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Chapter 2
LIVES OF A POET
Kenneth Rexroth seems to have passed through several
incarnations during his seventy-seven years as poet, translator,
essayist, playwright, revolutionary activist, one of America's first
abstract painters, and visionary sage.
Born in South Bend, Indiana, on December 22, 1905, Rexroth
lived most of his first twenty-one years in the midwest, primarily in
Chicago, where precocious accomplishments brought him fame
before he moved to San Francisco in 1927. Making his home there
until 1968, when he moved to Montecito in Santa Barbara, he is
generally identified as a West Coast writer. But extensive study and
travel throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia gave his work a
cosmopolitanism rare in American poetry; and from 1967 until his
death in 1982 his writing and thinking were centered on Japanese
Buddhism.
Did he quixotically charge off in diverse directions at once, or
did his various careers express a coherent worldview? How could a
poet celebrating love and nature also be committed to social change
while at the same time trying to transcend the world as a mystic?
Mystics are thought to be ascetically indifferent to erotic love or
changing the world, revolutionaries often decry romance as anti-
social diversion, and lovers are usually too wrapped up in each other
to become fully committed revolutionaries or mystics. Nevertheless,
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were revolutionary lovers;
Dante and Yeats were erotic mystics; Kropotkin and Tolstoi were
saintly anarchists; and like Blake and Whitman, Rexroth was an
erotically mystical revolutionary. He wrote to his second wife:
This is your own lover, Kenneth, Marie,
Who someday will be part of the earth
Beneath your feet; who crowned you once with roses
Of song; whose voice was no less famous
Raised against the guilt of his generation. [1]
His voice was righteously raised with comrades like Eli Jacobson,
whose Bolshevism the anarchist Rexroth opposed, but with whom he
felt a common commitment:
We were comrades
Together, we believed we
Would see with our own eyes the new
World where man was no longer
Wolf to man, but men and women
Were all brothers and lovers
Together. [2]
Revolutionary activism, far from distracting him from mysteries
of nature, in fact sprang from ecological contemplation that often
lovingly united inner and outer experience, spirit and body, person
and universe:
The world
Is alive tonight. I am
Immersed in living protoplasm,
That stretches away over
Continents and seas. I float
Like a child in the womb. [3]
Here Rexroth alludes to "womb-consciousness," symbolized in the
mandala of Tantric Buddhism, a major influence on his worldview
because its practice of erotic meditation confirmed his own intuitions
of the creative processes of mind, body, and universe, and their
fundamental unity. Whereas early Buddhists had viewed sex as a
pernicious attachment that caused suffering and delusion, Tantric
practices in Nepal and Tibet in the seventh century, and in China and
Japan later, involved erotic symbolism and yoga (yab-yum) as skillful
means of realizing universal Being. All of this appealed to Rexroth,
whose deepest commitments seemed to flow from a still pool of
compassionate wisdom that might be called his Buddha-nature,
obscured though it was at times by emotional and intellectual turmoil.
He was certainly not a Buddha, for he suffered from attachments,
passions, and delusions at least as much as the rest of us; but he
realized in his poetry, more than many poets, how to love in a world
of interdependent, interacting beings that mutually reflect each other.
This mystical worldview, therefore, embraces eroticism and
revolutionary action, both of which may be means of discovering
with others the underlying harmony of natural processes. Because he
envisioned a community of love in the universe as it is and in human
society as it might become, his revolution was anarchistic, aiming at
the liberation of consciousness and the perfection of a pre-existing
community of love. In opposition, he persistently denounced political
coercion in communistic, socialistic, and capitalistic states.
Rexroth's autobiographical prose makes clear how visionary,
oceanic, nirvanic intimations of eternity, as if he lived in and out of
the world simultaneously, generated his vocation as a poet of
revolutionary consciousness. He searched through religions,
philosophy, and literature for explanations of these experiences,
sometimes finding Christian thought appropriate, and later mostly
Buddhist imagery and ideas. For Rexroth, love unites all beings and
is never limited to pairs of lovers. His short poems of love and nature
and his long philosophical reveries express a sense of the underlying,
harmonious interdependence of all things. When he periodically lost
this sense of fundamental harmony, he would furiously explode in
satire, polemics, and revolutionary prophecy against those people,
institutions, and impersonal forces that threaten love, consciousness,
and life itself.
Turning from political action as hopes for humane revolution faded,
he developed an organic philosophy, in poetry and prose, that found
its fullest expression in Buddhist imagery such as the Net of Indra, in
which each jewel in an immense net reflects all others just as each
being reflects all others throughout the universe, and each Buddha-
world reflects infinite Buddha-worlds. His remarkable achievements
in many fields, then, sprang from habitual contemplation,
communion with people he loved and with the cyclical processes of
nature, and a sense of community extending from human and earthly
realms to galaxies and limitless realms of spirit. If he had lived
longer, he might well have produced a philosophical-poetic systhesis
of Buddhism with modern ecology, social theory, physics, linguistics,
and anthropology. That had been his tendency all along.
Before his readings, Rexroth liked to ask whether the audience
wanted sex, revolution, or mysticism. Then he would tell about the
blond who once, from a front row seat, seductively asked back,
"What's the difference?"
An Autobiographical Novel:
The Midwest (1905-27: 1966)
The best way to understand the interactions between Rexroth's
inner and outer lives, contemplative and worldly experience, mind
and action, is to read An Autobiographical Novel, covering
his first twenty-one years (henceforth abbreviated AN). The story
was originally dictated into a tape recorder while he was touring
Europe with his family, then was transcribed and read on his KPFA
radio program in San Francisco, and in 1966 was published by
Doubleday. He aimed to understand himself in communion with his
daughters and others whom he loved.
In a style that varies from the witty, hilarious, and outrageous to
the profound, Rexroth narrated his philosophical, spiritual, and
artistic quests, his ceaseless adventures as poet, painter, translator,
and revolutionary; and the resulting book is packed with brilliant
ideas and unforgettable impressions of countless famous intellectuals
with whom he interacted. His original account ended in 1927, just
after he (then twenty-one) and his bride Andrée had
hitchhiked from Chicago, where he had grown up, to San Francisco,
and just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston
poisoned worldwide dreams of revolutionary change.
Highly acclaimed in England and America for its portrayal of
the poet and his historical milieu, it has been reissued on both sides of
the Atlantic. [4] Like Yeats'
Autobiographies and Wordsworth's Prelude the
book reveals "the growth of the poet's mind," but Rexroth seems to
have been more worldly than either of the earlier poets, despite his
mysticism. His feet were on the ground and on the pavements of
Chicago during the Roaring 1920's. Dead-pan objectivity,
photographic description, witty anecdotes, adventurous story-telling,
and incessant intellectual inquiry sweep us into his stormy life.
Regardless of inaccuracies that biographers have suspected if not
always have proved, Rexroth's life-story shows how his creative
powers as painter and poet emerged from his contemplation of the
universe, how his ideas developed through personal encounters, vast
reading, the practice of translation, and an incessant spiritual quest.
Like Augustine and Rousseau, Rexroth told his life as a search for
ultimate values, though his differed radically from theirs. Rexroth's
sense of life came closest to that of Tu Fu, his favorite non-dramatic
poet, who seemed to be saying in his work that "only men's
steadfastness, love, magnanimity, calm, and compassion redeem the
nightbound world" (319).
These values inhere in the contemplative, visionary experiences
discussed at length. When he was four or five years old, observing a
wagon-load of new-mown hay, he claims that "An awareness, not a
feeling, of timeless, spaceless, total bliss occupied me or I occupied it
completely" (338). The careful wording shows that bliss was not
merely his feeling, but something that he was aware of beyond time
and space, a "normal and natural life" transcending the tribulations
of ordinary life and yet immanent in physical existence. So he seems
to have had intuitions of nirvana or heaven on earth. When he was
eleven, and his mother died, "a great sense of peace and well-being
came over me as though I, too, had gone to a heaven which was all
one calm, limitless, vision" (77). When he had a high fever from flu,
he terrified his father by saying, "The whole room is filled with silver
lines like thousands of spider webs of light. They all come together
over there where there is a spot so bright you can't stand to look at it.
That is the other me on the other side of the universe" (91).
At fifteen, he plunged into philosophy for explanations of such
visionary experiences of "communion" (152)--a term which implies
Christian love, but he goes on to show how other religions and
philosophies also contributed to his worldview. So speculation
characterizes much of his work, especially the longer poems, though
he realized that it could not finally explain visionary life or express
the love and wisdom flowing from it. Instead, in order to transmit his
deepest experiences in poetry, he came to rely upon such powerful
images from Tantric Buddhism as sexual bliss with female deities,
symbolizing the union of compassion and transcendental wisdom,
and sun and moon as symbols of enlightenment.
As a youth in retreat at Holy Cross Monastery near
Poughkeepsie he considered becoming an Anglo-Catholic monk; but
though he experienced rapture throughout Holy Week, he did not feel
"called" to this vocation (334-35). Instead, he sought enlightenment
in erotic mysticism and sacramental marriage, enthused by the
writings of D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and many ancient mystics.
He described marital bliss with his first wife, Andrée
Dutcher, an anarchist painter who suffered from epilepsy and
kleptomania, as "total identification" (358). Similar experiences
generated "When We with Sappho" and other ecstatic love poems.
This poem, beginning with Rexroth's version of Sappho's apple-
blossom poem, shows how he and his beloved transcend historical
fact, for she is "Not like a body, not like a separate thing/But like a
nimbus that hovers/Over every other thing in all the world." The
intensity of direct address mounts from the hypnotic repetition of
"summer" to the startling imperatives of "Lean back. Give me your
mouth." The lovers' bliss illuminates the world, ancient as well as
present, human and natural: "I will press/Your summer honeyed flesh
into the hot/Soil, into the crushed, acrid herbage/Of midsummer."
Afterwards they rest and savor Sappho's poem. Finally in silence
their bodies slip away like the sun as they move toward death with
Sappho. [5]
Love is, then, the dominant emotion of Rexroth's poetry and
prose: love of women, of community, of nature, of poetry and the
other arts, of innumerable Buddha-worlds (dimensions of universal
mind). Love is at once erotic and transcendent, flowing through him
and the universe, reflecting all beings in every being, transforming
life into poetry, uniting individuals in communities. His satirical and
polemical poems attack those who deny, block, or pervert love into
destructive power. His elegies commemorate his loves in recognition
of inevitable cycles of creation through destruction. His translations
came about through sympathetic identification with poets of many
cultures. So all of his poetry and poetics, his philosophizing and
acting in the world to savor and improve it, flow fundamentally from
love.
In his tales of family, friends, lovers, and spiritual and literary
masters, we learn how he enacted roles of rebel, prophet, and bard
from ancient times as well as from the American tradition of
conscientious dissent and revolt, encouraged by his parents'
noblesse oblige. The family's values were those of the
American struggle in defense of natural rights of conscience as
proclaimed in the revolution for national independence, in
Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, frontier populism, New
England Transcendentalism and Abolitionism, the spiritual and
political radicalism of European immigrants, Debsian socialism, the
Industrial Workers of the World, feminism, and other movements for
social reform in opposition to militarism, bureaucratic repression,
ecclesiastical authoritarianism, political prosecution, and capitalistic
profit-making at the expense of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness."
Like Whitman and Williams, and unlike Pound and Eliot, he
never abandoned American experience, even as he absorbed
European and Asian cultures, for he felt no fundamental contradiction
between his labors as a Wobbly logger and cowboy and delight in
translating Greek and Chinese poetry. He took himself for granted,
accepting the universality of his own experience instead of
submitting to external authorities for discipline. So mystical
realizations are presented as matter-of-factly as political struggles.
The earliest Rexroths were thirteenth century Harz Mountain
peasants and scholars and West German officials, some perhaps
Jewish. In America, the first Rexroths were Pietists and radicals,
marrying with Indians, Negroes, and Irishmen, and settling mostly in
Ohio. Kenneth's father was Charles Rexroth, an unsuccessful but
high-living pharmacist of considerable sophistication, wit, and charm,
a drinking-companion of Theodore Dreiser, James Whitcomb Riley,
Eugene Fields, George Ade, and other famous mid-western writers.
Kenneth's mother was Delia (or Della) Reed, a woman of aesthetic
sensibility who had dropped out of Oberlin College for a brief
business career with a suffragette before marriage.
Less than a year after Kenneth was born, the family moved to
Elkhart, Indiana, where his mother began educating him with
methods similar to the Montessori system, an Indian soon taught him
nature lore, and his father later equipped him with a scientific
laboratory. Kenneth's childhood seems to have been idyllic until, in
his fifth year or so, his father had the first of a series of financial
crises, a couple of years later his mother's lung hemorrhaged, and his
father began drinking so heavily that Kenneth was emotionally
distanced from him and thereafter despised drunks. Despite these
tribulations, the family visited England and the Continent later that
year and traveled as far as Constantinople, initiating Kenneth as a
world-traveler. They then settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, for about
three years, but occasionally visited New York, where he met such
famous Bohemians as James Gibbon Huneker, Sadakichi Hartman,
and the anarchist lovers Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.
Meanwhile, as his parents had love affairs, little Kenneth began to
have his own in a dream-world inspired by the utopian Oz books.
When he was ten, his parents moved with him briefly to Chicago,
then separated, reunited, and returned to Elkhart, where his mother
died in 1916 of gangrene of the lung. Devoted to her as an ideal
mother and liberated woman, he commemorated her in several
elegies, calling her "a fierce lover,/A wild wife, an animal/Mother."
[6] For a couple of years he then lived in Toledo, Ohio, with
his paternal grandmother and then with his father, who died in 1918
(91). If Kenneth had learned to debate ideas from his father, he had
learned to love deeply from his mother; so in his poems, thinking
rises from love and, finding no ultimate answers, sinks back into
love.
The boy then lived in Chicago off and on until 1927, first with
his mother's sister, then alone in his own studio. Residing in James T.
Farrell's neighborhood, he later appeared as a fat boy named Kenny
in Studs Lonigan. [7] He attended classes
at the Art Institute, Edmund Burke Grammar School, and eventually
Englewood High School, but his real education was extra-curricular,
as he began to associate with many celebrities and become known as
poet, theater director and actor, abstract painter, journalist, and
political activist. Observing Communists and reading Lenin, he
rejected Bolshevism because of its militarism and centralized
authoritarianism and for the rest of his life remained an anarchist,
opposed to centralized government and all other collectivities. A
poem called "The Bad Old Days" tells how, after reading Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle and H. G. Wells' The Research
Magnificent, and seeing for himself, in the stockyards area of
Chicago, "Debauched and exhausted faces,/Starved and looted
brains," [8] he took a revolutionary vow that is
probably the one of Eugene Debs in The Dragon and the
Unicorn: "While there is a lower class,/I am in it. While there
is/A criminal element,/I am of it. Where there is/A soul in jail, I am
not free." [9] Paradoxically, he also
believed that he "belonged to a special elite whose mission it was to
change the world" and that his primary way of doing this was
through poetry (149).
During his fifteenth year, the most intellectually active time of
his life, he began translating poetry, Sappho's "Apple Orchard" first
of all, then other poems from the Greek, Chinese, and Japanese,
depending on Judith Gautier's French versions of oriental poems until
he could read the originals. He visited classes at the University of
Chicago, but never pursued a degree. He claimed to have begun his
first long philosophical poem, The Homestead Called
Damascus, as early as 1920, and to have finished it in 1925,
during his first major love affair, with a social worker ten years older
than himself named Shirley Johnson ("Leslie Smith" in his poetry),
and a minor fling with a Jewish student named Ruth at the University
of Chicago. The poem's symbolist style and Christian questing for
spiritual renewal were strongly affected by his discovery of "The
Waste Land" in the Dial of 1922, which he imagined to be
revolutionary until realizing its reactionary thrust. Because of his
reaction to symbolism generally and Eliot's work in particular, he did
not publish his own long poem as a whole for thirty-two years (191-
201 and 255-58).
Accompanying Shirley to Smith College, he visited in Boston
the imprisoned Sacco and Vanzetti, whose anarchist saintliness
permanently deepened his radical commitments. In New York he
tried sexual yoga with a free-thinking female disciple of Mahatma
Gandhi. Back in Chicago he acted in plays by Pirandello and other
modernists and joyfully discovered Middle English and Latin poetry,
philosophy, and theology, which attracted him to the sacramental
system of Catholicism, especially its Anglican expression, though he
remained heterodox in thought and behavior. Hitch-hiking to Seattle
in 1924, he worked as a logger and participated in The Industrial
Workers of the World, then explored primitive life in the Ozarks
before settling again in Chicago, where he led a Dada movement and
studied anthropology on his own, inspired by Edward Sapir, who
seems to have understood Rexroth's poetics of communion and
communication. [10]
Breaking up with Shirley, he explored the Southwest and
Mexico, meeting the D. H. Lawrence circle, which hardly resembled
the community of love that he had been seeking, then worked with
both cowboys and Indians on the west coast. He studied Wittgenstein,
but rejected the Tractatus for Duns Scotus' ontology,
eventually finding that no philosophy offered final answers or
embodied the wisdom that he craved. Working his way on a ship to
Europe, he met Aragon, Soupault, Tzara, Cendrars, and other literary
heroes in Paris, but returned to the American West after Alexander
Berkman advised him not to become another expatriate. He was soon
mountain-climbing and training horses in Montana, then met Rivera,
Orozco, and other revolutionary artists in Mexico.
In 1927 he and his bride Andrée hitchhiked from
Chicago to California, where he was to make his home thereafter,
arriving just before news of Sacco and Vanzetti's execution in Boston
shattered revolutionary hopes--an event commemorated in some of
his finest elegies. [11] In the same year he
completed "Prolegomena to a Theodicy," his second long
philosophical reverie, a Christian vision of hell and heaven in the
cubist mode, begun in 1925 but not published until 1932.
The first twenty-one years of Rexroth's life must have been
even more complex than could be indicated in the concentrated,
rapidly-paced narrative of An Autobiographical Novel. It seems that
he was never idle nor at a loss for discovery and creation. And during
his years of being based in Chicago, especially the last seven, his
religious, mystical, philosophical, political, erotic, and artistic
perspectives coalesced in a way that determined the rest of his
lifework.
Excerpts from a Life:
California (1927-48: 1981)
Although by the age of twenty-one Rexroth had had more
adventures than most people have in a lifetime, the move to
California in 1927 initiated an even greater leap forward. In this
second phase of his development, centered in San Francisco until
1968, his poetry, drama, translations, criticism, revolutionary
activism, and painting reached fruition, with most of his major
writings being published before his attention centered on Asia as
never before.
An additional installment of Rexroth's autobiography,
Excerpts from a Life, covering the years 1927-48, was
published first in 1981 and included in Linda Hamalian's 1991
edition of An Autobiographical Novel, now the standard
edition (but my footnotes refer to the 1981 Excerpts.). We
learn how the Rexroths settled in San Francisco, where he rapidly
rose to a pre-eminent position in the literary life of the region. They
turned from geometrical painting to a rendering of organic forms as
they climbed mountains, observed landscapes, and made friends with
the photographer Edward Weston, the painter Hilaire Hiler, the poet-
critic Yvor Winters, the lesbian-anarchist poet Elsa Gidlow, and a
young Russian genius, Mark Kliorin, who eventually disappeared in
Moscow.
In 1929 Rexroth began publishing in magazines, and in 1932
made his first major international breakthrough as a leading cubist in
the "Revolution of the Word" when two versions of "Prolegomena
to a Theodicy" appeared in An "Objectivists" Anthology in
Le Beausset, Var, France, in 1932: the poet's original and a revision
by editor Louis Zukofsky that Rexroth repudiated in the same issue.
[12]
Rexroth's comprehension of Marxism, especially the theory of
capitalistic self-alienation at the center of Marx's humanist
philosophy, matured in response to the Great Depression and
international crises; so during a visit to New York he joined the first
John Reed Club because of its broad representation of diverse
viewpoints at that time, despite his objections to Bolshevism, which
he and many other radicals believed had perverted Marx's ideas.
Andrée, on the other hand, joined the Communist Party, went
insane, and attempted suicide. They separated, Rexroth fell in love
with Marie Cass, a nurse, and married her in 1940, after
Andrée had died in an epileptic seizure.
The same year, In What Hour, consisting of thirty-one
poems of revolution, love, and nature, was published by Macmillan
and the next year won a California Silver Medal Award. This brilliant
first book, the product of twenty years of writing and more than a
decade of publishing in periodicals and anthologies in Europe and the
United States, includes cubist poems as well as poems in natural
speech. Though critics admired the nature poems and Rexroth's
intellect and artistry, they had difficulty grasping the serious quest of
the poet, through the poems of revolutionary hope, struggle, defeat,
and despair, towards an organic philosophy in which value is
naturally emergent in geological and biological, social and artistic,
processes. [13] The quest zigzags like a
mountain trail, so dark at times that it is apparently impassable before
suddenly brightening. As Rexroth confronted social, economic, and
military crises of the 1930's from mountains under stars, he realized
in these poems how creation emerges from destruction, universally.
Rexroth saw World War II as a supreme symptom of an
exploitative, authoritarian, dehumanizing, and disintegrating
"civilization," rather than simply a conflict between Democracy and
Fascism. Nor did he support the Soviet state, which in his opinion
had betrayed humane ideals of social revolution. Like Kenneth
Patchen, Paul Goodman, William Everson, William Stafford, Carlos
Cortez, and other anarchist and pacifist writers, he refused on ethical
grounds to kill impersonal "enemies," even for a government less
unjust than the totalitarian states. Instead of joining a war effort that
he believed would perpetuate injustices, he did what he could to
advance the values of love, cooperation, and community. He was,
therefore, constantly and often dangerously threatened by those
uncritically supporting the war, including former friends from the
Left; and his position was unique even among pacifists, who were
generally from traditional peace churches. As a conscientious
objector, he worked as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, where he
was permanently injured by a violent patient. He also gave
humanitarian aid to Japanese-Americans, threatened by evacuation
and incarceration, who in turn helped him explore oriental culture.
The study and practice of Buddhist and Christian contemplation
show up in his second book, The Phoenix and the Tortoise
(1944). According to the preface, the poems were written after 1940,
but at least one exception must be the translation of Sappho's apple-
blossom poem, which he had written as a youth. In a style of classical
clarity the poet moves from desperation, abandon, and resignation in
response to cultural collapse, shown in the Hellenistic, Byzantine,
and Roman paraphrases, through "erotic mysticism" (in the original
poems of love and nature) into a consciousness of "universal
responsibility" through "sacramental marriage," which generated the
long title poem in response to World War II. The poems were later
reprinted: the title poem in The Collected Longer Poems; the
thirty-seven short ones and a few of the twenty-six translations in
The Collected Shorter Poems and most of the translations
and imitations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin in various collections
of translations. The book was enthusiastically reviewed and won him
another California Silver Medal Award the following year.
[14]
After the war, in a worldwide upsurge of idealistic hopes for a
new way of life despite Cold War militarism, Rexroth helped
organize the Libertarian League for a thorough study of revolutionary
thought and action from an anarchist perspective. He also organized
weekly poetry readings that spawned the San Francisco Renaissance
years before the Beats appeared, and which led to the establishment
of the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State College (now
University). [15] Distinguishing his own
ethics, based on a personal, mystical sense of universal community,
from statist politics (Republican, Democratic, Communist, Socialist,
Fascist) on the one hand and the mindless amorality of many Beats
and Hippies on the other, Rexroth claimed that his literary and
political activities had helped spread a new style of cultural revolt
across the continent and abroad (61). Rejecting the "Social Lie" that
coerces people into serving dehumanizing institutions, Rexroth
uncompromisingly advocated being true to love, friendship,
knowledge, relentless inquiry, critical thought, and the creative spirit
of nature and art.
Organic Christian Personalism:
California and Europe (1947-67)
In 1947, Viking published Rexroth's edition of Selected
Poems of D. H. Lawrence, containing his vigorous introduction
to the erotic-visionary-prophetic poetry, an important influence on his
own. Though Rexroth had been publishing criticism for almost two
decades in periodicals, the Lawrence essay, written as imaginatively
as his poetry, brought him international fame as an important critic at
odds with the impersonal formalism of the New Critics and other
academics.
He was divorced from Marie the next year, married Marthe
Larsen, and traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was
renewed in 1949, when, in his anthology, The New British
Poets, his long essay on the neo-romanticism of Dylan Thomas,
Denise Levertov, George Barker, Hugh MacDiarmid, and others who
were expanding the emotional and intellectual range of poetry across
the Atlantic effectively introduced their work to many American
readers.
Also in 1949, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a collection
of his cubist poems written between 1920 and 1932, was published in
an effort to revive the Revolution of the Word. This third volume of
Rexroth's poetry included his second long poem, retitled "A
Prolegomenon to a Theodicy," shorter poems, and the first of many
manifesto-like introductions to his books. But because of improper
printing after the director of the Decker Press in Prairie City, Illinois,
was murdered, the collection was reissued, as Rexroth had originally
intended it, in 1953 by the Golden Goose Press in Sausalito. The first
edition was dedicated to his late wife Andrée, and the second
to the anarchist poet and painter Kenneth Patchen, with whom
Rexroth then felt closer than to any other American writer at that
time, for Patchen was extending techniques abandoned after this
book. In the 1953 preface, Rexroth belligerently proclaims:
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the
invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. My poems are
acts of force and violence directed against the evil which
murders us all. If you like, they are designed not just to
overthrow the present State, economic system, and Church,
but all prevailing systems of human collectivity altogether...
I wish to speak to and for all those who have had enough of
the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual
Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
Such polemics turned off some readers, for the time was not ripe for
revolution of any kind. [16] During the McCarthyite
years of the Korean War, Rexroth was one of the few writers to
proclaim publicly an uncompromising faith in human liberation from
all forms of coercion, winning him admiration from some, but
contempt from many, including Stalinists who resented his attacks on
the Soviet Union. Not all of the poems in The Art of Worldly
Wisdom, however, were radical in style or subject. The best
poems in the collection, in fact, the sequence for Leslie Smith, his
Chicago lover, are tender love lyrics of much wider appeal than the
cubist and rhetorical pieces (CSP 31-36).
From this quiet side of Rexroth's sensibility came The
Signature of All Things (1950), the fourth book of his own
poetry, including some of his most enduring personal lyrics and
translations of mystical love and nature and a preface affirming that
"the integral person is more revolutionary than any program, party,
or social conflict..." The book's title is borrowed from Jacob
Boehme, the seventeenth century Christian mystic who, along with
Buber, Schweitzer, Suzuki, and Kropotkin, influenced the spiritual
anarchism of Rexroth's poems. Their style, he says, is influenced less
by contemporary poetry than by folksongs from around the world,
primitive and ancient songs, and "directly communicative poetry" by
Burns, Landor, Blake, Christina Rosetti, Tennyson, and others. The
syllabic prosody that had become familiar in Rexroth's non-cubist
work is concisely explained. Though the book is dedicated to Marie,
to whom the most erotic poems are addressed, Marthe, his third wife,
bore their first daughter, Mary, the year that the volume was
published. [17]
Rexroth's poetic, philosophical, and visionary powers are
epitomized in Beyond the Mountains, four verse tragedies on
the disintegration of the Greek world, prophetic of the cultural
collapse of our own age, influenced by Japanese Noh drama as well
as by Sophocles and Euripides. They were published separately in
periodicals, then altogether as a book in 1951. Phaedra was premiered
in St. Louis in June, 1951, directed by James Walsh, who acted also
in the New York premiere by the Living Theatre of the tetralogy as a
whole--including also Iphegenia at Aulis, Hermaios, and Berenike--
directed by Julian Beck and starring Judith Malina, December 30,
1951-January 20. [18] The plays' theme of
spiritual commitment in the face of collapsing civilization was
amplified the next year in The Dragon and the Unicorn,
Rexroth's fifth book of non-dramatic poetry and his fourth long
philosophical poem, evolving from his travels in post-war Europe,
under the threat of World War III. The poem amplifies the erotic,
organic Personalism, still predominantly Christian but with vivid
Buddhist themes and imagery, of The Phoenix and the
Tortoise, the philosophical reverie which it most closely
resembles; but Rexroth's style has become much stronger and more
flexible in this longest of his poems. [19]
In 1952 Rexroth's first full collection of translations,
Fourteen Poems by O. V. de L. Milosz, most of them done
years before from the French, confirmed his already recognized
accomplishments as a translator. A year after a second daughter was
born in 1954, his children were honored in the acidly whimsical A
Bestiary for My Daughters Mary and Katherine. Also in 1955,
One Hundred Poems from the French and the ever-popular
One Hundred Poems from the Japanese established him as a
major translator who was extending Pound's attempt to bridge Asian
and Occidental cultures. Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Memorial for
Dylan Thomas, his most powerful and renowned protest poem
against the worldwide culture of violence, ripped through the
reactionary decade. This blistering poem and the Bestiary
were reprinted with other poems of protest, satire, and affection in his
sixth full book of original poetry, In Defense of the Earth in
1956, dedicated to his daughters. A short preface reaffirms the
visionary and prophetic role of poetry in opposition to a destructive
society. [20]
Also in 1956 Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile
(published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the first City Lights Pocket
Poets book) and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
[21] increased his popularity as a translator. He taught at
San Francisco State College, even though, having never completed
highschool, he bristled at academic restrictions. And in 1957 he
received a Chapelbrook Award and the Eunice Tietjens Award from
Poetry magazine.
Meanwhile his fame was dramatically spreading because of
worldwide attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat
Generation after he had introduced Allen Ginsberg and other poets at
a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955; for more than
any other American poet, he had kept alive, through dark years of
war and Cold War, the spirit of revolt, protest, and liberation, even
when it was widely believed that conformity and conservatism were
permanent. His support of the Beat movement was critical and
temporary, for he objected to the ignorance, amorality, and
commercialism of some of its participants, but he long praised
Ginsberg as a major poet of visionary protest and remained close
friends with Ferlinghetti, McClure, and especially Snyder, whose
work has the closest affinities with his own. [22]
In 1957 The Homestead Called Damascus, his first long
philosophical poem, the symbolist reverie of two brothers' quest
completed in 1926, was first published in The Quarterly Review
of Literature with Lawrence Lipton's introductory essay, and
won a Longview Award. [23] He also received a Eunice
Tietjens Award from Poetry magazine, a $1000 Shelley
Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Chapelbrook
Award, and an Amy Lowell Fellowship.
Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays, Rexroth's first whole
book of criticism, issued in 1959, and Assays in 1961, extended the
already powerful influence of his erudite but popular prose that had
been appearing in periodicals in support of the new American poetry,
and projecting a bolder, more imaginative comprehension of world
culture than was evident among most academics.24 Also in 1961, he
and Marthe were divorced. The next year, Poems from the Greek
Anthology reminded readers that his poetic practice and theory
were grounded in western classics as well as in those from Asia.
In 1963, The Homestead Called Damascus was
republished as a booklet with a Foreword by James Laughlin,
[25] along with Natural Numbers: New and
Selected Poems, a small, quiet assortment from his previous
books, with a few new poems for his daughters. [26] He
was also writing a column for The San Francisco Examiner
and teaching a course in art history and appreciation at the San
Francisco Art Institute. The next year he received a grant from The
National Academy of Arts and Letters, taught at San Francisco State
College, and in the summer was poet-in-residence at the University
of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, where had I convinced my skeptical
colleagues to invite him. In 1965 he won a William Carlos Williams
Award from Contact magazine.
As youth rebellion boiled against racial discrimination,
academic restrictions, and especially the war in Southeast Asia,
Rexroth spoke out clearly and forcefully against injustices, but
published no new protest poems after 1963. Why? Perhaps rebellion
could not defeat the "Social Lie," against which he had said all that
he could say, or so he thought. Moreover, he had come to the tragic
conclusion that those who rule the world would destroy it through
ecological catastrophe or nuclear war. They
are pushing all this pretty
Planet, Venice, and Palladio,
And you and me, and the golden
Sun, nearer and nearer to
Total death. Nothing can stop them. [27]
In 1966 An Autobiographical Novel and The
Collected Shorter Poems, containing new work and poetry from
nine previously published books, climaxed his career thus far.
[28]
The Buddha's Way:
Asia (1967-82)
Rexroth made enduring poetic, philosophical, ecological, and
utopian contributions to the holistic worldview evolving in the
counterculture, while condemning drugs, mindless music, senseless
activism and other stupid excesses along with the alienation, bigotry,
coercion, and warfare of the established culture. Throughout his life
he had been developing an organic philosophy of mind and
community long before many intellectuals had recognized the
ecological basis of human life and thought.
Believing that the disintegration of western civilization was
being hastened by the technological revolution, he turned
increasingly to traditional Asian culture, which had influenced him
from the beginning of his career, but which had remained
subordinated to Christian themes until 1967, when it predominated
over western thought in his work. In that year, after visiting Japan
and other Asian countries for the first time, and Europe again, on a
world tour made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation
and an Akademische Austausdienst Award from West Berlin, he
wrote at Daitokuji Zen Temple in Kyoto The Heart's Garden, The
Garden's Heart, his fifth long poem, a Buddhist reverie in his
most sensuously melodic style, rich in allusions to Japanese
literature, in which he seems to attain satori. This masterpiece of
living in the Tao, dedicated to his daughters and to Carol Tinker, was
published first as a book in 1967, with graphic designs by the poet,
and the next year in The Collected Longer Poems. [29]
The long poems, read consecutively with the aid of its preface,
display the development of Rexroth's worldview from the resignation
of Homestead to the apocalyptic Prolegomenon, then through
the erotic-organic Personalism of The Phoenix and the
Tortoise and The Dragon and the Unicorn, to the
realization of Dharma in Japan. [30] Buddhist
influences had appeared in Homestead, and after a twenty year hiatus
had thematically and imagistically shaped The Phoenix and the
Tortoise, which nevertheless was centrally Christian, but they
had intensified until by 1967 his outlook was predominantly
Buddhist. [31]
Like his friend Thomas Merton, Rexroth had seen no
fundamental contradiction between Christian and Buddhist
contemplative experience, in the "peace that passeth understanding"
beyond words and ideas. As a youth he had understood Buddhism as
as "pure religious empiricism... the Noble Eight Fold Path, whose
culmination is the 'unruffledness'--Nirvana--which underlies reality."
[32]
He had anarchistically explored the Eight Fold Path of morality
(right speech, conduct, and livelihood), meditation (right effort,
mindfulness, and contemplation), and wisdom (right views and
aspirations). His morality was not monastic but revolutionary, based
on responsibility for all humanity, like that of a Bodhisattva who
renounces nirvana until all beings enter it. He practiced yoga off and
on, but did not believe "in sitting zazen, facing the wall and straining,
as at stool, for satori. Satori is an invisible mist, which envelops you
unaware and finally never goes away." [33]
In 1968 Classics Revisited, his most popular collection
of essays from Saturday Review, vastly expanded his fame as
a critic. Having lived in San Francisco for forty-one years, Rexroth
became so disgusted with the increase of drugs and crime there that
he moved to Santa Barbara in the fall to begin teaching on the
University of California campus there. [34]
In 1969 Rexroth vigorously defended cubism in the
Introduction to Pierre Reverdy Selected Poems and in
translations therein; and the year after that he swung from west to
east again in Love in the Turning Year: One Hundred More
Poems from the Chinese. Also in 1970 The Alternative
Society: Essays from the Other World centered on American
literature and society in the face of nuclear extinction; and With
Eye and Ear related eastern and western literature and religion.
He was so firmly established in American intellectual life, despite his
relentless objections to it, that in the spring of that year, just before
campuses exploded all over the country in massive strikes against the
war in Southeast Asia, I arranged for him to be offered a
professorship at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee which he
declined because students at the University of California--Santa
Barbara were demanding that he continue teaching there.
Because Rexroth's spiritual life, like Thomas Merton's, was
never an escape from humanity, he had become increasingly
concerned about the buildup of the war in Southeast Asia and
political repression of opponents to it. Though he persistently spoke
out against the war and other injustices, generally sympathized with
the Movement, and admired the honest commitment of many
activists, he did not conceal his contempt for participants who were
stupid, amoral, or totalitarian. Some of them, in turn, distrusted his
anarchism, considered him above the battle, did not know his earlier
protest poems, did not care for his music and poetry performances, or
saw no "relevance" in the Buddhist poems that he was writing at this
time. He grew increasingly dubious about confrontational opposition
as the war worsened. Ever since the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
he had seen idealistic rebellions crushed. He knew that even the most
militant demonstrations would not bring down the Military-Industrial
Complex and usher in Utopia. [35] He wrote me on
June 3, 1970:
As the world economic crisis II shuts down, radical
melodrama, massive confrontation, calls for "general
strikes" observed only by tiny minorities, all this will have
to change to infiltration, organization, long term planning.
The past decade of adventurism was purely a function of the
affluent society. Jerry Rubin is Hugh Hefner in dirty
whiskers. Eventually of course we will have new armies of
unemployed, dispossessed and starving. But now is the time
for the cadres to consolidate and hang on to any strategic
positions they've gained. Nobody knows now how to plan,
organize, train -- or what for. So don't quit!
I think the "crisis program" here was a fine idea. A
"hard strike" would not have been pulled off. There'd have
been a mass picket line for a couple of days, arrests,
clubbings, gas, shootings, and then it would have been over.
As it is students are getting credit for "crisis classes" in the
theory and practice of social conflict, the economics of the
war economy, the history of revolutions, etc etc and more
credit for canvassing door to door in Santa Barbara, and
union to union, and lunch hour factory to factory, and store
to store.
Rexroth's political critiques might seem to have nothing to do
with Buddhism, but in fact the war and resistance to it heightened
awareness of the universal suffering of humanity, which the Buddha
claimed resulted from attachments. The disillusioning process of
history, so familiar to Rexroth, had deepened his interest in the
Buddha's way of liberation, as opposed to political activism. When I
asked him whether certain meditation experiences might be
satori, he explained to me in his letter of September 23, 1970,
the difference between Buddhist and Christian realization:
My. My. First time? I've always thought that's what part of
the mind is always doing anyway - you just get a sharp
focusing of attention on that level and a kind of hypertrophy
of importance. It's the opposite of the mystical experience
where there is a gradual dying out of any "importance" into
IMPORTANCE and a sense of peace and contentless where
you occupy CONTENT--the "meaning of meaning." What a
disappointment that title [of I. A. Richard's book] was in the
20's when we expected something quite different. Of course
in completion all polarities and antitheses merge. Love to all
Kenneth.
As the Movement collapsed, Rexroth tried to keep alive radical
ideas in his writing of Communalism: from Its Origins to the
Twentieth Century. In 1971 he reported, "This has been a year of
retreat. Everybody is scared after the 69-70 pogroms against students
& blacks. Reagan's bloodbath policy has worked so far." Unlike
Gary Snyder and others, he saw little hope of the Movement's
securing itself in communes: "Most of the country ones sound like
Wheeler's ranch, shit on the ground, crash pads of an unrelieved
nightmare of drugs & disorder - essentially a phenomenon of
breakdown not revolution--and totally upper middleclass." (Undated
letter to me.)
In 1971, Rexroth's longest literary study, American Poetry
in the Twentieth Century, showed how writing had emerged
from complex regional, ethnic, intellectual, and artistic communities;
and more quiet nature poetry from his Japanese experience, Sky
Sea Birds Trees Earth House Beasts Flowers, was dedicated to
Carol Tinker and Gary Snyder.
In 1972, after he had commented on a draft on my Kenneth
Rexroth, it was corrected and published.36 He participated in a
Japanology Conference in Tokyo; and The Orchid Boat: Women
Poets of China (translations done with Ling Chung, contributed
to the rising consciousness of women in literature. In 1973 The
Elastic Retort: Essay in Literature and Ideas offered more
"Classics Revisited" and other pieces on Japanese and western
religion and culture.
In 1974, after marrying the poet Carol Tinker in an Episcopal
service in Santa Barbara, he lived with her in a Kyoto farmhouse with
eight-hundred year old beams, a tea ceremony room, and rare
calligraphies. For about a year he gave readings and lectures
throughout Japan and other Asian countries, explored cultural
traditions, and worked on new poetry and prose. One Hundred
More Poems from the Japanese [37] and New
Poems (a short collection of work in progress) [38]
appeared in 1974, along with his authoritative essay on the art of
literature in the fifteenth edition of The Encyclopaedia
Britannica, followed the next year by the fullest exposition of his
social philosophy, Communalism, from the Neolithic to 1900,
his longest historical study.
Our correspondence on Buddhism indicates his disappointment
in finding many Japanese less sophisticated than he had expected.
That's quite a letter! I have quoted it to Japanese &
Indian (I just was at an "East-West" discussion in Bombay)
intellectuals and it amazes them - to whom Buddhism,
Hinduism, much less Tantrism is anathema, and represents
only the blackest reaction and commercialism. In Japan,
some of the youngest, influenced by Snyder, have taken up
their own, or Gary's "Buddhism," which is as much a recent
construct as Suzuki (or Buber's "Zen Judaism") and a kind
of Neo-Tantrism is popular among a very few intellectuals in
India, mostly artists. Most Japanese are totally ignorant of
the very existence of philosophical Buddhism or have ever
read the Lotus, or ever heard of the Lankavatara or the
Avatamsaka - or know the difference between a Buddha & a
Bodhisattva." [February 1, 1975]
Buddhism is for burials, Shinto for weddings - both
thoroly (sic) commercial & as bankrupting as bar mitzvahs.
[June 1, 1975]
A Japanese would as likely to seek philosophy from
a Buddhist monk as you would from a "mortician." [July 31,
1975]
Rexroth denounced Zen as a religion of militarists, millionaires, and
hippies, but excepted Daisetz Suzuki, whom he had met as a boy in
Michigan, and whom he admired as a creative thinker. Similarly,
though he loathed the sentimentality of many haiku, the
poetic offspring of Zen, he admired the great accomplishments of
Basho and Shiki.
Despite his complaints he loved many Japanese friends, authors
ancient and modern, poetry and Noh, temples, shrines, and
gardens, about which he spoke enthusiastically when we met in
Kyoto just before he and Carol sailed to Santa Barbara. Back in
America he denounced his homeland:
After Japan the culture shock is too much. This is the
greatest military despotism since Assyria, governed by fools
& feared and hated by every nation on earth... I don't want to
be part of the collective guilt. I do not have a male friend in
Santa Barbara who is not a foreigner! I don't know what
American men are talking about and I have nothing to say to
them... I wish I was 35 years younger. I would... change my
citizenship... [February 1, 1976]
Deepening Japanese influences had shaped the poignant lyrics
in The Silver Swan and On Flower Wreath Hill, the Buddhist
sequence of eight short poems written in a Kyoto cemetery as he had
anticipated death, published in 1976 and dedicated to Yasuyo Morita,
Rexroth's secretary in Kyoto who contributed calligraphies on the
cover and title page, while he had done those inside. The Burning
Heart: Women Poets of Japan (translations with Ikuko Atsumi)
and The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (edited with
Rexroth's Introduction on Japanese Buddhism) followed in 1977; and
Seasons of Sacred Lust: Selected Poems of Kazuko Shiraishi
(translations of the most famous living woman poet of Japan done
with Carol Tinker, Ikuko Atsumi, John Solt, and Yasuyo Morita) in
1978.
Also in 1978 the Rexroths returned to Japan and toured South
Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand,
sponsored by the United States Agency of International
Communication despite his outspoken objections to United States
militarism and foreign policy. A novelistic sequence of sixty short
poems called The Love Poems of Marichiko Translated by
Kenneth Rexroth and dedicated by him to her and by her to him
proved that his passion was unflagging. The truth of the matter is that
though he took pains to present these poems in public readings and in
notes as translations, he confided to a few friends that he had made
them up entirely himself. Staying in my home at Osaka University,
he tried to produce, with the help of Yasuyo Morita and a young
tanka poet, a full Japanese version of the poems to be published as
Marichiko's original work, but was dissatisfied with the results,
which were incomplete and never published, though some of the
proceedings remain on a tape in my possession. The Marichiko
poems were republished in 1979 by New Directions in The
Morning Star, containing also The Silver Swan and
On Flower Wreath Hill. This last book of his original poetry,
along with Li Ch'ing Chao: Complete Poems (translations of
the greatest Chinese woman poet done with Ling Chung), were the
last full books to be published in his lifetime as he faced death from a
failing heart. [39]
In 1980, For Rexroth, edited by Geoffrey Gardner, the
first Festschrift about his work, appeared as he returned to Japan for
an international poetry conference despite declining health. That year
Bradford Morrow issued a chapbook of Rexroth's light verse for his
birthday, Saucy Limericks and Christmas Cheer, and the next
year edited Excerpts from a Life, Rexroth's last publication
that he was able to read. He was able to join in the celebration of his
earlier career as an abstract painter, at the retrospective show at the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art. [40]
Although Rexroth had been baptised an Episcopalian, at his
request his good friend Father Alberto Huerta, S. J., of the University
of San Francisco, gave him a Roman Catholic baptism on Easter
Sunday, 1981, and thereafter said Mass for him periodically at his
bedside, where he was immobilized for over a year because of strokes
and heart trouble. He was unable to speak at our last meeting, ten
days before his death on June 6, 1982, but with tears in his eyes
squeezed my hand in reply to questions. Courageous to the end, he
had refused hospitalization; so James Laughlin had generously
arranged for around-the-clock medical care at home, where Carol
Tinker could remain with him. On 11 June, an ecumenical funeral
was conducted by four Jesuit priests at Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Church near their home, with nuns from the Santa Barbara Vedanta
temple chanting in Sanskrit, with music composed by his Dick
Collins of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and with the orientalist Esther
Handler giving a reading of On Flower Wreath Hill. Father
Huerta eloquently celebrated
Rexroth's profound ability to contemplate the things which
make up this universe: the leaves that descend down some
river in the high Sierras in the Fall, the Japanese red sun that
illuminates with a sudden flash at dawn in Kyoto, the
mediterranean colors of Aix en Provence in Spring, or the
simple rustling leaves and the infinite kaleidoscope sky
which he contemplated with his sensitive blue eyes for over
one year from his rectangular bedroom window. For when
he could not speak, nor sit outside on the porch to let the
light touch him, he would travel with his heart and mind
through this opening in the wall to the incandescent light of
all faith and all truth.
Rexroth was buried in the Santa Barbara cemetery, overlooking
the Pacific Ocean, among cypresses and pines. [41] John Solt,
his former student and collaborator on translations, organized a
memorial service at the Marishi-ten Temple in Tokyo the following
August at which poet Kazuko Shiraishi and actress Maralia
Yoshimasu read The Love Poems of Marichiko and sutras
were chanted. In October, a memorial program of Rexroth's poems
was led by poet-professor Yuzuru Katagiri, who read his Japanese
translations of them at the Kyoto American Center and presented the
eighth annual Rexroth Awards, which Rexroth had founded, to
Japanese women. Memorial issues of Kyoto Review, Seiza
(Tokyo), Poetry Flash (Berkeley), and Sagetrieb
(Maine) appeared. Katagiri's Japanese translations in 1978, 1979, and
1984 extended Rexroth's influence in Asia. [42] On June 4,
1983, a memorial poetry reading was held at the Kyoto American
Center, led by Katagiri, with jazz accompaniment by Ron Hadley,
and involving poet-friends Nanao Sakaki, Yo Nakayama, myself, and
Keiko Matsui Gibson, who described him in a memorial poem as "a
firey Buddha, a raging Fudo-Myoo" (a fierce-looking but
compassionate king with upraised sword whose sculptured form
guards Tantric Buddhist temples). [43] I also offered
memorial lectures on Rexroth and Buddhism on five Japanese
campuses, including Koya-san University in the awesome monastery
which Rexroth had considered his spiritual home in Japan. In 1984
Brad Morrow's selection of Rexroth's poetry was published by New
Directions. [44]
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