Arts and Letters

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, on December 22, 1905. Both his parents died when he was young. In 1918 he was taken by an aunt to Chicago to live. He wrote his first poems when he was fifteen, and in the exciting city that Chicago was then, mostly on his own, he studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Natural Sciences by sitting in on classes at the University of Chicago; and all kinds of music, classical, ethnic, and jazz, the latter at first hand in the dives and black clubs of the city. He became a political man simply as a natural means of survival: he liked to know how things worked, and in Chicago, and later San Francisco, got his information by first-hand observation of political machines in operation. "I write prose for money, and to put my ideas in order," he said. He also once said, "I write poetry to seduce women, and to overthrow the capitalistic system."

In Chicago, while still in his teens, he helped run a nightclub called The Green Mask, where poets, including himself and Langston Hughes, among others, read to jazz. During his Chicago years he also worked as a farm hand, a factory worker, and an attendant in an insane asylum. In 1927 Rexroth and his first wife, Andrée, moved to San Francisco, where he settled in for a lifelong stay, worked his way through the leftist views towards what was essentially an anarchist position in Politics, and where he first defined the kind of poetry he recognized as true for him:

[it was to be] a revolt against rhetoric and symbolism in poetry, a return to direct statement, simple, clear images, unpretentious themes, fidelity to objectively verifiable experience, strict avoidance of sentimentality.

Out of this program Rexroth evolved what was basically a quantitative verse whose measure consisted of simple count of syllables per line, with variations allowed; how many syllables per line, be it seven, eleven, or whatever, derived from whatever feeling he was dealing with. It was a musical system. (The number of stresses per line was where he left himself utterly free to play—he "went on his nerve.") On occasion he could be, as William Carlos Williams wrote of him, "a moralist with his hand at the trigger, ready to fire at the turn of a hair."

His colleague, Louis Zukovsky, had included him in the famous Objectivist Issue of Poetry Magazine in 1931 (an earlier wave of open form poetics), but Rexroth was no joiner—he was both a generous man, and an abrasive one. He was an outspoken lover, and a good mad hater. City-bred, he loved nature, and knew its workings, he knew the names of the flowers and trees and the migration paths of birds. He climbed mountains, and knew the stories of their rock formations, just as in Literature he knew the great stories of the chair: the names and stories of writers of many cultures, which men and women he thought of as his contemporaries. His favorite poets perhaps included more women than men. In his books, Bird in the Bush, Assays, and Classics Revisited, he makes Chinese and Japanese and French, Spanish, Greek, and Latin writers come alive as any writer writing now is alive. Those books have been read in and out of universities for thirty years, and continue to be read.

His translations, notably 100 Poems from the Chinese and 100 Poems from the Japanese, and his Reverdy translations, are present on every poetry lover's bookshelves.

A quarter century before his death, he was one of a community of older poets primarily responsible for encouraging public acceptance of that group of writers associated with the "San Francisco Renaissance," and thus helped supervise the transition of American poetics from closed to open form. In this role he was mentor and friend to the literary circle that included West Coast bards Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, as well as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and myself, visiting from the East in the mid-1950s.

His major books remain: The Collected Shorter Poems, and The Collected Longer Poems, from New Directions; the outrageous In Defense of the Earth, with its love poems to Andrée, and his shocking and controversially anti-bourgeois-Philistine Thou Shalt Not Kill, an elegy for Dylan Thomas. He told much of his own story in his dazzling tall-tale autobiography, An Autobiographical Novel. On phonograph records, that scornful, tender, abrasive, and musical voice continues to tell its story, and name names of human loves, and curse the despicable.

Charles Olson said, "That Rexroth, there's no accounting for him, but that long poem of his, The Dragon and the Unicorn, that's really something! He gets the whole thing down there!"*

*Charles Olson in conversation with Ted Berrigan, Gloucester, 1966.