It is simply irresponsible for anyone engaged in American
poetry to treat Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82), a world-class poet and
intellectual, as if he were an almost forgotten "poet of the people,"
loony Beatnik, orientalized fakir, dead white male sexist pig, or false
prophet. Gone are the days when we had to explain patiently, for
incredulous, small-minded academics of impaired vision, the
accomplishments of this great lyrical, satirical, philosophical, and
religious poet of love, nature, and revolution, this beloved and
influential translator of European and Asian poetry, this radical,
erudite, polymath critic of culture. He played a key role in the long-
range process of opening the American mind to Asian culture and
absorbing some of its wisdom and beauty into western civilization.
His star shines brilliantly in the constellation of modern poetry.
Those anthologists and scholars who, clinging to some
provincial MLA canon out of ignorance of Rexroth's work or
inability to deal seriously with his ideas, are an endangered species
that will not be missed. New generations of scholar/critics, with
broader, more eclectic, often radical views, are far more responsive to
Rexroth's poetic genius and cross-cultural world view than were my
own professors half a century ago and most of my American
colleagues until recently. Like Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, and
Williams, Rexroth was not accepted as a major poet during his
lifetime, thanks to the dominant philistinism of the United States and
the conservatism of most English departments.
Rexroth is often cited in the Beat revival, sometimes
condescendingly, for his early bold and enthusiastic promotion of
Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, McClure, Lamantia, and others of the
Beat Generation and the ensuing counterculture; but this involvement
was but one of many spin-offs of his astonishing career; and his later
critique of the Beats was as astute as his sponsoring them, as leader
of the San Francisco Renaissance, at the premier reading of "Howl"
in 1955 and in the censorship trial thereafter. Later criticizing the
Beatnik fad and pop commercialization of dissent and mysticism, he
continued to promote the best work of Ginsberg, McClure,
Ferlinghetti, and especially of Snyder, whose anarcho-Buddhist
environmentalism was influenced by his own.
Countless readers of Rexroth, communicating with me for four
decades, return to his work not primarily because of his connection
with the Beat Generation, or Objectivism, or anarchism, or cubism
(which characterizes some of his poetry as well as his paintings), or
Buddhism, or the counterculture, but because of the startlingly unique
and varied qualities of his poetry and prose, aesthetic and intellectual.
The readers who keep many of his books in print do not buy them
only because professors assign them in classes and critics list them in
various canons, left and right. Readers become intrigued by his work
and often devoted to it because of its unique mix of honesty and
artistry, simplicity and complexity, personal engagement and
detached analysis, high culture and common speech, brilliant
sensuous imagery and philosophical depth--extremes of passion,
thought, and linguistic skill that cohere in an endlessly unfolding
worldview that is fascinating and liberating.
My own work on Rexroth, originating during the late 1950's,
developed primarily outside of the academy during my involvement
in radical politics of the civil rights, anti-war, and student
movements, and matured during a long friendship with him in the
context of countercultural poetry. Though sharing his antagonism to
the bureaucratization of knowledge, and specifically to those critics,
scholars, and other professors who neglected his work in universities,
I have taught in colleges and university for four decades--25 years in
the United States and 15 in Japan. This book and my first book on
Rexroth in the Twayne U. S. Authors Series in 1972 were well
received as academically sound studies in which information,
interpretation, analysis, and criticism were offered with as much
objectivity as I could muster. Some of the best work by others also
creatively mixes academic research with committed involvement in
countercultural activities, political as well as literary, in various
movements and traditions of justice and wisdom which Rexroth
illuminated in his work--radical, libertarian, communal, Buddhist,
mystical Christianity, etc.
Ken Knabb's The Relevance of Rexroth
Of all Rexroth experts distinctly outside the American academy,
Ken Knabb has contributed the best book-length introduction to
Rexroth's work. His Relevance of Rexroth, first published in
1990, translated into French in 1993, reprinted in Knabb's collected
works in 1997, and posted on his "Bureau of Public Secrets"
homepage (knabb@slip.net) is solidly researched and
epigrammatically expressed, from the engaged point of view of
Situationism, an important movement of theory and practice
prominent in the Paris revolt of 1968.
Knabb transmits an exciting sense of anarchistic experience and
thought that the poet imaginatively got into his poetry, making us feel
that we are with him in his poems, tragically reflecting on comrades
struggling to the death for universal liberation. Knabb insightfully
and convincingly interrelates revolutionary theory and action in
Comrade Rexroth's poetry and prose with love, nature, mysticism,
and other dominant themes. Knabb explains Rexroth's Buddhist
anarchism, his communitarian personalism, his affinities with Martin
Buber, for example. Readers may disagree ideologically, but Knabb's
spirit and style will help readers tune into the nitty gritty of Rexroth's
world view. Knabb gets at the essence of Rexroth through his ideas,
quoting a few poems but mostly choice passages of prose. Knabb also
gets at the way Rexroth talked, the way he "bantered with people" or
slipped into an "ironic showbiz persona... to get his points across
without too much solemnity" (4). Yes, that is exactly the way he was
at times: "amid the give and take of conversation he would slip in a
joke or an anecdote that would subtly undercut our illusions and put
in a new light whatever we were talking about" (4). At other times,
however, Rexroth could be dogmatically preachy, dismissive,
reductive.
Knabb insightfully connects Rexroth's chief themes, sex,
mysticism, and revolution, showing how Rexroth persistently
interrelated these and other apparently incongruous topics:
civilization and nature, sex and mathematics, personal intimacies and
history, visionary contemplation and birthday parties, verse rhythms
and riding a horse, for instance. Knabb is especially insightful in his
shrewd analysis of Rexroth's revolutionary theory and practice, his
Buddhist anarchism, his communitarian personalism, his affinities
with Martin Buber. He explains Rexroth's activities in the Industrial
Workers of the World and his formation of the anti-war Randolph
Bourne Council during World War II and of the San Francisco
Anarchist Circle (renamed the Libertarian Circle) after the war, with
the aim of re-examining and reconstructing revolutionary thought.
For many years his radical views, aired weekly on KPFA and in
newspaper columns, as well as in literary and political periodicals,
intellectually enriched the San Francisco poetry renaissance and
counterculture.
Knabb's main disagreement with Rexroth is that he offered
insufficient guidance for the massive revolts of the late 1960's, when
he had decided that personal freedom, poetry, song, and the arts
generally subverted the oppressive society more than social action.
Knabb argues that even the arts of rebellion have become co-opted in
the "barrage of spectacles" that maintains the status quo, a powerful
thesis that is developed further in his Situationist International
Anthology and other publications.
The Relevance of Rexroth deserves to be in every
library, private, public, academic, where modern poetry is
emphasized. My only dissatisfaction with it is that it is too short to
offer full explanations for Rexroth's ideas. Like Voltaire, Rexroth
presented his ideas epigrammatically, seldom showing how he
reached such conclusions. His conversation and some letters
indicated how carefully he thought through his positions, after
exhaustive reading. Like Eliot Weinberger, Knabb thinks that
Rexroth's writings require little explication; but few critics have read
as widely as they have, and I know of no one, in or out of academia,
who has read more widely than Rexroth. The point of many of his
allusions may be clear, but the processes of his imaginative thinking
are not so easily grasped. More interpretation of his work is
needed.
From France
Thanks to Knabb's continuing influence on French radicalism
since 1968, as a theorist, critic, and former activist, numerous French
publications by and about Rexroth have appeared. Joël
Cornuault has published his own substantial essays about Rexroth
since 1985 and his French translations of Rexroth's poetry and prose,
notably, Classics Revisited (1991), L'autumn en
Californie (1994), the poet's prose account of his travels in
France, and an exciting collection of the poet's essays under the title
Le San Francisco de Kenneth Rexroth (1997), in which
subjects range from the Golden Gate to Shakespeare, Pasternak,
kabuki, the Tao, the sciences, mysticism, revolution,
and Bob Dylan, to pick a few. The latter volume also includes
informative commentaries by Cornuault, photographs of Rexroth, and
letters from him to myself and others. Rexroth's relations with France
run deep, indicated by his pathfinding essay, "The Influence of
French Poetry on American," others on major French authors, and
volumes of his translations of many French poets. Nadine Bloch,
Catherine Daems, Yves Le Pellec, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Louis Soler,
and others have also published influential translations of Rexroth's
poetry and prose, as well as essays on his work. In 1996 J. A. Para
devoted four days of "France Culture" broadcasts to Rexroth's work.
From the Academy
The most prolific critic of Rexroth since the 1986 publication of
Revolutionary Rexroth is Donald Gutierrez, professor
emeritus at Western New Mexico University and the author of five
critical books on modern literature and many substantial articles on
Kenneth Rexroth. He offers in "The Holiness of the Real": the
Short Verse of Kenneth Rexroth (1996) a more extensive and
aesthetically sensitive study of Rexroth than Knabb, based on wide-
ranging scholarship and close analyses of many poems. It is
heartening that a critic of Gutierrez's stature has thoroughly
demonstrated the high order of Rexroth's lyric and elegiac poetry of
love, nature, revolution, and prophetic vision. Anyone studying
modern American poetry is obliged to read this informative and
insightful study.
The title of Gutierrez's book is a quotation from "Time Is the
Mercy of Eternity," which he praises highest of all Rexroth's nature
poems. The Signature of All Things, a book profoundly
influenced by the German mystic Jakob Boehme, contains the lines
"The holiness of the real/Is always there, accessible/in total
immanence." Gutierrez clarifies Rexroth's fundamental belief,
strongly implied if not always explicitly expressed in his poetry, that
Being is here and now, interactively creative, directly experienced,
loving, and inherently valuable. Rexroth sacralized the thing itself
(not Kant's thing in itself) as a "signature" of the whole universe,
each being reflecting the whole of existence--at least each thing he
chose to sacralize, though not those things, events, people, and
injustices he hated in, say, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and other protest
poems.
Gutierrez labels Rexroth's viewpoint "Natural
Supernaturalism," but this term from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus and Emerson's essays should not be associated in
Rexroth's poetry with the symbolic technique of much 19th century
romanticism; for Rexroth turned from the symbolic style of The
Homestead Called Damascus, his first long poem, much
influenced by Eliot, to his distinctively personal and direct expression
and representation of experience. Instead of revealing a supernatural
absolute by means of natural symbols, he envisions in his poetry the
radiant details of reality, of what the physicist David Bohm has called
(without reference to Rexroth) the "Implicate Order." Rexroth's
sense of life and death in the context of holistic process philosophy
transcends the outmoded conventions of realism without transcending
nature.
Gutierrez offers close, fresh, shrewd, and aesthetically reliable
readings of poems, subtly interpreting images and themes, examining
many sources, and meticulously analyzing forms and prosody--a
sound, humane approach that includes relevant biographical and
historical material and no postmodern jargon, bizarre theorizing, or
irresponsible polemics. Anyone studying or teaching Rexroth's
sometimes difficult poems will find the book useful, reliable,
convenient in revealing what needs to be known about the shorter
poems; and the general reader will discover herein why Rexroth's
poems are so delightful and insightful.
In his Introduction, Gutierrez does an exceptionally good job of
describing Rexroth's contemplative sage-like persona in the poems
and in clarifying the doctrine of Personalism, which Rexroth offered
somewhat simplistically though usefully in opposition to the
modernist dogma of impersonality in poetry. Gutierrez shows how
Rexroth recognized the disturbingly personal qualities of Eliot's
poetry, in violation of Possom's own doctrine, and how Rexroth's
own poetry is sometimes personal, sometimes impersonal, certainly
more complex than either doctrine. Gutierrez's analyses here and
throughout his book are judicious, and convincing. In addition,
however, Rexroth's poetic Personalism, along with his emphasis on
sacramentalism, vision, communion, and community, might have
been related more fully to his interest in Christian theology. Radically
transforming traditional meanings of these terms, Rexroth applied
them to immediate experience, even, most startlingly, to sexual love--
bringing them down to earth and body.
Also in the Introduction Gutierrez indicates the influences on
Rexroth of Whitman, Lawrence, Williams, Pound, and Asian poetry
and culture, defending him against the charge of Orientalism. He
argues, as I have done, that Rexroth was an advocate of traditional
Asian culture; but I must admit that Rexroth's enchantment with "the
mysterious East" exemplifies a kind of exoticism denounced by
Edward Said and other critics of cultural imperialism. Despite
Rexroth's erudition, he oversimplified and romanticized premodern
Japan and China, and excluded from his poetry serious attention to
contemporary Asia--Japanese commercialism and Chinese
communism, for example, both of which he despised. So we are left
with poignant images of an Asian never-never land--with the
exception of his translations of modern Japanese women poets. I
think that Asia fed and expanded Rexroth's Romanticism, at a time
when Romanticism was dying under the impact of Modernism. Nor
would I object to exoticism, especially if it reveals the wisdom and
beauty of misunderstood cultures. Rexroth romanticized "the
mysterious East" in troublesome ways, to draw upon it for beauty,
passion, and wisdom.
In the Introductory chapter and throughout the book, Gutierrez
offers exceptionally keen comments on Rexroth's prosody, and
concludes this chapter with speculations about the critical and
academic neglect of Rexroth during his lifetime.
In the next chapter, Gutierrez shows how Rexroth's finest
nature poems are not only vividly descriptive, but also richly
philosophical in revealing the universal interactive community of all
beings--how human love and struggles for freedom and justice are
related to seasonal changes in the mountains and the movements of
heavenly bodies. In "Time Is the Mercy of Eternity," for instance,
"In this translucent/Immense here and now, if ever,/The form of the
person should be/Visible, its geometry,/Its crystallography, and/Its
astronomy."
Many of the love poems discussed in Chapter 3 may be
conveniently found in the Hamill/Kleiner collection, Sacramental
Acts. Rexroth's celebrations of lovers, wives, his children, and of
love in the abstract, are aesthetically inseparable from what Gutierrez
calls "confabulation," which entails the idealizing transformation of
fact into fable. The result is some of the most intense, often ecstatic,
and well wrought erotic poetry of the twentieth century, much of it of
intellectual import that in no way diminishes its sensuous passion.
For example, in "She Is Away": "As on so many nights, once more
I/Drank from your sleeping flesh the deep still/Communion. I am not
always strong/Enough to take from you waking, the peace of love."
Nor should Rexroth's idealizing poetry be compromised by the
undeniable facts of his messy love-life and his problematic
personality, which could be both dangerously destructive as well as
astonishingly creative. One indication of the problematic relationship
of art and life is that the great poems written to Rexroth's third wife
Marthe were, after their divorce, reprinted without her name.
Gutierrez shows brilliantly, for example, how Rexroth revised one of
his major translations, that of "The Great Canzon" of Dante, which
was part of the Marthe series.
Gutierrez offers a close and tender interpretation of the
seventeenth poem in The Morning Star, which I believe is
Rexroth's most fully realized poem of ecstatic vision. In this poem,
which is set in the garden of the ancient Japanese house he rented for
a year in Kyoto, and which is unfortunately not included in the
Hamill-Kleiner collection, Rexroth unites with the goddess of the
Morning Star: "her/Body flows into mine, each/Corpuscle of light
merges/With a corpuscle of blood or flesh." Gutierrez skirts the
Tantric Buddhist meaning of the poem, merely referring in a footnote
to my interpretation, which had been based on Rexroth's own
commentary.
Similarly, Gutierrez slights the Tantric Buddhist dimension of
The Love Songs of Marichiko, Rexroth's original sequence
which had been falsely presented by him as translations of work by a
modern woman of Kyoto. I regret that Gutierrez skirts the poems'
Buddhist and other Asian dimensions, although his aesthetic and
psychological insights are impressive and valid as far as they go. The
excuse that the Buddhist implications are "not essential to the
autonomy of the poems" (141) is like saying that Confucianism is
"not essential to the autonomy" of Pound's Cantos, or
Christian theology is "not essential to the autonomy" of Dante's
Divine Comedy or of Eliot's Four Quartets. If Asian
qualities of the poems, both obvious and obscure, those noted by
Rexroth himself and by commentators, are not essential, then why did
he identify Marichiko with an East Indian fertility goddess of the
dawn and the Bodhisattva Kannon, in an intricate allegory of Tantric
Buddhism? Gutierrez omits mention of the strong influence on these
poems of Yosano Akiko, the greatest woman poet of modern Japan
(whom Rexroth had translated), the rich significance of the Japanese
imagery, and the Shingon Buddhist theme. Gutierrez's comment that
good and evil are identical is not grounded clearly either in the poems
or in identifiable Asian influences on them. Moreover, his intriguing
speculation that Rexroth wrote these poems from a woman's
perspective to "redeem the misery" of his guilt-ridden problems with
women calls for additional examination of these poems, which are
among the very best of his last years and some of the most passionate
American love poems of all time. Gutierrez might be right, but where
is the evidence? In any case Rexroth's creation of Marichiko should
be compared with his identification with many Asian women poets,
whose poems he translated, and with the cultural heritages that they
embodied. As I have shown above, Marishi-ben has been
reincarnated as Marichiko, who in turn is associated with the "dark
woman" of the Tao Te Ching, the yin of
yin/yang, the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of
Wisdom), other feminine images in Asian religions, and perhaps with
Asia "herself." Gutierrez's interpretation is psychologically accurate
in analyzing an intensely erotic relationship, while leaving the poems
simplistically "free of esoteric interpretations," as he puts it.
Modestly admitting his unfamiliarity with Asian culture, Gutierrez
does not attempt to show how it permeates much of Rexroth's poetry
and world view, centrally affecting his creative process, and indeed
the contemplative side of his contradictory personality.
Other erotic poems, which Gutierrez calls "the Love-Nature
Verse," are examined in Chapter 5, in relation to what the critic calls
the monistic idea of "Concentric Affinities." Here is a superb
discussion of one of Rexroth's greatest poems, "When We with
Sappho," in which "With 'Sapphic help, and with something of
Sappho's setting in 'Orchard"'--his translation of her poem--
"Rexroth is trying to memorialize a love experience two and a half
millennia after the celebration of immediate sensory experience
found in the Greek woman's verse. And he does so by presenting
reverie as a patterning and commingling of sexual love, sleep,
waking, and rumination."
The intervening Chapter 4, "Lost Left Causes," may especially
benefit generations of readers unaware of the historical struggles of
the poet's lifetime, complementing Knabb's work. Gutierrez's book
concludes with a lively chapter on Rexroth's "literary-social" prose,
and a moving Epilogue. This important study should help bring
Kenneth Rexroth to the forefront of serious attention of anyone
devoted to poetry as a living art outside the academy as well as inside
its often sombre walls.
Linda Hamalian's A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (1991)
Linda Hamalian's substantial biography, published by Norton in
1991, presents Rexroth as a great poet requiring serious attention by
scholars, critics, poets, and general readers. Her meticulous research
has turned up much information not previously available in print. She
has explored with special concern his relations to wives and lovers,
showing how his love life inspired much of his poetry, and how he
treated women in his poems. Certainly feminist perspectives on
Rexroth's work and personality are needed, just as they are needed on
all subjects, but especially on this unusual man who claimed to be a
committed feminist throughout his life, thanks in part to devotion to
his mother, who was also a feminist. Hamalian is to be congratulated
for her thorough study and the honesty of her stern critique of
Rexroth's complicated love life, in which she finds abundant
evidence of sexism at odds with his feminist claims. Her poignant
confession of disappointment and disillusionment with the poet,
because of his hypocrisy towards women, may well indicate reactions
by other readers as well, a kind of feminist backlash against a poet
whose love poetry, translations of women's poetry, and essays
concerning women writers were enthusiastically received by many
women during his lifetime.
However, Hamlian's criticism oversimplifies the problems of
Rexroth's life and work. She accuses, prosecutes, tries, judges, and
condemns him as sexist, without allowing any defense or alternative
interpretation. His poems, including the most spiritual and
philosophical, are reduced to scandalous records of erotic
autobiography. Her moral, psychological, and aesthetic analyses
seem impulsively simplistic. Is she aware that poets' sex-lives seldom
measure up to moral commonplaces? What male poet meets strict
feminist criteria? How should current feminist and other moral
principles be applied to men several decades in the last?
While admitting that Rexroth's voracious sexual appetite, his
countless affairs and four marriages, his mistreatment of some
women violated his lofty ideals of sacramental love and marriage, we
may still welcome his feminist views as good in themselves,
expressed at a time when few men shared them. His promotion of
writing by many women, in his essays and translations, was also rare
in the male-dominated literary world. Most important, whatever we
may think of him as a sexual being, however much one may
disappove of some of the ways that he treated women, how exactly
should such moral judgments be related to aesthetic judgements of
his poetry and philosophical judgments of his ideas? To modify Jean
Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on the Marquis de Sade, "Must
we burn Rexroth?" Or indeed most dead white males for thinking
women inferior and mistreating them in many ways? More generally,
how can his art be evaluated both in relation to his life and
independently of it? Hamalian skirts these important theoretical
issues.
In Rexroth's poetry and prose sexuality always has spiritual and
philosophical dimensions, in which the body was inseparable from
creative mind. Sexuality is often expressed and explored in Hindu,
Taoist, Buddhist, and Christian terms. Unlike the predatory Henry
Miller, Rexroth was deeply devoted to women, who often attaining
mythic dimensions in his poetry. They were his muses, awakening
the feminine principle in himself and inspiring much of his poetry. A
central theme in his work is the sacred quest for ecstatic loss of ego in
sexual union in which two become one. He revered the Jewish
Shekinah, the Christian Sophia, the Buddhist Perfection of Wisdom,
and other embodiments of the feminine principle. The value of such
ideas should be considered apart from the man who expressed them
in poetry.
Indeed, Hamalian does not add much to our understanding of
Rexroth's complex and often profound habits of thinking. His
complex world view, his profound involvement with Buddhist
traditions, his erudite devotion to Japanese culture, his philosophy of
communion, communication, community, and creative process, all
receive short shrift. His views of sexuality cannot be understood or
judged properly outside these contexts. I would welcome thorough-
going critiques of Rexroth's ideas from the perspectives of feminism,
psychology, and philosophy: gender analyses of his imagery of
women and of himself as romantic lover, critiques of his
romanticism, exoticism, and mysticism, etc.
In on-going debates we must not forget that like D. H.
Lawrence, André Gide, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Allen
Ginsberg, and many other twentieth-century writers, Rexroth was a
sexual libertarian in an oppressive, hypocritical, puritanical culture.
The outrageous phallocentrism of such a remark as "I for one stand
for the reinstatement of the rational intellect, the conscious will, the
erect penis" (Letters ,7) is bound to offend those of us who
are feminists, but it should be understood in the pre-1960's context,
when blind censorship was commonplace, and when avant-garde
women welcomed sexual liberation as much as men. These outbursts
were directed against puritanism, not women. Many women
obviously loved Rexroth and his poetry, and he seems to have loved
them with great sensitivity and devotion, seeking mutual
enlightenment that is revealed exquisitely in such poems as "When
We with Sappho" and The Love Poems of Marichiko, among
many others. Although Buddhism did not weaken his cravings,
Tantrism ennobled them into avenues of transcendence, which
Hamalian ignores in her relentless exposé of Rexroth's alleged
mistreatment of wives and lovers, some of whom seem as untrue to
him as he was to them.
Rexroth was too complicated and too honest to be politically
correct (if there is such a thing). He can be seen as both sexist and
feminist, an advocate of sacramental marriage and an adulterer; but
can he not be forgiven for confessing a guilty conscience? (See the
letter to his third wife, Marthe, quoted by Hamalian on 211; and also
his letter to Laughlin on page 33 of the Letters.) His sense of
personal responsibility was so powerful, so universal, that no one
could measure up to it. He advocated freedom for women in an age
when few women, and virtually no men but Bernard Shaw, were
feminists; and he admired and promoted the work of women of
genius more than most male writers of his generation. His love of
women, in the flesh and in their poetry, involved interplay of intellect
and imagination of the highest order.
Rexroth's mysticism, fueled by eroticism, contributed to a kind
of absolutism that was difficult for some of us who knew him well to
reconcile with his anarchism. Because he contemplated so deeply, so
surely, arriving at ideas from intensely personal experiences, he had a
clarity of vision rare in a world in which the perceptions and thoughts
of most people are muddled by religion, politics, family, the media,
schools, and universities. He had an extraordinary conviction of
being right, of uncannily seeing into nature and human nature. His
insights into people and poetry were astonishing, often at first
unbelievable, but they usually hit the mark. He was often too certain
to tolerate doubt or contradiction. His hubris was visionary certainty.
The women in his life undoubtedly suffered from his absolutist
tendencies, for though he gave much of himself to them, he also
seems to have demanded too much in return.
Rexroth's flaws should be understood in relation to his almost
superhuman strength of character that, driving him to liberate the
world, could not save him from the self-torment of remorse and guilt,
and eventual physical collapse in a tragic finale. His lofty ideals for a
free humanity living in harmony with nature could not be realized,
nor could his moments of visionary ecstasy be sustained.
Hamalian's elaboration of the story of Rexroth's precocious
years in the Chicago Renaissance, his decisive move to San Francisco
with his first wife Andrée in 1927, his activities as poet and
abstract painter, and his leadership of the Bay Area literary and
anarchist movements add valuable information to Rexroth's own
electrifying accounts. She portrays many people in his life, based on
extensive interviews and countless letters, though her style conveys
little of the excitement, intellectual and erotic, of his interactions with
them. She does, however, suggest something of Rexroth's
philosophical investigations in her treatment of how Alfred North
Whitehead, Duns Scotus, Marx, Jakob Boehme, Martin Buber, and
other thinkers influenced him; and her fresh interpretation of his first
long poem, The Homestead Called Damascus, is on the level
of serious ideas, rather than of personalities. But she neglects to dig
into the abstruse philosophizing of his second and third long poems,
The Phoenix and the Tortoise and The Dragon and the
Unicorn; and though she offers fascinating details about the
Living Theater's premiere of Rexroth's tetralogy, Beyond the
Mountains, she skips its ideas, which are so crucial in the
development of Rexroth's world view.
Hamalian recognizes the transformation in Rexroth's
consciousness during his first trip to Japan in 1967, when he wrote
his fifth long poem, The Heart's Garden, the Garden's Heart
at Daitokuji, the Kyoto temple where Gary Snyder was studying Zen;
but her acquaintance with Buddhist and Japanese subjects is
superficial. What does she mean by calling Rexroth's Buddhism a
"version of behaviorism" (328)? He had no use for behaviorist
stimulus-response causality and rejection of consciousness. She
offers (161) a bizarre interpretation of Rexroth's poem "Yugao,"
which has nothing to do with the Hindu "yuga," as she thinks.
Yugao, meaning "moon-flower" in Japanese, is the name of one of
Prince Genji's lovers who dies bewitched by a female demon, in
Murasaki Shikibu's classic novel. Rexroth imagines "some old
jealousy/Or hate I had forgotten" taking form, like the Japanese
demon, to haunt the woman he now loves. (CSP 184-85.) The
persona is clearly in a garden; so why does Hamalian think that he is
camping with two women in the mountains? Why does she think that
the "distraught, imagined girl" is named Prudence Ohmstead? And
by neglecting Prince Genji's immensely conscientious sensitivity to
interpersonal webs resulting from his promiscuity, Hamalian passed
up an opportunity to explore Rexroth's similar karmic sense of total
responsibility.
Nevertheless, Hamalian's indispensable biography, her
excellent edition of An Autobiographical Novel, her
thoughtful 1983 dissertation on The Homestead Called
Damascus, and her informative articles establish her as a leading
Rexroth expert, others currently being Donald Gutierrez, Lee Bartlett,
Brad Morrow, Ken Knabb, Ling Chung, Joël Cornuault in France,
and in Japan Sanehide Kodama and Yuzuru Katagiri. It goes without
saying that many others, some famous, many others "common
readers," deeply comprehend Rexroth's work, while publishing little
about him. The most impressive dissertation that I have seen recently
is Rachelle Katz Lerner's "A Gazing Eye through Different Mirrors:
the Concept of Cubism in the Poetry and Paintings of Kenneth
Rexroth" (U of Toronto 1992). This and her book in progress are
based on fresh research and original theoretical and philosophical
perspectives.
Philosophically Interpreting Rexroth
Rexroth needs to be understood as an important philosophical
poet and critic in every sense of the word. He was a wise lover and a
lover of wisdom, both theoretical and practical. He was one of the
most profound American men of letters in an age of intense spiritual
confusion and despair, when Pound was driven to fascism, Eliot to
Christian monarchism, and other writers to absurdity and nihilism.
Rexroth's thinking is generally truer, more humane, more
ecologically grounded, more illuminating of the world as a whole
than that of any other American poet since Whitman. Rexroth's
wisdom was inseparable from love--of women, of nature, of the
mysteries of creation. His quest for personal realization was both
mystical and rational; and his visionary world view was an original
synthesis of Buddhist and other Asian thought, along with classical
Greek and Latin, Christian, and modern revolutionary and ecological
ideas. No other American poet understood world history and
philosophy as fully as he. He was intellectually complex, but his
poetry was usually vivid, direct, and sharp. He was a thinker in
poetry who insisted on truth. And his attitude was always
"philosophical" in the face of suffering and defeat, accepting the
tragic inevitability of death in the creative process of the universe,
after heroically struggling to realize ideals of universal communion
and community. His work has made us better men and women--more
conscious, more compassionate, more understanding--as philosophy
and literature should do, though they usually do not.
Now that Rexroth's poetry, translations, essays, autobiography,
and ideas can be understood in the context of his lifework and world-
vision as a whole, many specialized aspects of Rexroth's art can be
explored more satisfactorily: relations between his painting and
poetry, oral and written dimensions of his poetry, artistic and
intellectual influences of all kinds, prosody, and his achievement
relative to that of other poets, to mention only a few.
Cultural interpretation and evaluation is endless, for the
dogmas, canons, methodologies, and judgments of each age are
replaced in the next. If this study does nothing else, may it alert
readers to the enduring importance of Kenneth Rexroth, his writings,
and his ideas. I have tried to show how some of his poems reveal
certain kinds of truth as well as beauty, how he thought and felt
deeply, how his art can change minds as well as hearts, and how it
can enrich our sense of the creative process of the universe.
In concluding my 1972 book on Rexroth, I compared his
outlook with that of George Santayana, Susanne Langer, Denis
Seurat, and others concerned with philosophical poetry by Spenser,
Milton, Goethe, Nietzsche, Blake, Whitman, Yeats, and others (128-
32). Since then it has become apparent that phenomenological and
hermaneutical critics are likely to find Rexroth's poetic theory and
practice congenial. Rexroth's vision is of "being-in-the-world," to
quote Heidegger without implying that Rexroth was influenced by
him. Like Schleiermacher, Rexroth assumed that understanding rests
upon pre-understanding (in community), rather than upon the
objective interpretation of signs. Like Wittgenstein, Rexroth saw
through the games of language by focussing on "life-forms." Like
Gadamer, he dialectically questioned poems, letting them speak out
of their traditions instead of imposing methodological categories on
them. Structuralist, semiotic, deconstructive, and other linguistically
oriented critics and "language poets" have much to contribute to an
understanding of Rexroth's cubist innovations. For Freudians and
Jungians there is his erotic symbolism. And his absorption and
interpretations of diverse cultures harmonize with the ethnopoetics of
Rothenberg, Tarn, and others.
But among modern philosophical currents in the West, the
process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne,
Nolan Pliny Jacobson, and others seems closest to Rexroth's
organicism, which is so profoundly influenced by Asian traditions.
His work also has many fundamental affinities with comparative and
anthropological studies of literature, religions, and culture generally,
especially with the deep ecology and Buddhist anarchism of Gary
Snyder, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and of other Engaged
Buddhists such as the Vietnamese monk, poet, and activist Thich
Nhat Hanh. Such philosophical currents have influenced this study,
leading me to conclude that as Buddhism spreads in the west and
revives in Asia, Rexroth is sure to be valued as one of its most
innovative interpreters. Not in ideas alone, but in sensibility did he
find and transmit compassionate wisdom that is rare in the twentieth
century, coming to the same conclusion as Kukai that "Bliss of the
Great Void Only is my true Empress." [1]
Whatever their orientation, readers discover an amazing world,
many worlds, in Rexroth's work. For rebels and utopians there are
furious satires whose targets are perennially with us. But Rexroth's
polemics need not alienate readers uncommitted to revolution, for in
fact some of his most enduring poems are lyrics of love, nature, and
life that appeal to nearly everyone. Learning how he created poetry
out of despair and ecstasy, disillusionment and realization, we cannot
help but live more consciously, compassionately, and creatively in
the networks of existence.
The Kenneth Rexroth East-West Collection at
Kanda University of International Studies in Japan
In addition to collections of Rexroth's papers at UCLA and the
University of Southern California, his own library of 13,000 volumes
has been shelved and catalogued at Kanda University of International
Studies in Chiba, Japan. When he had lived in San Francisco, his
personal library had grown so large that he had kept much of it in a
second apartment at 250 Scott Street. When he had moved to Santa
Barbara in 1968, some of this collection had been sold; the remainer
was shelved in his spacious home on his property on East Pepper
Lane in Mendocito, in a small guesthouse, and in a large building
where he did most of his writing. Though he never anticipated that
his library would be moved to Japan after his death, the transfer is
astonishingly karmic in light of the fact that he considered Japan his
spiritual home. He had wanted to spend his last years and die here.
Rexroth's library reflects the extraordinarily diverse interests of
this self-educated polymath genius, who wrote authoritatively about
world literature, philosophy and religion, Asian and Western cultures,
political ideologies, art, jazz and classical music, folklore and other
subjects. The library is a goldmine for specialists in these fields as
well as young minds newly awakening to books and ideas.
How did Rexroth's library come to Japan? Five years after his
death on June 6, 1982, his remarkable collection was purchased by
Kanda University of International Studies, with the help of Mitsuo
Nitta of Yushodo Bookstore. Nitto has reported that after discussing
the poet's papers with D. S. Zeidberg, head of the rare book section
of the UCLA Library, he had received information about the library
in the spring of 1985 from the California bookseller J. S. Edgren,
who had long been in communication with Rexroth because of their
expertise in Asian art. In August of 1985, thanks to Edgren's
arrangements, Rexroth's widow Carol Tinker showed Nitta the
library while she was still living in the poet's home. In addition to
books stacked to the ceiling, there was the large desk where he had
written many poems and essays. Carol Tinker informed Nitta that
because the estate was expected to become a kind of memorial
(though these plans did not in fact materialize), the library had to be
sold. There were many difficult and painful problems involved in
liquidating the estate, as Hamalian has reported in her biography.
Now that the library has been shelved and catalogued at Kanda
University of International Studies, it can facilitate the work of
scholars, poets, critics, students, and general readers. A list of books
containing Rexroth's marginalia should help us discover ways in
which he responded to various authors. And readers hitherto
unconcerned with Rexroth will also find his library a valuable
resource. Professor of Philosophy Gyo Furuta supervised the Rexroth
Collection until his retirement in 1999. Professor Emeritus Kenji
Yamaryo, Director of the University Library, then developed, with
my advice, plans to facilitate its use.
In a special room among stacks of books that Rexroth collected,
is the poet's desk, on which he had written most of his poetry and
prose in California. "In front of me on my desk/Is typewriter and
paper," he wrote in "January Night" (CSP 185), "And my beautiful
jagged/Crystal, larger than a skull..." As poetry flowed through his
mind, he often silently contemplated the crystal, which is still on the
desk, at Kanda University What could it have meant to him? Just as
William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, Rexroth seems to
have envisioned in the crystal the on-going creativity of the universe,
writing, "An imponderable and/Invisible elastic/Crystal is the womb
of space" ("It Is a German Honeymoon," Flower Wreath Hill , 15).
Visitors are welcome at the Rexroth East-West Collection at
Kanda University of International Studies, but should first make
arrangements. Proposals for research projects using the Collection are
invited. An e-mail network of those interested in Rexroth's work and
related subjects is being developed. Some information in English
about the Library is on the KUIS webpage:
http://kifl.ac.jp/kuis.html
Anyone interested in additional detailed information is invited to
write me at
gibmat@gol.com