Episode 34 - Kenneth Rexroth: his life and poetry

In this episode I talk about the American poet, essayist and translator, Kenneth Rexroth. Like Gary Snyder, who I will speak about in a future episode, Rexroth explores the natural world – both literally, as a hiker through the American landscape, and in his poetry and other writings. Rexroth belongs to the generation immediately prior to Snyder though they did know each other well in the 1950s. I will touch on various strands of his work and point out a few parallels with Buddhist ideas and practices. While Snyder is probably more widely known today, and more influential, I want to begin with Rexroth whose work I am particularly fond of and who had quite an influence on his younger west coast American colleagues. In particular, I want to draw out the ways in which Rexroth celebrated the act of paying attention as a way of revealing the beauty of being alive, and the practice of making poems as a revelation of what one might call the sacred or divine dimensions of nature and life.

Transcript

Kenneth Rexroth was born in 1905 in South Bend, Indiana, and died in 1982 in California, where he had lived for most of his adult life. Rexroth’s father, Charles, struggled with alcoholism in his later years and the family led a rather turbulent life with frequent changes of address and diminishing financial security. His mother, Delia, who had instilled in Rexroth a sense of his own independent voice and of the moral value of the arts, died in 1916 from a lung disease after a few years of failing health. Rexroth had been at her bedside when she died, and Delia’s presence and loss haunted him for the whole of his life. In a couple of poems titled, Delia Rexroth, he refers to her ‘torn and distraught life’ and notes how he has moved past her into middle age, ‘past your agony and waste.’ (Rexroth 2003: 219 & 284) The loss of Delia, and in 1940, his first wife, Andree, and the pain of their final years, had a profound effect on Rexroth. As well as the Delia poems, he also wrote five very moving poems to Andree. Here is one of them, titled, ‘Andree Rexroth – died October 1940.’ It gives a flavour of Rexroth’s poetic voice and his feelings for Andree: 

Now once more gray mottled buckeye branches

Explode their emerald stars,

And alders smoulder in a rosy smoke

Of innumerable buds.

I know that spring again is splendid

As ever, the hidden thrush

As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital –

But these are the forest trails we walked together,

These paths, ten years together.

We thought the years would last forever,

They are all gone now, the days

We thought would not come for us are here.

Bright trout poised in the current –

The raccoon’s track at the water’s edge –

A bittern booming in the distance –

Your ashes scattered on this mountain –

Moving seaward on this stream.

(Rexroth 2003: 220)

To return to Rexroth’s early life, in 1912, the family embarked on a European tour that had a lasting impact on Rexroth – even though he was only seven years old at the time. They travelled from Stockholm to Constantinople (as Istanbul was then known) – also visiting London and Paris. Apparently, the young Rexroth was deeply affected by the poverty he witnessed in London and his social conscience was no doubt reinforced and refined by the many forms of political radicalism espoused by members of his wider family and their friends. At times, there was a very bohemian feel to family gatherings, with ‘circus performers and burlesque artists included in their circle.’ (see Hamalian 1992: 3) No doubt this somewhat wayward and disjointed upbringing was partly responsible for the upheavals and broken relationships that characterised Rexroth’s adult life. His four marriages are testimony to his difficulties, though as far as I know, his wives remained fond of him long after they had separated.

Rexroth was a writer deeply engaged in the social, political and cultural debates of his time. He was a radical intellectual, critic and activist who did much to develop the artistic culture of the Bay Area around San Francisco in the 1950s. In his poetry Rexroth brings together two seemingly incompatible strands of thought and feeling: on the one hand, a profound awareness of injustice and a simmering rage at the conflicts in himself and in the world; and on the other, a deep yearning for peace, love and connectedness. Finding a form that could articulate these contrasting currents of inspiration drove Rexroth early in his career to explore many experimental poetic structures, including a collage-like Cubist mode of disjointed phrases and images. Later, his poems flow with a harmony in which many feelings and concerns are woven together into lyrical coherence and beauty. Often in one poem quasi-religious, mystical experiences and insights are presented alongside his social and political concerns.  

A poem titled, Stone and Flower, is dedicated to the English poet Kathleen Raine whom he met on his travels in the UK in 1949. Though he is writing about Raine’s work, he could have been writing about his own. He writes: ‘Out of the permanent / wreckage of a world where / wars are secret or not / but never, never stop. / Your poems give meaning to / the public tragedy / to which they lend themselves / on their own terms, as when / one sharp, six-pointed star / of snow falls from the black / sky to the black water / and turns it all to ice.’ (Hamalian 1992: 191) In making a poem, meaning is forged from worldly conflict by acute attentiveness to the natural world. Perhaps Rexroth’s later attraction to, and translation of, work by classical Chinese poets, happens because he recognises a similar poetic ethos in many of their poems.

Rexroth was largely self-educated. He was fluent in a number of languages and a Washington Post writer described him in this way: ‘In an era in which American colleges crank out graduates who seemingly have never read anything, Rexroth … [appeared] well on the way to having read everything. And ‘everything’ is not just the standard European classics in translation: it is the Latins and Greeks in the original; it is the Japanese and Chinese; it is poetry of all kinds; … curiosities [such] as the literature of alchemy [and] the writings of 18th and 19th century Anglican divines.’ (see Poetry Foundation 2024)

In the mid-fifties Gary Snyder became a close friend of Rexroth’s. When he was a student at Indiana University, Snyder had read one of Rexroth’s poems, The Signature of All Things, and he was attracted to it as a poem, and as he read more about Rexroth himself, he recognised their mutual interest in climbing and hiking in the mountains. He was also attracted to Rexroth’s erudition, his radical politics and his interests in native American and oriental cultures. He and Rexroth met regularly at weekends from 1953-56 and Snyder dedicated his first major book of poems, The Back Country, to Rexroth - no doubt in honour of their friendship and Rexroth’s role as a supportive older poet. (Hamalian 1992: 234) 

On the thirteenth of October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Rexroth was the master of ceremonies at one of the most celebrated poetry readings in Californian, and maybe American, literary history. The event brought together Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia and Rexroth – apart from Rexroth and Whalen the poets were all in their twenties, eager to make their mark in the literary world. 

The Six Gallery event became both celebrated and notorious when Ginsberg read his long declamatory poem, Howl, which began with the now-famous lines: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…’ (Ginsberg 1956) Following the publication of Howl, Rexroth was called as a witness at the obscenity trial of Ginsberg. Rexroth surprised many people in the court by praising Howl as being ‘in the long Jewish Old Testament tradition of testimonial poetry.’ (see Sam Hamill introduction to Rexroth 2003: xxiv) Needless to say, Ginsberg was acquitted. Later, Rexroth was somewhat surprised and irritated to find himself described as the ‘elder statesman of the Beat Generation,’ even though he considered himself still as a ‘poet struggling for wider recognition,’ and financial security. (Hamalian 1992: 244) Jack Kerouac, who was a very vocal member of the audience at the Six Gallery reading, captured its vibrant atmosphere in his book, The Dharma Bums.

Rexroth was an energetic supporter of many of the younger poets he encountered – promoting their work on a radio programme he hosted. He was a tireless promoter of the work of Denise Levertov, an English poet whose work he had come across in a collection of English poetry he had edited. His support for Levertov is particularly striking as he had not met her at this time. As a translator Rexroth became well-known for his lucid and sensitive translations of the work of Chinese and Japanese female poets. As previously mentioned, Rexroth was profoundly affected by the death of his first wife, Andree, writing a number of very moving poems in her memory. As far as I know, he remained on good terms with his next two wives, Marie and Marthe, even after their divorces. In 1974 he married his assistant, and fellow poet, Carol Tinker. In his 1974 collection, titled, New Poems, Rexroth included poems that purported to be the work of a Japanese poet named, Marichiko. In fact, Marichiko was an invention of Rexroth’s, but the poems were, and still are, seen as remarkable evocations of a woman’s amorous and erotic thoughts and feelings – so true to life, so-to-speak, that they fooled many critics and other readers.

Despite his notoriously turbulent life, his womanising and his many fractured friendships with other intellectuals, artists and poets, Rexroth produced a body of work that is distinguished by its accessibility, lucidity and eloquence. At times rhapsodic and ecstatic, sometimes angry and full of protestations at the injustices he perceived around him, much of his writing is measured and elegiac, the voice of someone who finds in the space of the poem a place in which to step aside from the flow of conflicts and suffering (received and inflicted) that often overwhelmed him. The process of writing poems seemed to afford Rexroth both a way of reflecting on and detaching himself from conflict and suffering, and maintaining contact, however briefly, with a more harmonious and joyfully ecstatic mode of being. Rexroth’s experiences of the ‘divine’ in nature are firmly rooted in this life – in the delight, and pain, of being alive. The tension between these two strands of discourse is evident, not only in Rexroth’s life, but in many of his poems and translations. In Time Is the Mercy of Eternity (Rexroth 2003: 545) he writes:

Far away the writhing city

Burns in a fire of transcendence

And commodities. The bowels

Of men are wrung between the poles

Of meaningless antithesis.

And yet this image of conflict is immediately followed by these lines:

The holiness of the real

Is always there, accessible

In total immanence.

For Rexroth, ‘the holiness of the real’ is a quality that is immanent in the whole of life, to be found within the everyday affairs of the ‘writhing city,’ not in some other reality or in the cloisters of academia or the institutionalised church. Undoubtedly Rexroth himself found it hard to realise this quality, except in the making of his poetry and in his life-long practice of walking, climbing and camping in the Sierras. In his political thinking Rexroth’s sought to unite the apparently mutually-exclusive strands of egalitarian socialism and anarchist individualism. He tended to be suspicious and dismissive of institutions and mainstream political organisations.  

In For Eli Jacobson, a poem written in 1952 to commemorate the death of an old friend, he reflects on the hopes of an age of social emancipation and harmony that he and Jacobson thought, naively, they would live to see realised: ‘the new / world where man was no longer / wolf to man, but men and women / were all brothers and lovers / together. We will not see it.’ (ibid: 541) However, though he recognises that this ‘golden age’ may not come to pass, he believes that it is worth working for. He reckons that Jacobson ‘had a good life. Even all / its sorrows and defeats and / disillusionments were good.’ (ibid) This acceptance of the ‘sorrows and defeats’ provides a note of realism to offset the romantic left-wing dreaming that might otherwise make this an overly sentimental poem. For Rexroth, the pursuit of social justice and the egalitarian state is an integral part of the poet’s agenda, even though he knows that these aspirations may never be fulfilled – indeed he knows that ‘all this has happened before, / many times.’ (ibid) 

Underpinning Rexroth’s social and political activism is a belief that the poet is ‘one who creates / sacramental relationships / that last always.’ (in Barnhill 1997) Rexroth was very fond of the work of the German mystic, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), in whose writings he identified ‘a way of endowing the natural world with spiritual significance and an explanation of the revelatory moments he [Rexroth] had experienced since childhood.’ (Hamalian 1992: 60) Rexroth took one of Boehme’s writings, The Signature of All Things, as the title of a poem published in 1949 (in a collection with the same title). In the poem he refers to Boehme as a saint who ‘saw the world as streaming / in the electrolysis of love.’ (Rexroth 2003: 275) As in many of his other works, Rexroth describes experiences of reverie and contemplation amidst the woods, glades and mountains. The detail is as finely drawn as in the work of John Clare or Thoreau: ‘The wren broods in her moss domed nest. / A newt struggles with a white moth / Drowning in the pool.’ (ibid) Out of these ‘long hours’ of reflection and reminiscence he experiences some kind of redemptive epiphany: ‘My own sin and trouble fall away / Like Christian’s bundle, and I watch / My forty summers fall like falling / Leaves and falling water held / Eternally in summer air.’ (ibid: 275-276) 

Later in the same poem he describes how he pulled a ‘rotten log / From the bottom of the pool, / It seemed as heavy as stone.’ He leaves the log for a month to dry out, chops it into kindling and lets it lie nearby to dry some more. Later that night he looks out from his cabin porch and sees the pieces of log ‘Spread on the floor of night, ingots / Of quivering phosphorescence, / And all about were scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.’ (ibid: 277) In the transmutation of the heavy rotten log into ‘pale cold light that was alive,’ we can perhaps read a metaphor for the way in which Rexroth retrieves ‘sacramental relationships’ from the flux of conflict and brokenness that characterised his everyday life. Just as Jacob Boehme recognised the signature of the divine in all things, so Rexroth ‘draws attention through reminiscence to the transience of life and […] the need to crystallize value amidst the flux of existence.’ (Gutierrez 1999: 2)

The eighth-century Chinese poet, Tu Fu, like Jacob Boehme, was a talismanic figure in Rexroth’s mindscape. Inscribed into the poems of Tu Fu and Rexroth there is a melancholy air, a yearning for peace and tranquillity. In his translation of Tu Fu’s poem, Written on the Wall of Chang’s Hermitage, Rexroth/Tu Fu writes: ‘Life whirls past like drunken wildfire.’ (Rexroth 1971: 4) Rexroth’s troubled personality, stormed by anger, conflict and remorse, yet aspiring to compassion and care, found a companion in time, an ancient counsel, in the sensitive mind of Tu Fu who, like Rexroth, addressed both the public powers of the day and the many intimate friendships he both sought and disturbed. Both Tu Fu and Rexroth seem to have been envious of, and in awe of, those who have found peace of mind and stillness in action:

[…] You have learned to be gentle

As the mountain deer you have tamed.

The way back forgotten, hidden

Away, I become like you,

An empty boat, floating, adrift.

(Rexroth 1971: 4)

Rexroth’s range of reading was very extensive, and many poets, students and scholars who participated in the countless discussions and dinner parties he laid on throughout his life, bear testimony to his erudition and autodidactic scholarship. As well as his readings of Boehme and other Christian mystics and scholars (Duns Scotus was a favourite, an author whose ‘incomprehensibility appealed to him’), later in his life he was drawn more and more to Buddhist ideas. (Hamalian 1992: 28) Despite, or maybe because of, his somewhat chaotic personal life, Rexroth valued contemplative experience and the insights and equilibrium it brought him. If we return to his poem, Time Is the Mercy of Eternity, which, as we have seen, opens with an image of ‘the writhing city’ burning ‘in a fire of transcendence / And commodities,’ we can see how a process of contemplation and the insights it brings, lead Rexroth to a mode of being that appears to be very similar to the mystical states described by Jacob Boehme, Thomas Merton and other mystics. Here is the ending of the poem, which I quote at length because it reveals much about Rexroth’s poetics and his belief in art as a transformative mode of knowing:

[…] Suspended

In absolutely transparent

Air and water and time, I 

Take on a kind of crystalline

Being. In this translucent

Immense here and now, if ever,

The form of the person should be 

Visible, its geometry,

Its crystallography, and

Its astronomy. The good

And evil of my history

Go by. I can see them and

Weigh them. They go first, with all

The other personal facts,

And sensations, and desires.

At last, there is nothing left

But knowledge, itself a vast

Crystal encompassing the 

Limitless crystal of air

And rock and water. And the

Two crystals are perfectly 

Silent. There is nothing to

Say about them. Nothing at all.

(Rexroth 2003: 548-549)

Rexroth’s infidelities, occasional cruelties and lies, ‘the good and evil’ of his history, are not to be excused, let alone somehow compensated for, by his poetry. But he does demonstrate in his writing a profoundly self-aware and self-critical analysis of his own shortcomings. In his work we see how a flawed and troubled life, scrutinised and stripped bare by contemplation, by mindful meditation, can be laid out for us so that we can see ‘its geometry, / Its crystallography, and / Its astronomy.’ The poem becomes a kind of ‘clearing’ in which the contraries that make up a person’s life are presented without much comment or judgmental analysis. In Rexroth’s case the exercise of a poetic discipline can be considered as equivalent to the disciplines of prayer and meditation in a monastic context, or to the merging of self in love or nature found in Sufism or transcendentalists like Thoreau, or to the ‘letting-be’ that Heidegger advocates as a mode of understanding human being. 

Rexroth died in June 1982. Very fittingly he had an ecumenical funeral at Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Santa Barbara, California. The service was conducted by four Jesuit priests, accompanied by nuns from the local Vedanta Temple, who chanted hymns in Sanskrit. He was buried with a Tibetan Buddhist statue by his side in the Santa Barbara cemetery. On his tombstone is written lines from one of his poems: ‘As the full moon rises / the swan sings / in sleep / on the lake of the mind’ – a beautiful enigmatic image. Perhaps only Kenneth Rexroth has heard the song of a swan. Later in the month Gary Snyder got together with a few friends and read their favourite Rexroth poems as they sat around a bonfire. (Hamalian 1992: 369-370)

With that picture in mind, of old friends gathered around a bonfire, I’d like to end with a few lines from one of my favourite Rexroth poems, titled, Empty Mirror: ‘…In the night / I stare into the fire. / Once I saw fire cities, / towns, palaces, wars, / heroic adventures, / in the campfires of youth. / Now I see only fire. / My breath moves quietly. / The stars move overhead. / In the clear darkness / only a small red glow / is left in the ashes. / On the table lies a cast / snake skin and an uncut stone.’ (Rexroth 1966: 223) Rexroth was a poet who paid attention – to the stars, to the embers of countless campfires and to the delicate skin cast by a snake that he found and placed next to an uncut stone on his writing table. His poems are full of a hard-earned wisdom gained through the conflicting energies and aspirations of his full and vibrant life. I hope this talk has whetted your appetite and that you will read some of his work - there is much to enjoy and to learn from.

Thank you for listening and bye for now.

REFERENCES

Barnhill, David Landis. 1997. ‘EarthSaint: Kenneth Rexroth. On line at: http://www.earthlight.org/earthsaint25.htm (consulted 18.04.2002).

Ginsberg, Allen. 1956. Howl & other poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Gutierrez, Donald, K. 1999. ‘On Rexroth’s Poetry’. On line at: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rexroth/gutierrez.htm (consulted 23.01.2003).

Hamalian, Linda. 1992. A Life of Kenneth Rexroth. New York: W.W. Norton.

Kerouac, Jack. 2000. The Dharma Bums. London: Penguin. (1st pub. 1958)

Poetry Foundation. 2024. Rexroth. Online at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kenneth-rexroth (consulted 28 October 2024)

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1966. The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. New York: New Directions.

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1971. One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. New York: New Directions. 

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1974. New Poems. New York: New Directions.

Rexroth, Kenneth. 2003. The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend, Washington, USA: Copper Canyon Press.