Kenneth Rexroth

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Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement.[1] Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.[2] Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.[3]

Early years[]

Rexroth was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana,[4] the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia Reed. His childhood was troubled by his father's alcoholism and his mother's chronic illness. His mother died in 1916 and his father in 1919, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago.

At age nineteen, he hitchhiked across the country, taking odd jobs and working a stint as a Forest Service trail crew hand, cook, and packer in the Pacific Northwest, at the Marblemount Ranger Station.[5] Later he was able to board a steamship in Hoboken, exploring Mexico and South America before spending a week in Paris to meet many notable avant-garde figures, notably Tristan Tzara and the Surrealists. He considered staying on in Paris, but an American friend urged him not to become just another expatriate and he returned home.

After meeting his first wife, he moved to San Francisco; he would live in California the rest of his life.

Love, marriage, sacrament[]

Rexroth viewed love for another person as a sacramental act that could connect one with a transcendent, universal awareness. In his introduction to his poem The Phoenix and the Tortoise, Rexroth articulated his understanding of love and marriage: "The process as I see it goes something like this: from abandon to erotic mysticism, from erotic mysticism to the ethical mysticism of sacramental marriage, thence to the realization of the ethical mysticism of universal responsibility."[6]

In 1927, at age 22, Rexroth married Andrée Dutcher, a commercial artist and painter from Chicago. He claimed to have fallen in love with her at first sight when he saw her in the doorway of the apartment building he was renting. He encouraged Dutcher to pursue non-commercial painting, and she gave him feedback on his writing. The two shared many interests and what Rexroth described as a perfect relationship. Their marriage deteriorated, however, and the couple was divorced near Rexroth's 35th birthday. Andrée died of complications from epilepsy shortly after, in 1940. Her death triggered great sadness in Rexroth, who wrote a number of elegiac poems in her honor.

Within a year of Andrée's death, Rexroth married the nurse and poet Marie Kass. They opened up their home to weekly literary discussions, anti-war protesters, and Japanese-American convalescents avoiding internment. The two separated in 1948.

In 1949, Rexroth traveled to Europe with Marthe Larsen. The two were married in Aix-en-Provence despite Rexroth still being legally married to Marie. When the couple returned to the US, Marthe was pregnant. They had had two daughters, Mary and Katherine, by 1955, when Rexroth's divorce from Marie finally came through. In 1956, Marthe fell in love with the poet Robert Creeley, and she later left Kenneth despite his desperate pleas for her to stay. Rexroth later removed all instances of her name from his poetry.

After living in San Francisco for 41 years, Rexroth moved to Santa Barbara in 1968. He taught two courses at UCSB. After a few years, he married Carol Tinker, his longtime assistant. They remained married until Rexroth's death in 1982.

Poetic influences[]

In the 1930s, Rexroth was associated with the Objectivists, a largely New York group gathered around Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen.[7] and was included in the 1931 issue of Poetry magazine dedicated to Objectivist poetry, and in the 1932 An “Objectivists” Anthology.[8]

Rexroth was the central figure in San Francisco Bay Area poetry from the 1930s through the 1960s and exercised a major and early influence over the evolution of the area's local artistic culture and social counterculture. Bay Area poetry in the 1940s and 1950s was substantially the creation of Rexroth, along with Robert Duncan, William Everson (Brother Antoninus), Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others, and Rexroth's centrality was generally acknowledged. His prose on social subjects was an incitement, a participant, a witness and a history of the emergence of this counterculture. His weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle was, while it survived, a lodestar of this movement. Rexroth was deeply involved in anarchist-libertarian political circles in San Francisco from the early 1930s and as such deeply opposed to American intervention in foreign conflicts. He and his wife Mary were intensively active, alongside anarchist and Quaker friends, in working to help California Japanese avoid internment in 1942 and lessen its harm. In the late 1940s he was instrumental in the founding of radio station KPFA-Berkeley, a pioneer in cooperative public radio where he conducted a weekly book-review hour, recorded from his bathtub at home. For the emergent poets of the San Francisco Renaissance and, later, visiting Beat poets, he was the central figure of the local poetic avant garde scene as a node in international artistic culture. His An Autobiographical Novel is a primary witness to this period of importance. It was labeled "autobiographical" to evade legal entanglements.

Much of Rexroth's work can be classified as "erotic" or "love poetry", given his deep fascination with transcendent love. According to Hamill and Kleiner, "nowhere is Rexroth's verse more fully realized than in his erotic poetry".[2]

His poetry is marked by a sensitivity to Asian cultural forms as well as an appreciation of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, particularly that of Sappho. Rexroth's poetic voice is similar to that of Tu Fu (whom he translated), expressing indignation with the inequities of the world from an existential perspective.

During the 1970s Rexroth, along with the scholar Chung Ling, translated the notable Song Dynasty poet Li Ch'ing-chao and an anthology of Chinese women poets, titled The Orchid Boat.

With The Love Poems of Marichiko, Rexroth claimed to have translated the poetry of a contemporary, "young Japanese woman poet", but it was later disclosed that he was the author, and he gained critical recognition for having conveyed so authentically the feelings of someone of another gender and culture.[9] Linda Hamalian, his biographer, suggests that, "translating the work of women poets from China and Japan reveals a transformation of both heart and mind".[2]

Rexroth's poetry, essays, and journalism reflect his interests in jazz, politics, culture, and ecology.

The Beat Generation[]

Kenneth Rexroth Street in San Francisco, California

With Rexroth acting as master of ceremonies, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen performed at the famous Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955. Rexroth later testified as a defense witness at Ferlinghetti's obscenity trial for publishing Howl. Rexroth had previously sent Ginsberg (new in the Bay Area) to meet Snyder, and was thus responsible for their friendship. Lawrence Ferlinghetti named Rexroth as one of his own mentors.[10]

Rexroth was eventually critical of the Beat movement. Years after the Six Gallery reading, Time referred to him as "Father of the Beats.[2] To this he replied, "an entomologist is not a bug."

Rexroth ostensibly appears in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums as Reinhold Cacoethes, a characterization that says more about Kerouac's egotistical agenda and sense of artistic inferiority than about Rexroth.[11]

Politics[]

As a young man in Chicago, Rexroth was involved with the anarchist movement and was active in the IWW,[5] attending and participating in politically charged readings and lectures. He was a regular at meetings of the Washington Park Bug Club, a loose assemblage of intellectuals and revolutionaries. Such relationships allowed him to recite poems by other writers as well as gain experience with the political climate and revolutionary currents of the day.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti recalled that Rexroth self-identified as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore.[12]

His ideas later coalesced into a concept that he termed the "social lie": that societies are governed by tactics of deception in order to maintain a hierarchy of exploitation and servitude. He saw this as pervasive in all elements of culture, including popular literature, education, and social norms.

Rexroth, a pacifist, was a conscientious objector during World War II[5] and worked to help Japanese-Americans forcibly sent to internment camps during the war.

Last years[]

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara on June 6, 1982.[4] He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas. The year before his death, on Easter, Rexroth converted to Roman Catholicism.[13] He is buried on the grounds of the Santa Barbara Cemetery Association.

Works[]

As author[]

(all titles poetry except where indicated)

  • In What Hour? (1940). New York: The Macmillan Company
  • The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944). New York: New Directions Press
  • The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1949). Prairie City, Il: Decker Press (reissued in 1953 by Golden Goose and 1980 by Morrow & Covici)
  • The Signature of All Things (1949). New York: New Directions
  • Beyond the Mountains: Four Plays in Verse (1951). New York: New Directions Press
  • The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952). New York: New Directions Press
  • Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Memorial for Dylan Thomas (1955). Mill Valley: Goad Press
  • In Defense of the Earth (1956). New York: New Directions Press
  • Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays (1959) New York: New Directions
  • Assays (1961) New York: New Directions (essays)
  • Natural Numbers: New and Selected Poems (1963). New York: New Directions
  • Classics Revisited (1964; 1986). New York: New Directions (essays).
  • Collected Shorter Poems (1966). New York: New Directions.
  • An Autobiographical Novel (1966). New York: Doubleday (prose autobiography)(expanded edition 1991 by New Directions)
  • Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967). Cambridge: Pym-Randall Press
  • Collected Longer Poems (1968). New York: New Directions.
  • The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World (1970). New York: Herder & Herder.
  • With Eye and Ear (1970). New York: Herder & Herder.
  • American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971). New York: Herder & Herder (essay).
  • Sky, Sea, Birds, Trees, Earth, House, Beasts, Flowers (1971). Santa Barbara: Unicorn Press
  • The Elastic Retort: Essays in Literature and Ideas (1973). Seabury.
  • Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974). Seabury (non-fiction).
  • New Poems (1974). New York: New Directions
  • The Silver Swan (1976). Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press
  • On Flower Wreath Hill (1976). Burnaby, British Columbia: Blackfish Press
  • The Love Poems of Marichiko (1978). Santa Barbara: Christopher's Books
  • The Morning Star (1979) New York: New Directions
  • Saucy Limericks & Christmas Cheer (1980). Santa Barbara: Bradford Morrow
  • Between Two Wars: Selected Poems Written Before World War II (1982). Labyrinth Editions & The Iris Press
  • Selected Poems (1984). New York: New Directions
  • World Outside the Window: Selected Essays (1987). New York: New Directions
  • More Classics Revisited (1989). New York: New Directions (essays).
  • An Autobiographical Novel (1964; expanded edition, 1991). New York: New Directions
  • Kenneth Rexroth & James Laughlin: Selected Letters (1991). New York: Norton.
  • Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems (1991). New York: New Directions.
  • Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems (1997). Copper Canyon Press.
  • Swords That Shall Not Strike: Poems of Protest and Rebellion (1999). Glad Day.
  • Complete Poems (2003). Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press.
  • In the Sierra: Mountain Writings (2012). New York: New Directions (poems and prose).
  • K. Rexroth: World Poems #17 (2017). Tokyo: Shichōsha (poems and prose in Japanese translation).

As translator[]

(in chronological order)

  • Fourteen Poems by O. V. de L.-Milosz. (1952), San Francisco: Peregrine Press. Translated by Kenneth Rexroth, with illustrations by Edward Hagedorn. Second edition. (Port Townsend, WA): Copper Canyon Press, (1983). Paperbound. Issued without the Hagedorn illustrations.
  • 30 Spanish Poems of Love and Exile (1956), San Francisco: City Lights Books.
  • One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955), New York: New Directions.
  • One Hundred Poems From the Chinese (1956), New York: New Directions.
  • Poems from the Greek Anthology. (1962), Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks: The University of Michigan Press.
  • Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems (1969), New York: New Directions
  • Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese (1970), New York: New Directions.
  • 100 Poems from the French (1972), Pym-Randall.
  • Orchid Boat (1972), Seabury Press. with Ling Chung; reprinted as Women Poets of China, New York: New Directions
  • 100 More Poems from the Japanese (1976), New York: New Directions.
  • The Burning Heart (1977), Seabury Press. with Ikuko Atsumi; reprinted as Women Poets of Japan, New York: New Directions
  • Seasons of Sacred Lust: Selected Poems of Kazuko Shiraishi. (1978), (New York): New Directions.
  • Complete Poems of Li Ch'ing-Chao. (1979), (New York): New Directions.

Discography[]

  • Poetry Readings in the Cellar (with the Cellar Jazz Quintet): Kenneth Rexroth & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1957) Fantasy #7002 LP (Spoken Word)
  • Rexroth: Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk (1958) Fantasy #7008 LP (Spoken Word)

Notes[]

  1. ^ "Kenneth Rexroth". The Academy of American Poets.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Sam Hamill, Sam; Kleiner, Elaine Laura, eds. (1997). Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 9781556590801. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
  3. ^ "Kenneth Rexroth". Modern American Poetry. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
  4. ^ Jump up to: a b "News & Notes". PN Review. 9 (3). February 1983. Retrieved 2 November 2014.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c Suiter 2002, p. 81
  6. ^ Prefaces to Rexroth's Poetry
  7. ^ McAllister, Andrew, ed. (1996). The Objectivists. Eastburn: Bloodaxe Books. pp. 12–13. ISBN 9781852243418.
  8. ^ Scroggins, Mark. "The "Objectivists" and Their Publications". Z-site, A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky. Z-site. Retrieved 17 July 2021.
  9. ^ Weinberger 1986, pp. 117-118
  10. ^ "Legendary Beat Generation Bookseller and Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books on the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Poetry as Insurgent Art" (Interview). Democracy Now. December 24, 2007. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
  11. ^ Beat Museum, The. "Books by Jack Kerouac-Real Names and their Aliases". self-published, N.D., unpaginated.
  12. ^ Wroe, Nicholas (July 1, 2006). "Last of the bohemians" (Interview). The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2008-06-08. He called himself a 'philosophical anarchist'...
  13. ^ Hamalian 1991, p. 367

References[]

  • Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (Paperback)
  • Hamalian, Linda (1991). A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Paper ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393309157.
  • Hartzell, James and Zumwinkle, Richard. "Kenneth Rexroth. A Checklist of His Published Writings". Los Angeles: Friends of the UCLA Library, 1967. (Hardcopy and paper)
  • Perron, Lee. Kenneth Rexroth. "A Bibliographic Checklist". Bennett Valley, CA: Sun Moon Bear Editions, 2009. (Paper)
  • Suiter, John. "Poets on the Peaks" (2002) Counterpoint. ISBN 1-58243-148-5; ISBN 1-58243-294-5 (Paper)
  • Weinberger, Eliot. Works of Paper, 1980-1986 (1986) New Directions. ISBN 0-8112-1000-6

Further reading[]

External links[]

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