Among Kenneth Rexroth's lesser accomplishments, he appears as a character in two famous novels. James T. Farrell put him in the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–35), where he is a kid named Kenny working in a drugstore. With more creative denomination, Jack Kerouac called him Rheinhold Cacoethes in The Dharma Bums, that 1958 Beat Generation testament, where he is the figure we recognize: anarchist, leader of San Francisco's literary community, and poet.

For decades he has written lines like these, setting human life in a context of stone:

       Our campfire is a single light
       Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls.
       The manifold voices of falling water
       Talk all night.
       Wrapped in your down bag
       Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids
       Your breath comes and goes
       In a tiny cloud in the frosty night.
       Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise.
       Ten thousand years revolve without change.
       All this will never be again.

One thing that is without change is that everything changes. Like many of the greatest poets—Wordsworth, Keats, Frost, Eliot—Rexroth returns continually to one inescapable perception. Maybe this elegiac vision of permanent stone and vanishing flesh derives from the great private event of his middle years—the death of his first wife Andrée in 1940 after 13 years of marriage. Her name and image return decades after her death.

But Rexroth is not limited to elegy; he is the most erotic of modern American poets, and one of the most political. The great public event of his young life was the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Years after the electrocution he wrote "Climbing Milestone Mountain":

              In the morning
     We swam in the cold transparent lake, the blue
     Damsel flies on all the reeds like millions
     Of narrow metallic flowers, and I thought
     Of you behind the grille in Dedham, Vanzetti,
     Saying, "Who would ever have though we would make this history?"
     Crossing the brilliant mile-square meadow
     Illuminated with asters and cyclamen
     The pollen of the lodgepole pines drifting
     With the shifting wind over it and the blue
     And sulphur butterflies drifting with the wind,
     I saw you in the sour prison light, saying,
     "Goodbye comrade."

In Rexroth's poems the natural world, unchanged and changing, remains background to history and love, to enormity and bliss.

As a young man, Rexroth was a Wobbly—an Industrial Worker of the World, or IWW—and he studied Marxism as a member of a John Reed Club. Later he became anarchist and pacifist, ideologies which his mature philosophic poems support with passion and argument. His politics of the individual separates him from the mass of Americans—and obviously from Stalinists—and yet joins him to all human beings; it is a politics of love—and Rexroth is the poet of devoted eroticism. "When We with Sappho" begins by translating from a Greek fragment, then continues into a personal present:

     "… about the cool water
     the wind sounds through sprays
     of apple, and from the quivering leaves
     slumber pours down …"
 
     We lie here in the bee filled, ruinous
     Orchard of a decayed New England farm,
     Summer in our hair, and the smell
     Of summer in our twined bodies,
     Summer in our mouths, and summer
     In the luminous, fragmentary words
     Of this dead Greek woman.
     Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
     Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
     You move against me like a wave
     That moves in sleep.
     Your body spreads across my brain
     Like a bird filled summer;
     Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
     But like a nimbus that hovers
     Over every other thing in all the world.
     Lean back. You are beautiful,
     As beautiful as the folding
     Of your hands in sleep.

This passionate tenderness has not diminished as Rexroth has aged. His latest book includes the beautiful "Love Poems of Marichiko," which he calls a translation from the Japanese; however, a recent bibliography lists the translation of Rexroth's "Marichiko" into Japanese: in the middle of his eighth decade, the poet has written his most erotic poem.

His work for 40 years has moved among his passions for the flesh, for human justice, and for the natural world. He integrates these loves in the long poems and sometimes in briefer ones like "Lyell's Hypothesis Again":

     Lyell's Hypothesis Again
 
       An Attempt to Explain the Farmer
       Changes of the Earth's Surface by
       Causes Now in Operation
     Subtitle of Lyell: Principles of Geology
 
     The mountain road ends here,
     Broken away in the chasm where
     The bridge washed out years ago.
     The first scarlet larkspur glitters
     In the first patch of April
     Morning sunlight. The engorged creek
     Roars and rustles like a military
     Ball. Here by the waterfall,
     Insuperable life, flushed
     With the equinox, sentient
     And sentimental, falls away
     To the sea and death. The tissue
     Of sympathy and agony
     That binds the flesh in its Nessus' shirt;
     The clotted cobweb of unself
     And self; sheds itself and flecks
     The sun's bed with darts of blossom
     Like flagellant blood above
     The water bursting in the vibrant
     Air. This ego, bound by personal
     Tragedy and the vast
     Impersonal vindictiveness
     Of the ruined and ruining world,
     Pauses in this immortality,
     As passionate, as apathetic,
     As the lava flow that burned here once;
     And stopped here; and said, 'This far
     And no further.' And spoke thereafter
     In the simple diction of stone.
 
     .....
 
     Naked in the warm April air,
     We lie under the redwoods,
     In the sunny lee of a cliff.
     As you kneel above me I see
     Tiny red marks on your flanks
     Like bites, where the redwood cones
     Have pressed into your flesh.
     You can find just the same marks
     In the lignite in the cliff
     Over our heads. Sequoia
     Langsdorfii before the ice,
     And sempervirens afterwards,
     There is little difference,
     Except for all those years.
 
     Here in the sweet, moribund
     Fetor of spring flowers, washed,
     Flotsam and jetsam together.
     Cool and naked together,
     Under this tree for a moment,
     We have escaped the bitterness
     Of love, and love lost, and love
     Betrayed. And what might have been,
     And what might be, fall equally
     Away with what is, and leave
     Only these ideograms
     Printed on the immortal
     Hydrocarbons of flesh and stone.

The poet writes best when his passions coalesce.

It is the strength of Rexroth's language that it proscribes nothing. He uses words from the natural sciences and from mathematics, as well as philosophical abstractions which modern poetic practice is supposed to avoid. If he sometimes aims to speak in "the simple diction of stone," he refuses the temptation to purity: this same brief poem uses classical reference, scientific terminology and Latin taxonomy, earth-history, the "flagellant blood" of Christianity, and intimate common speech: "tiny red marks on your flanks / like bites…."

In "Lyell's Hypothesis Again" we hear Rexroth's characteristic rhythm—swift and urgent, slow and meditative, powerful; his line hovers around three accents, mostly seven or eight syllables long. (Much of his poetry is strictly syllabic.) It is remarkable how little Rexroth's line has changed over 40 years, in a world of poetic fashions. This steadfastness or stubbornness recalls his patience over publication: he did not publish a book of poems until 1940, when he was 35 years old, although he had been writing since the early 1920s. Later, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1949), he collected and published work from his Cubist youth. Some had appeared in Louis Zukofsky's An Objectivists' Anthology (1932).

When we try to describe a poet's style, it can be useful to name starting points, but that is not easy with Kenneth Rexroth. He has said that Tu Fu was the greatest influence on him; fair enough, but there is no analogy between the Chinese line, end-stopped, with its count of characters, and Rexroth's run-in enjambed syllables. In temperament and idea Rexroth is close to D. H. Lawrence, about whom he wrote his first major essay in 1947. But Lawrence's best poems take off from Whitman's line—and Rexroth's prosody is as far from Whitman's as it can get. Perhaps there is a bit of William Carlos Williams in his enjambed lines; maybe Louis Zukofsky. We could say, throwing up our hands, that he is a synthesis of Tu Fu, Lawrence, and Mallarmé. To an unusual extent, Rexroth made Rexroth up.

..…

He was born in Indiana in 1905 and spent most of the 1920s in Chicago's Bohemia—poet, painter, and autodidact. Late in the decade he moved to San Francisco where he has lived much of his life, moving down the coast to Santa Barbara only in 1968. He was the poet of San Francisco even before Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Patchen, and William Everson (Brother Antoninus). For decades he has advocated the poetry of the West, the elder literary figure of the city where poetry came to happen: Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger…. His influence on the young is obvious, clearest in Gary Snyder, who is worthy of his master. When young writers from the East arrived in the 1950s—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso—they attended gatherings at Rexroth's house, and it was Rexroth who was catalyst for the 1955 Six Gallery reading that was the public birth of the Beat Generation.

Later, alliances altered…. Talking about Kenneth Rexroth, it is easy to wander into the history of factionalism, for he has been partisan, and few polemicists have had a sharper tongue. Inventor of "The Vaticide Review" (apparently referring to The Partisan Review, but it can stand in for all the quarterlies), he wrote in 1957 of poet-professors, "Ninety-nine percent of them don't even exist but are androids manufactured from molds, cast from Randall Jarrell by the lost wax process." On the west coast he has been a constant, grumpy presence. If the West has taken him for granted, the East has chosen to ignore him, perhaps because he has taken potshots at the provincial East forever and ever. The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (1979), which purports to cover the scene since 1945, will do for an example: the poetry critic quotes none of Rexroth's poetry but sputters about his "intemperate diatribes." Nor does Rexroth make the New York Review of Books shortlist of Approved Contemporaries. Which is a pity, because he is better than anyone on it.

Taste is always a fool—the consensus of any moment; contemporary taste is the agreement of diffident people to quote each other's opinions. It reaffirms with complacency reputations which are perceived as immemorial, but which are actually constructed of rumor, laziness, and fear. As a writer ages and issues new volumes, he or she is reviewed as if the writing had remained the same, because it would require brains and effort to alter not only one's past opinion but the current professional assessment.

Perhaps the consensus of our moment, product largely of the East and the academy, is especially ignorant, especially gullible. Or perhaps it is only—in the matter of Kenneth Rexroth—that the taste-makers are offended by Rexroth's morals. In fact they ought to be because the ethical ideas that Rexroth puts forward with such acerbity are old-fashioned and individual—anathema to the suburban, Volvo-driving, conformist liberalism of the academy. He stands firm against technocracy and its bureaus and hierarchies, to which the university is as devoted an institution as General Motors. Rexroth's morals derive in part from Indiana before the First World War, in part from centuries of oriental thought, and in part from the radical non-Marxist thinking of late 19th-century Europe.

He has not been wholly without attention. James Laughlin of New Directions has been his loyal publisher who keeps his poetry in print. Morgan Gibson wrote a book about him which lists many reviews and articles about his poetry; a magazine called The Ark devoted a 1980 issue to his work; his reading aloud to music, which is superb and innovative, can be heard on several tapes and records.

Still, he should be acclaimed as one of the great poets of our literature because he has written poems like "The Signature of All Things."

     My head and shoulders, and my book
     In the cool shade, and my body
     Stretched bathing in the sun, I lie
     Reading beside the waterfall—
     Boehme's "Signature of all Things."
     Through the deep July day the leaves
     Of the laurel, all the colors
     Of gold, spin down through the moving
     Deep laurel shade all day. They float
     On the mirrored sky and forest
     For a while, and then, still slowly
     Spinning, sink through the crystal deep
     Of the pool to its leaf gold floor.
     The saint saw the world as streaming
     In the electrolysis of love.
     I put him by and gaze through shade
     Folded into shade of slender
     Laurel trunks and leaves filled with sun.
     The wren broods in her moss domed nest.
     A newt struggles with a white moth
     Drowning in the Pool. The hawks scream,
     Playing together on the ceiling
     Of heaven. The long hours go by.
     I think of those who have loved me,
     Of all the mountains I have climbed,
     Of all the seas I have swum in.
     The evil of the world sinks.
     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.
 
     .....
 
     Deer are stamping in the glades,
     Under the full July moon.
     There is a smell of dry grass
     In the air, and more faintly,
     The scent of a far off skunk.
     As I stand at the wood's edge,
     Watching the darkness, listening
     To the stillness, a small owl
     Comes to the branch above me,
     On wings more still than my breath.
     When I turn my light on him,
     His eyes glow like drops of iron,
     And he perks his heard at me,
     Like a curious kitten.
     The meadow is bright as snow.
     My dog prowls the grass, a dark
     Blur in the blur of brightness.
     I walk to the oak grove where
     The Indian village was once.
     There, in blotched and cobwebbed light
     And dark, dim in the blue haze,
     Are twenty Holstein heifers,
     Black and white, all lying down,
     Quietly together, under
     The hugh trees rooted in the graves.
 
     .....
 
     When I dragged the rotten log
     From the bottom of the pool.
     It seemed heavy as stone.
     I let it lie in the sun
     For a month; and then chopped it
     Into sections, and split them
     For kindling, and spread them out
     To dry some more. Late that night,
     After reading for hours,
     While moths rattled at the lamp—
     The saints and the philosophers
     On the destiny of man—
     I went out on my cabin porch,
     And looked up through the black forest
     At the swaying islands of stars.
     Suddenly I saw at my feet,
     Spread on the floor of night, ingots
     Of quivering phosphorescence,
     And all about were scattered chips
     Of pale cold light that was alive.

Starting from his reading in a Christian mystic (Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624), he writes vividly of the natural world, he refers to Pilgrim's Progress, he ranges out into the universe of stars and focuses back upon the world of heifers and minute phosphorescent organisms. It is a poetry of experience and observation, of knowledge and allusion, and finally a poetry of wisdom.

This poem comes from the Collected Shorter Poems (1967). There is also a Collected Longer Poems (1968); they are five in number, including "The Phoenix and the Tortoise," a 30-page meditative philosophic poem from the early 1940s, and "The Dragon and the Unicorn," from the second half of the same decade, which describes European travel and argues on a high level of abstraction. Best of the long poems is the latest, "The Heart's Garden, the Garden's Heart" (1967).

There is also a collection of verse plays. There are many volumes of prose: An Autobiographical Novel (1966), several volumes of essays both literary and political, and a rapid polemical literary history called American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971). In addition, Rexroth has translated from Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, but it is his work in Chinese and Japanese which is deservedly best known—beginning with One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1956). Certainly his verse translations remain among the best work in an age of translation.

But if we look for the best, we look to his own poems. To end with, here is a lyric from his New Poems of 1974:

               Your Birthday in the California Mountains
 
     A broken moon on the cold water,
     And wild geese crying high overhead,
     The smoke of the campfire rises
     Toward the geometry of heaven—
     Points of light in the infinite blackness.
     I watch across the narrow inlet
     Your dark figure comes and goes before the fire.
     A loon cries out on the night bound lake.
     Then all the world is silent with the
     Silence of autumn waiting for
     The coming of winter. I enter
     The ring of firelight, bringing to you
     A string of trout for our dinner.
     As we eat by the whispering lake,
     I say, "Many years from now we will
     Remember this night and talk of it."
     Many years have gone by since then, and
     Many years again. I remember
     That night as though it was last night,
     But you have been dead for thirty years.