Two New Books by Kenneth Rexroth
[In his review of In Defense of the Earth and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, Williams defends Rexroth's unpoetic meter and diction, and lavishly praises his translations.]
The technical problem of what to do with the modern poetic line has been solved by Kenneth Rexroth by internal combustion! Whether that can be said to be activated by atomic fission or otherwise is immaterial. The line, in Rexroth's opinion, is to be kept intact no matter if it may be true, as the painters have shown, that any part of a poem (or painting) may stand for the poem if it is well made; therefore if anything at all is done with it, keeping it intact, it must give at the seams, it must spread its confinements to make more room for the thought. We have been beaten about the ears by all the loose talk about "free verse" until Rexroth has grown tired of it.
But the problem still remains. If you are intent on getting rid of conventional verse what are you going to accept in its place? It is purely a matter of how you are going to handle the meter. Forget for a moment the meaning of the poems in this book, In Defense of the Earth, which is not, I think, a good title, the poet has ignored all formal line divisions save by the use of an axe.
The first ten or fifteen poems trespass perilously close upon sentimentality, they can be passed over at once as of mere personal interest to the poet himself, no matter how deeply experienced, having to do with individuals of his family. With "A Living Pearl," the general interest may be said to begin, the technical and ideational interest that is inherent in the poems (there is not room enough in the pages of Poetry to quote the poem in full):
"A Living Pearl"
At sixteen I came West, riding
Freights on the Chicago, Milwaukee
And St. Paul, the Great Northern,
The Northern Pacific.
A job as helper to a man
…..
Tonight,
Thirty years later, I walk
Out of the deserted miner's
Cabin in Mono Pass, under
The full moon and the few large stars.
And so it goes for about seventy-five lines. It is written as verse, the initial letter of every lineis capitalized as in Marlow or Lope de Vega or Edna St. Vincent Millay. But there the similarity to any verse form with which I am familiar ceases. It is a sequence we are more familiar with in prose: the words are direct, without any circumlocution, no figure of speech is permitted to intervene between the meaning of the words and the sense in which they are to be understood.
There is no inversion of the phrase. The diction is correct to the idiom in which the poet speaks, a language "which cats and dogs can read." But it is a language unfamiliar to the ordinary poetry reader. Poems are just not written in those words.
More serious is the question as to whether or not, since poems are universally thought to be musical, Rexroth has any ear for music. And if so what constitutes his music.
Can the lines be counted—forget for the moment the prosy diction? It may have been put down purposely to subvert any poetic implication in the lines that it is associated with the lies of the ordinary poem in the usual facilely lilting measures. This American author is dedicated to the truth. To hell with tuneful cadences in the manner, let us say, of Robert Burns or T. S. Eliot or Rimbaud at least while the world is being cheated and starved and befouled.
Rexroth is a moralist with his hand at the trigger ready to fire at the turn of a hair. But he's a poet, and a good one, for all that. So as to the music of his lines let us not be too hasty. As a translator of the Chinese lyrics of Tu Fu his ear is finer than that of anyone I have ever encountered. It has been conclusively proved to my ear, at least, that if he does not give himself to our contemporary building of the line he doesn't want to soil himself as all others are doing.
Toward the end of this book of eighty-odd pages, after that fine poem, "A Living Pearl," with its unfamiliar turns of phrase, there are some shorter pieces or longer ones broken into shorter subsections (like the one to Dylan Thomas) which are arresting by the directness of their speech: by the way, when I attempt to measure the stresses in one of his typical lines, which are short, I find that there are for the most part three. The pace is uniformly iambic, using a variable foot according to the American idiom.
The poems themselves are the importance. Their moral tone is stressed, except in the translations from the Japanese at the end. The book's seriousness, sting, and satiric punch dominate these pages. A miscellany of bitter stabs masquerading as, and meant to be, nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, a-b-c's and other accounts, scathing denunciations of our society which would have done credit to a Daumier or a Goya: "A Bestiary For My Daughters Mary and Katharine;" "Murder Poem No. 74321;" "Portrait of the Author as a Young Anarchist"—a grieving memorial to Vanzetti and others; and another, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," a memorial to Dylan Thomas.
The latter half of the book is a diatribe of the most comprehensive virulence. It should be posted in the clubrooms of all universities so that it could never be forgotten. For the poem is the focal point for all activity among the intellectuals of the world from New York, Paris and Helsinki. Rexroth puts down many of their names here—a lunatic fringe it may be:
They are murdering all the young men.
For half a century now, every day,
…..
Stephen, Lawrence ("on his gridiron"), Robinson, Masters ("who crouched in / His law office for ruinous decades"), Lola Ridge, Jim Oppenheim, Orrick Johns, Elinor Wylie, Sara Teasdale, George Sterling, Phelps Putnam, Jack Wheelright, Donald Evans, John Gould Fletcher, Edna Millay, Bodenheim ("butchered in stinking / Squalor"), Sol Funaroff, Isidor Schneider, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Ezra, "that noisy man," Carnevali, etc. etc.
He may sometimes be mistaken in his choice of those to remember but that is a mere choice among individuals: his sympathies are amply justified.
…..
There is another memorable passage showing the sardonic temper with which the poems have been salted down. This occurs toward the end of the "Mother Goose" (for his daughters), and note that he treats his children with the same respect as though they had been adults at whose throats their murderous weapons are addressed. Addressing his countrymen in general he tells them:
Hide the white stone
in the left fist.
Hide the white stone
In the right fist.
I am your secret brother.
Where is the white stone?
You have swallowed it.
…..
It may not be welcome in a review of this kind to stress an author's pointed reference to an unlovely fact. But in this case when in the text reference has been made to Martial's satyrs whose whole mood of violent attack on the corruption of his own age has been invoked by Rexroth in his own revolt and revulsion, nothing could be more appropriate to this than the following anecdote:
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shit in the golf holes.
Kenneth Rexroth has been an avid reader in universal literature. He is familiar with a variety of foreign languages, ancient and modern. He is familiar with the capitals of Europe, has read extensively of philosophy and the history of the social sciences. I think, as men go, there is no better read person in America. You should see his library! all his books, and most of his collected magazine articles, filed in orderly fashion for twenty or thirty years back for ready reference.
He is an authority on his subject of modern poetry. As a lecturer he is respected (and feared) throughout the academic world.
The present book, In Defense of the Earth, has been dedicated To Marthe, Mary, Katharine; his wife and daughters whom he speaks of extensively in the first part.
…..
Kenneth Rexroth has recently translated One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, one of the most brilliantly sensitive books of poems in the American idiom it has ever been my good fortune to read.
It must be amazing to the occidental reader, acquinted we'll say with Palgrave's Golden Treasury, to realize that the Chinese have a practice and art of the poem, which in subtlety of lyrical candor, far exceeds his own. I am grateful to him. Nothing comparable and as relaxed is to be found I think in the whole of English or American verse, and in French or Spanish verse, so far as I know. So that it constitutes a unique experience to read what has been set down here.
Womanhood has been engraved on our minds in unforgettable terms. Oh, I know that women can be bitches, you don't have to be a homosexual to learn that, but the exact and telling and penetrant realization of a woman's reality, of her lot, has never been better set down. It is tremendously moving, as none of our well known attempts, say, throughout the Renaissance have ever succeeded in being.
This is a feat of overwhelming importance. It is not a question of a man or woman's excess in experience or suffering, for whatever this amounted to, they have had to do; but that in their mutual love they have been made to bear their fates. What does it matter what a woman and a man in love will do for themselves? Someone will succeed and someone will die. In the poem suddenly we realize that we know that and perceive in a single burst of vision, in a flash that dazzles the reader.
The poet Tu Fu (713-770) was the first, with him it begins. Homer and Sappho with their influence on our poetry had been dead for over a thousand years. The use of the metaphor, pivotal in our own day, had not been discovered by the Chinese in these ancient masterpieces. The metaphor comes as a flash, nascent in the line, which flares when the image is suddenly shifted and we are jolted awake just as when the flint strikes the steel. The same that the Chinese poet seeks more simply when the beauty of his images bursts at one stroke directly upon us.
Dawn over the Mountains
The city is silent,
Sounds drains away
Buildings vanish in the light of dawn,
Cold sunlight comes on the highest peak,
The dust of night
Clings to the hills,
The earth opens,
The river boats are vague,
The still sky—
The sound of falling leaves.
A huge doe comes to the garden gate,
Lost from the herd,
Seeking its fellows.
(Tu Fu)
Where is the poem? without metaphor among these pages so effortlessly put down. Occidental art seems more than a little strained compared to this simplicity. You cannot say there is no art since we are overwhelmed by it. The person of the poet, the poetess, no, the woman herself (when it is a woman), speaks to us … in an unknown language, to our very ears, so that we actually weep with her and what she says (while we are not aware of her secret) is that she breathes … that she is alive as we are.
Where is it hidden in the words? Our own clumsy poems, the best of them, following the rules of grammar … trip themselves up. What is a sonnet of Shakespeare beside this limpidity but a gauche, a devised pretext? and it takes fourteen lines rigidly to come to its conclusion. But with bewildering simplicity we see the night end, the dawn come in and a wild thing approach a garden…. But the compression without being crowded, the opposite of being squeezed into a narrow space, a few lines, a universe, from the milky way … vividly appears before us.
But where has it been hidden? because it is somewhere among the words to our despair, if we are poets, or pretend to be, it is really a simple miracle, like that of the loaves and the fishes….
Where does the miracle lodge, to have survived so unaffectedly the years translation to a foreign language and not only a foreign language but a language of fundamentally different aspect from that in which the words were first written? The metaphor is total, it is overall, a total metaphor.
But there are two parts to every metaphor that we have known heretofore: the object and its reference—one of them is missing in these Chinese poems that have survived to us and survived through the years, to themselves also. They have been jealously, lovingly guarded … Where does it exist in the fabric of the poem? so tough that it can outlast copper and steel … a poem?
—and really laughs and cries! it is alive.
—It is as frightening as it is good.
And the Chinese as a race have built upon it to survive, the words of Tu Fu, a drunken poet, what I mean is DRUNK! and a bum, who did not do perhaps one constructive thing with himself in his life—or a Bodenheim.
I go to a reception and find a room crowded with people whom I cannot talk with except one, a man (or a woman perhaps) or one who wearies me with his insistencies…. When a few miraculous lines that keep coming into my head transport me through space a thousand years into the past….
"A magic carpet" the ancients called it. It costs nothing, it's not the least EXPENSIVE!
Look at the object: an unhappy woman, no longer young, waking in her lonely bed and looking over a moonlit valley, that is all. Or a man drunk or playing with his grandchildren who detain him so that he cannot keep an appointment to visit a friend…. And what? A few fragile lines which have proved indestructible!
Have you ever thought that a cannon blast or that of an atomic bomb is absolutely powerless beside this?—unless you extinguish man (and woman), the whole human race. A smile would supersede it, totally.
I raise the curtains and go out
To watch the moon. Leaning on the
Balcony, I breathe the evening
Wind from the west, heavy with the
Odors of decaying Autumn.
The rose-jade of the river
Blends with the green-jade of the void.
Hidden in the grass a cricket chirps.
Hidden in the sky storks cry out.
I turn over and over in
My heart the memories of
Other days. Tonight as always
There is no one to share my thoughts.
(Shu Chu Senn)
or this:
The Visitors
I have had asthma for a
Long time. It seems to improve
Here in this house by the river.
It is quiet too. No crowds
Bother me. I am brighter here
And more rested. I am happy here.
When someone calls at my thatched hut
My son brings me my straw hat
And I go out to gather
A handful of fresh vegetables.
It isn't much to offer.
But it is given in friendship.
(Tu Fu)
These men (a woman among the best of them) were looking at direct objects when they were writing, the transition from their pens or brushes is direct to the page. It was a beautiful object (not always a beautiful object, sometimes a horrible one) that they produced. It is incredible that it survived. It must have been treasured as a rare phenomenon by the people to be cared for and reproduced at great pains.
But the original inscriptions, so vividly recording the colors and moods of the scene … were invariably put down graphically in the characters (not words), the visual symbols that night and day appeared to the poet. The Chinese calligraphy must have contributed vastly to this.
Our own "Imagists" were right to brush aside purely grammatical conformations. What has grammar to do with poetry save to trip up its feet in that mud? It is important to a translator but that is all. Butit is important to a translator, as Kenneth Rexroth well knows. But mostly he has to know the construction of his own idiom into which he is rendering his text, when to ignore its more formal configurations.
This is where the translations that Kenneth Rexroth has made are brilliant. His knowledge of the American idiom has given him complete freedom to make a euphonious rendering of a text which has defied more cultured ears to this date. It may seem to be undisciplined but it is never out of the translator's measured control. Mr. Rexroth is a genius in his own right, inventing a modern language, or following a vocal tradition which he raises here to great distinction. Without a new language into which the poems could be rendered their meaning would have been lost.
Finally, when he comes to the end of introduction, he says, "So here are two selections of poetry, one the work of a couple of years, the other the personal distillate of a lifetime. I hope they meet the somewhat different ends I have in view. I make no claim for the book as a piece of Oriental scholarship. Just some poems."
At the very end there are data, notes, ten pages of them, annotated page for page, on the individual poems. And two and a half pages of Select Bibliography. The translations into English began in 1870 with The Chinese Classics, James Legge. Included is a mention of Ezra Pound's Cathay, 1915.
In the French there is, dating from 1862, the Poésies Chinoises de l'Epoque Thang, and, among others, that of Judith Gautier's, 1908, Livre de Jade. The German versions are still those of Klabund.
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