|
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) lived many lives in the avant-garde of six
decades--first in Chicago as a precocious actor, cubist painter, and soap-box
poet of revolution after World War I, then on the west coast as a Wobbly in the
Industrial Workers of the World, a cowboy-cook, and mountain-climbing naturalist
committed to the protection of the planet long before ecology became a popular
concern. Exploring Mexico, New York, Europe, and later Asia, he won
international fame as a poet of vision and protest, an erudite and popular
essayist, a translator from half a dozen languages, Asian and Western, and an
original thinker whose anarcho-ecological-erotic-Buddhist-Christian worldview
harmonized worldly and transcendental wisdom.
Rexroth was a contemplative activist, a lyricist of love and nature, a fierce
satirist and preacher against injustice, a rowdy comedian and tragic playwright,
an erudite sage and countercultural critic. He struggled for revolutionary hope
and mourned its defeat in World War II and the Cold War. This tragic view of a
worldwide collapse of values, along with a deeply religious sense of "total
responsibility,” ennobled Rexroth's character at a time when most Americans
uncritically, simplistically, and self-righteously supported first the "good
war" against fascism and then the promotion of Capitalism against Communism.
Long before the public woke up to the worldwide ecological crisis, Rexroth
expected it to finish us all off eventually if a nuclear Apocalypse did not.
Recognizing the worst, he celebrated the best in love and art. A founder of
the international Objectivist Movement in the early 1930’s and the San Francisco
Poetry Renaissance in the1950’s, an early promoter of Beat poetry and a major
pioneer of the 1960’s Counterculture, he expanded the audience for poetry of
high artistic and intellectual caliber, his performances of which were often
accompanied by live jazz and later by Chinese and Japanese music. Befriending
many poets, thinkers, artists, musicians, journalists, workers, feminists,
priests, nuns, prostitutes, politicians, bankers, and revolutionaries, he wrote
from a kind of worldly wisdom unique among intellectuals. He collaborated with
writers all over the world, assisted many before they became famous, and
supported small presses with some of his finest work, while at the same time
being published extensively by New Directions and other major publishers. The
influence of his mother’s feminism helped motivate his promotion of many women
poets, especially those of China and Japan. His lifelong absorption and
interpretation of Asian culture advanced the East-West tradition of Walt
Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Arthur Waley. Rexroth’s poetry of
visionary love, at once erotic and spiritual, earthy and transcendent,
suggesting nirvana in this world, has enriched many minds and many lives.
Orphaned in childhood, he grew up with minimal repression; and with little
formal schooling he learned and created as he wished, an uninhibited adventurer
who always refused to knuckle under to government, church, business, or the
dominant “culture.” He lived in poverty during his youth in Chicago and for many
years in San Francisco, though international fame eventually brought him the
comfort of a spacious home in Santa Barbara. Much earlier, a conscientious
objector during World War II, he aided Japanese-Americans threatened with
incarceration and performed alternative service in a mental hospital, where he
suffered permanent injury at the hands of a violent inmate. He had fits of
madness, temptations to suicide, the unstable temperament of a romantic poet. He
encouraged young poets, publicized their work, and helped spread a humane
counterculture throughout the world. At times he seemed superhuman, mythic,
challenging in poetry, prose, and speech the permanent war-mentality that has
ominously clouded modern civilization. His ideals of universal liberation and of
holy matrimony were noble but unrealized. Were his assertions of "total
responsibility" effusions of saintly modesty, guilt, the wish to save the world,
or symptoms of hubris, the pride of a hero that drove him to the heights of
visionary ecstasy before his fall into a final year of agonizing immobilization
and silence?
Because much commentary on Rexroth’s writings and ideas has appeared in Asia,
Europe, and the United States, how is it possible in some surveys of modern
poetry for his work to be underplayed? Critics were also slow to recognize Walt
Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein,
and other major literary innovators. In addition, some academics have been put
off by his sweeping attacks on the Ivory Tower, the New Critics, and the New
York literary establishment, as well as upon other vested interests, right and
left. His position on the west coast at first led to the misconception that he
was a regional poet; and his Asian subjects alienated him from Americanists and
Eurocentrists. There are those who find him more interesting as a creative
personality and original thinker than as a literary artist. But while
emphasizing that poetry is fundamentally vision, Rexroth was as devoted to
craftsmanship and aesthetic innovation as were other modern literary masters.
Much of his poetry is intellectually and stylistically complex, springing from
his profound involvement with world literature and thought, as is other
modernist and postmodernist literature. On the other hand, much of his writing
is so direct and personal that he seems to be speaking to us in the same room,
or in the mountains overlooking the Pacific, or in a Japanese garden.
Perhaps because Rexroth was younger than the classical modernists, not
publishing his first book until 1940, when he was thirty-four, and yet more
rebellious than the generation after World War II associated with the New
Criticism, he never fit into familiar periods, movements, and trends. After
promoting the Beat rebellion, he quickly disassociated himself from it, as he
had withdrawn from Objectivism over two decades previously. Some literary
historians had difficulty keeping up with the startling zigzags of his
development. Incessantly independent, often alienating friends and allies, he
never won the massive following enjoyed by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Allen
Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and some others, but neither did he
attract mindless camp-followers. Admirers are sometimes on the defensive about
his work, for this outrageous trouble-maker could be self-righteously
ideological and artistically uneven, but so were many much lesser writers.
More important than fitting Rexroth into an academic canon is to read his
work empathetically and carefully, interpret it insightfully, and evaluate it
philosophically as well as aesthetically. Since his death so much has been
published by and about him that we might speak of a “Rexroth boom,” but it is
more accurate to speak of his persistent popularity. His poetry, translations,
and prose have attracted several generations of large and varied communities of
readers, ever since his first book, In What Hour, appeared in 1940. Like
his I. W. W. hero Joe Hill, we might well say of Rexroth, “He never died!”
Rexroth has been hailed by Lawrence Clark Powell as “our greatest man of
letters,” by Leslie Fiedler as “the last of the great Bohemians,” by Hayden
Carruth as “our best nature poet,” and by George Woodcock as “one of the major
poets of our time.” In For Rexroth he is celebrated by editor Geoffrey
Gardner as “the most accomplished and deeply religious poet to write in this
country since Whitman,” “the American poet who best understands the Japanese
culture” by Kyoto scholar Sanehide Kodama, a “polymathic didact” who is “one of
the great love poets of all time” by critic and editor Justus George Lawler, an
“anarchic libertarian Wild West magician sage” by poet David Meltzer, and “a
great love poet in the most loveless time imaginable” by the poet James Wright.
According to Robert Bly, Rexroth was “the most intelligent literary man in
America...” Gary Snyder has confirmed his indebtedness to Rexroth; and his great
friend and editor James Laughlin has said that “Rexroth had a tremendous
influence on New Directions and on me... Rexroth partly took over the role of
Ezra [Pound] in my life, in that he advised me what to do and put me on to
things.”
More than fifty books of Rexroth’s work have been published, and new editions
continue to appear. Glad Day Books has recently published Geoffrey Gardner’s
collection of Rexroth’s political poetry--Swords That Shall Not Strike: Poems
of Protest and Rebellion--and Copper Canyon Press will issue in 2002 Sam
Hamill’s definitive Collected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. There have been
over thirty collections of Rexroth’s poetry and fifteen volumes of his
translations from Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and most famous, from Chinese
and Japanese, including many translations of the poetry of ancient and modern
women poets of Asia. His four philosophical tragedies based on classical Greek
subjects are original masterpieces of dramatic poetry. The two popular volumes
of Classics Revisited and other collections of his essays on a great
variety of subjects have further enriched the minds of many readers, and his
erudite study of Utopias, Communalism: from Its Origins to the Twentieth
Century, is indispensable for readers interested in Utopias. His
Autobiographical Novel has been proclaimed a classic, and the details of his
controversial life have been presented by Linda Hamalian in a full-length
biography. After my two books on Rexroth’s life and work appeared, other
book-length critical interpretations were published by Ken Knabb--The
Relevance of Rexroth (with his French translation of it)--and by Donald
Gutierrez--The Holiness of the Real: The Short Verse of Kenneth Rexroth.
French translations of his poetry and prose have been published by Joel
Cornuault, Ken Knabb, and others, and Japanese translations by Yuzuru Katagiri
have enhanced Rexroth’s high reputation in Japan.
Rexroth’s life, work, and creative thinking embody a contemplative way of
interacting with other beings, human and non-human, living and dead. Rexroth’s
stormy life was full of anguish from many mistakes, as he mournfully confessed;
but his visionary writings suggest how all beings are created, transformed, and
united in love, despite massive hatred, violence, and destruction; how we live
in universal community, human and cosmic, without usually knowing it; and how
human life can be liberated through a revolution in consciousness. This
worldview, an original synthesis of Christian, Buddhist, ecological, and
revolutionary values, revitalizes and ennobles the human spirit, dangerously
threatened by the madness of military, technological, political, and corporate
regimentation that toys with ecological disaster and nuclear annihilation.
Denouncing the Social Lie that depersonalizes and destroys, Rexroth offered an
alternative way of life, of waking up to the interacting plenitude of creative
existence, in a spiritual tradition going back to Shakyamuni, Lao Tzu, Sappho,
the Hebrew Prophets, Jesus, and other heroes of truth, love, and freedom.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpted from Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom, Chapter
1, with Notes.
Copyright (c)2000 by Morgan Gibson.
Expanded Internet Edition,containing his letters to Gibson and the most
comprehensive bibliography of work by and about him to date.
Light & Dust Mobile Anthology of Poetry,
Webmaster: Karl Young:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rexroth/gibson.htm
Originally published in 1985 as an Archon Book by The Shoe String Press,
Hamden, Connecticut 06514.
|
