars at my house. When this activity
became unmanageable, Robert Duncan, Madeleine
Gleason and I set up the Poetry Center and got Ruth Witt
Diamant to sponsor its readings at S. F. State College
which was then downtown. Later we got a considerable
amount of money from the Rockefeller Foundation and it
became a semi-autonomous activity of the college. Today
the school has completely absorbed it. Its days as the
spearhead of the vanguard are long since gone and the
intractables hereabouts refer to it as the anti-poetry center.
Since local academia is pretty hip, anti-academia is really
something, but I suppose they're right. I don't think you
should do anything about the Poetry Center without letting
Duncan, Ferlinghetti and Brother Antoninus speak their
pieces in criticism of it.
It's good you've got a new book coming
up and thank you for the two poems... Faithfully, Kenneth
Rexroth
P. S. I am asking my secretary Carol Tinker to send you
some poems of hers. I think she's pretty good.
His essay on Reverdy, an important attempt to revive the
"Revolution of the Word," first appeared elsewhere and became the
introduction to Pierre Reverdy Selected Poems (1969).
Instead of focusing on the Poetry Center I edited for Arts in
Society a selection of poetry from San Francisco generally. My
new book of poems was Mayors of Marble (Milwaukee:
Great Lakes Books, 1966). The first collection of Carol Tinker's
poems was in Four Young Women: Poems, edited by Rexroth
(1973). She married Rexroth in 1974.
America's War in Vietnam
As opposition to America's war in Vietnam spread in massive
demonstrations from coast to coast, Rexroth became increasingly
distressed about the killing and the repression of dissent. During a
poetry reading at the University of Illinois, where I drove him in
1967, he was so indignant at a professor who had pooh-poohed his
condemnation of America's role in the war that he aimed a forefinger
at him and shouted like Jeremiah, in the voice of "Thou Shalt Not
Kill," "You are in the eye of the hurricane and you don't even know
it!" As the master of ceremonies nervously tried to cut short the
program, Rexroth stormed off the stage and refused to attend a
reception.
He wrote on 7 January 1968: "Life goes on with us. People
arrested at the Oakland sit-in the second time are being given an
extraordinarily rough time. This is going on everywhere on direct
telephone orders from LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] - as I
suppose you know." I did not know until he informed me.
I included Rexroth's poetry and essays in classes on anarchism
and avant-garde literature offered by the Free University in
Milwaukee sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society, as well
as in my regular seminars. When he visited the University of
Wisconsin--Milwaukee again on 19 March 1968, I was surprised that
in his public reading he did not present protest poetry. Instead, he
featured The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart, the long
poem about satori in Kyoto that initiated his Japanese phase
and intensified my interest in Buddhism, which eventually brought
me to Japan. Still an activist, I had trouble understanding that while
sympathizing with opposition to the war, he had given up on its
effectiveness, cultivating instead the Buddha's compassionate
wisdom of resignation.
As always, he read my poems and offered help, writing on 7 May
1968 about the counterculture:
I think that both "Pilgrim Bones" and Mayors are very
good & somebody should publish them. But they are in a
style that most people who run the presses are just
catching up with... I'd be glad to write something for the
jacket or cover. Enclosed is the first half of a piece for a
magazine that folded before it got into print. I can do as
much again on the "counterculture." You can print it in
that magazine at Madison if you want to and it still exists.
Or anywhere else? Faithfully Kenneth LOVE TO
ALL!
"Pilgrim Bones" was one of my poems, and Mayors of Marble my
second book (Milwaukee: Great Lakes Books, 1966). I published his
"Alienation" essay in Arts in Society. On 28 June 1968, his
repudiation of an "interview" in a Madison little magazine indicates
that he distrusted hippies as much as the establishment, although he
generally supported countercultural values such as peace, love, and
freedom:
Dear Morgan -
That is quite a misrepresentation of
me... It's all a little wrong everywhere - but then I never
so much as mentioned Yvor Winters, Ruth Stone or
Arts in Society. Several paragraphs are simply
invented outright. It's saddening the amount of
malevolence loose in the world, and not least among Love
Children. [The interviewer] would be quite shocked if in
the court of heaven he found himself convicted of exactly
the same sin as the assassins of King and the Kennedys.
What can you do?
He went on to exclaim about Kenneth Rexroth, the
book that I had begun to write:
Really? A book about me? Honest? Gee!
I think the most civilized country is Finland & next,
Sweden. Australia Mary [his older daughter] says is a 25
hour Elvis Presley movie.
Need anything re/me? UCLA library has
all my papers and has just published a bibliography.
I had asked his advice about leaving our warring country. The
bibliography, by James Hartzell and Richard Zumwinkle, was
published in 1967 as Kenneth Rexroth/a Checklist of His
Published Writings, with a foreword by Lawrence Clark Powell.
On 21 July 1968, he sent me, for my book, information about his
family and ridiculed Nixon, Humphrey, Reagan, and other
politicians. The photo that he mentions was later used in
Revolutionary Rexroth
Did you take the pix? They're great! I could use 1/2 the
head in front of the bank sign as a publicity photo. It's the
best of me in ages... Looks like we'll all go to Santa
Barbara for a school year. Why don't you come to SF &
take over our house? Flat, rather. I like Montreal better
than Vancouver in many ways. Mostly because it is
French & has lots of cafes & good food & the life of a
capital. Vancouver is sure pretty.
If it's Tweedledick and Tweedlehump this Fall [Nixon vs.
Humphrey for president], people are going to flood out of
the country. In California it will certainly be Max Rafferty
[for governor]. No nation on earth has 3 top politicians
like Rafferty, Reagan, Murphy. And do you realize that
Wallace will get twice the percentage of vote of the W.
German "Neo Nazis" who are far less reactionary? There
isn't any part II of Alienation. Someday I'll do a
companion piece on the "counterculture." Love to all
Kenneth
The next day, he sent me the following open letter which I distributed
to the Madison literati:
Dear Morgan Gibson:
You can use the following in any way
you see fit:
That is quite a misrepresentation of my
talk in "Quixote" [III, 4, Spring, 1968, pp. 85-86]. It is all
a little wrong everywhere and conveys something totally
different from my own tone and attitudes. Far more
important, I never so much as mentioned Yvor Winters
whom I greatly respect, Ruth Stone who I scarcely know
but who I like and who had accompanied us to the lecture,
or Arts in Society to which I contribute and of
which you are I believe an editor. Several other
paragraphs are simply invented outright. It is saddening to
think of such irresponsible malevolence loose in the world
and I certainly believe any steps should be taken to
circumvent it and to repair the seemingly quite
unmotivated injuries done to people I like.
Faithfully, Kenneth Rexroth
When I queried him about teaching at San Francisco State
University, he wrote on 3 August 1968, "Actually State has become
so disorderly that all sorts of people are leaving or canceling."
Perhaps because he was not writing specifically anti-war poetry at
this time, he added, "The Anti-Vietnam forces won't print me. I've
gone down the memory hole." He was joking because The
Collected Longer Poems and Classics Revisited came
out that year, The Collected Shorter Poems and An
Autobiographical Novel had been selling well for two years, and
most of his other books remained in print and were popular. When
asked why his poems during the 1960's had been generally
contemplative, without explicitly condemning racial discrimination,
pollution, war, nuclear armaments, and other injustices, he replied
that he had already made his statement in earlier poems such as
"Thou Shalt Not Kill." His poetry was more prophetic and
philosophical than protesting literalists could comprehend.
Rexroth became so disgusted with life in San Francisco, as
drugs and violence became more threatening, that after living there
for forty-one years he moved to Santa Barbara to teach at the
University of California branch there. He made his permanent home
in the suburb of Montecito till his death. On 20 Oct 68 he wrote:
Dear Morgan -
This is the place for you. We don't want
to leave. Been swimming in the ocean every day so far.
Montecito is like California 50 years ago. UCSB is 12
miles away by freeway - the other side of town,
surround[ed] by slurb full of professors. Isla Vista, the
student village on the same sandbar as the university is a
horror - a real ghetto - not like Harlem, more like Warsaw
1943. But it's all far away and I have two classes - Mon &
Wed 10 to 12 Wed only 1 to 3--$15,600. (uneducated
students! and how!) Mary, in the Creative College - is
taking only graduate & upper division courses. Poetry
seminar - "bullshit" she says, Medieval Literature,
Renaissance Drama, Latin, Plato. Carol is potting. Jan is
taking all sorts of things - nature hikes & abnormal
psychology - the latter as a young girl's Baedeker I
guess.
Has Laughlin sent you proofs or advance
copy of Collected Longer Poems? He said he
would but he's been in Europe. You should talk to that girl
at UW Madison - Cyrena N. Pondrom. Her interview goes
on & on. Just got another letter & a blank tape. Also a
really touching long paper by Gordon K Grigsby Ohio
State U. (the one in Columbus. Dept of Eng. 26 pages -
very nice.) Did you ever see Dorothy Van Ghent's thesis
from Mills on me & Gertrude Stein & Laura Riding? Very
"revolutionary of the word." I will send you something
right away for Arts & Society.
Get the records now coming out of
readings & singing in the Theatre Odeon during the May
Days. Love to all Kenneth
The Collected Longer Poems and The Collected Shorter
Poems gathered together virtually all of Rexroth's poetry to date,
excepting the plays and translations. From 1968 on his poetry would
be fundamentally oriented around Japanese Buddhism, though he
remained a Christian. Professor Pondrom's interview (in
Contemporary Literature journal, 1969, and The
Contemporary Writer, 1972. Professor Grigsby's "The Presence
of Reality: the Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth" appeared in Antioch
Review in1971, and Van Ghent's 1935 M. A. thesis at Mills
College in 1935 was the best theoretical theoretical treatment of his
cubist/objectivist poetry before Rachelle K. Lerner's dissertation in
1992. The Theatre Odean was a center in the May, 1968, student
revolt in Paris that helped revive, momentarily, Rexroth's hope for
worldwide liberation. (See relevant grafitti on Ken Knabb's Bureau
of Public Secrets homepage.) Rexroth sent me "On His Thirty Third
Birthday," his translation of a poem by Sheng Kung Fan, which I
published in "The Arts of Activism," my special issue of Arts in
Society in 1969. This contemplative poem by an ancient Chinese
showed Rexroth's way of responding to the world crisis at that
time.
Correcting notes for my first book on him in 1969, he wrote about
Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (in which the anarchist poet
Rheinhold Cacoethes is obviously modeled on Rexroth), "I never
read the book." Why? He had despised its author since they had met
at the reading of Ginsberg's "Howl" that had inaugurated the Beat
Generation in 1955, and often ridiculed Kerouac's ignorance of
oriental languages, pretentions of Buddhist wisdom, and drunken fits.
Rexroth went on to comment on his own workshop at the University
of California--Santa Barbara: "Class in 'Poetry & Song' went great.
Produced several folky rocky numbers, four jazzy-torchy, 4 'art
songs' with flute, bass, cello, viola, piano, a bit on the Vaughan
Williams Bartok side - but atonal - or polyphonal. Giving a concert at
end."
"Noretorp-Noretsyh"
On the same page he answered my question as to why
"Noretorp-Noretsyh," a tragic elegy for the Hungarian Revolt of
1956, had not been included in The Collected Shorter Poems
after being published in the famous issue of Evergreen Review on
"The San Francisco Scene" in 1957. He replied: "Noretorp-Noretsyh
-- Hysterion-Proteron are oversight - just got omitted by accident."
They have not been included in any of his books, but his reading of
the former poem is recorded on "San Francisco Poets," Evergreen
disk #1 (n. d.). In this poem he imagines Makno, Kropotkin, Gorky,
Mayakovsky, and other dead heroes of revolution rising again, united
in a unified voice of protest against the Russian repression of
Hungary, victims in another revolution betrayed by so-called
"revolutionaries." At the end, he cries out to his cycling lover, her
skirt flaring in the wind like a butterfly of his erotic imagination
which saves her, momentarily, from the evil of the world. One of the
most powerful expressions of Rexroth's tragic sense of history and
affirmation of love, this poem deserves close attention. Reading it,
we can see why he doubted that the worldwide revolts of the 1960's
could be successful, and why his later poetry focused on transcendent
mysteries of love rather than on historical struggles for freedom.
"Noretorp-Noretsyh," Rexroth's greatest anarchist poem epitomizing
his tragic sense of revoluitionary history, appeared in Exquisite
Corpse with an excellent essay by Donald Gutierrez, though
regrettably not in any of Rexroth's books.
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Copyright © 2000 by Morgan Gibson
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry
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