BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
Completed on his 100th birthday, 22
December 2005.
Written in the “zuihitsu” (“following
the brush”) genre.
Linda Hamalian’s mostly cannibalizing
biography, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth
(NY: Norton, 1991; all page numbers
refer to it), has three conspicuous
virtues: she researched her subject
meticulously from a variety of written
sources in a number of locations around
the USA; she interviewed dozens of
people who knew him, many of whom have
passed away in the many years since the
book’s publication; and she quotes
Rexroth (1905-1982) verbatim at times,
thereby enabling his voice to rise above
her prose and thinking.
Hamalian describes her first meeting
with Rexroth, introduced by Leo, her
live-in boyfriend and future husband: “I
was twenty-one . . . Carol Tinker [and
Kenneth] came to our home after [his
poetry] reading for dinner. Rexroth told
me how perfectly I had prepared the
broccoli (in a white anchovy sauce). . .
. I could not believe that this great
poet was commenting knowingly on my
green vegetables. When Kenneth and Carol
returned our hospitality by inviting us
to their home in Santa Barbara, he
entertained us around a Mongolian hotpot
and talked philosophy (mostly Buddhist)
and politics (of the conspiracy theory
kind) into the early morning hours. I
was convinced he was a genius, and a
very kind man.” (x).
I was one of Kenneth Rexroth’s students
at the University of California at Santa
Barbara from 1968, soon after I started
writing poetry. After I graduated in
1972, Kenneth and I became lifelong
friends. He was my mentor and the
greatest person I ever met. I knew him
from when he was 62-76 years old and I
was 18-32. He disdained the word “guru”
and made it clear that he had no
successors, but to me he was like a
grandfather, father and brother rolled
into one. In other words, I could be
myself in front of him and yet I
respected him as a wise village elder.
Incidentally, I was interviewed for
Hamalian’s book and am mentioned in it a
half-dozen times. I neither object to
anything she wrote about me nor do I
wish she had written more; her treatment
was fine and is inconsequential to my
review.
Like most people who encountered
Rexroth, I was initially bowled over by
his erudition, charisma and compassion.
I thought there was no reason a man who
was 44 years my senior when I was a
teenager should spend quality time
mentoring me, and consequently I felt
extremely lucky. I was unaware at the
time that it was a tradition of
righteous anarchists and avant-garde
artists to mentor young people
considered worthwhile. Unlike some
people who encountered Kenneth, I was
never disillusioned or turned off by
him, I was simply grateful to be in his
presence. And I never tried to one-up
him as, for example, Allen Ginsberg did
when crassly declaring himself a
superior poet to Rexroth (246).
Ginsberg’s unfortunate but telling lapse
occurred after Rexroth, the elder poet,
had come to Ginsberg’s rescue in
print—soon after Allen emerged on the
San Francisco scene and was given a cold
shoulder by the east coast lit-crit
establishment—and in court, when
Ginsberg’s Howl went on trial
in 1957 for obscenity. At the trial
Rexroth had been among the distinguished
witnesses and gave an impassioned
defense which helped win the day—and
much publicity—for Ginsberg (267).
I found Kenneth Rexroth not only to be
extremely intelligent and witty, but
also exceedingly kind and considerate.
Just to cite one example is the time I
visited him and his wife, Carol Tinker,
in Santa Barbara with my wife-to-be
Sachiko Sekine, a Japanese woman who had
once lived in the USA. Kenneth went
shopping and prepared a delicious roast
beef dinner. Sitting in the living room
and digesting after the meal, I said,
“Kenneth, I’ve eaten here many times
over the years but you had never cooked
a roast beef dinner; you usually cook
Asian food.” He smiled faintly and spoke
softly, “I haven’t cooked roast beef in
years, but I thought Sachi would prefer
American food.” (Incidentally, the “ko”
子of Sachiko 幸子 is the graph for “child,”
common in women’s names, but feminist
Rexroth refused to use it for adults.)
The gracious dinner he served is just a
tiny example of his thoughtfulness, a
gentleman with fine-grained sensibility.
Sachi and I named Ken, our first son,
after Kenneth. Around the time Ken first
stood up, Kenneth observed him, tickled
him and out of the blue declared that
Ken would become a scientist. Oddly
enough, a quarter century after
Kenneth’s death, Ken is a scientist.
Kenneth had a sixth sense about people
(James Laughlin also noticed it in
relation to animals [Kobe, Japan:
Electric Rexroth #1, 1992, ed.
Tetsuya Taguchi]). He was perceptive in
x-raying psyches and hearts and catching
the contours of people’s vibrations as
if he were on a psychedelic, although he
had arrived at this intuitive sense by
meditating in nature for long stretches
and by living fearlessly at all times.
Hamalian’s initial experience was
similar to mine, but the difference is
that my wholly positive first impression
lasted and deepened over the fourteen
years I knew him. Whenever I left
Kenneth and Carol’s house after staying
a few days, I experienced a heady
contentment as if walking on air, and my
gratitude has increased incrementally
over the years. They say a mentor is
always with you, and I suppose it’s
true. Most writers on Rexroth get caught
up in the polemics of the man and there
is nothing wrong with that, but they
tend to overlook that he was a classy
guy. By ignoring that aspect, more often
than not they end up misinterpreting him
and exposing their own tunnel vision.
When I first held Hamalian’s hardback in
my hands, I wondered why there is a
photo resembling a mug shot used on the
book-jacket cover, a disheveled Kenneth
Rexroth with a cigarette dangling from
his lips. His unkempt appearance in the
present age of outlawing cigarette smoke
is already a turn-off for most readers.
Is this the idea of a Bohemian as seen
by the jacket-designer, Chris Welch? How
many photos did he sift through to
choose this particular one? It’s a
curious design decision, because another
camping photo, the frontispiece, is far
more attractive, if indeed a camping
photo is the most appropriate for a
biography of a poet. Rexroth was a great
nature poet and even wrote a brilliant,
unpublished book ca. 1939 on the ins and
outs of camping,
Camping in the
Western Mountains, but the
dangling cigarette shot remains an odd
choice.
Surely more relevance should be attached
to the fact that Rexroth was one of the
first poets to read with jazz and that
he kept performing for thirty years with
various musicians and instruments from
East and West. A more obvious cover
photo would be him reading poetry (one
is included in the book [248], among one
of Kenneth speaking into the ear of a
donkey [252], and others). That choice
would have grounded the pre-reading
viewer to note that the book will be the
biography of a performance poet,
presumably an innovative and influential
figure.
Such an approach would have dovetailed
well with Hamalian’s repeatedly stating
that Rexroth’s poetry readings in old
age, despite his frailty, were superb.
She notes that although over 70 years
old and with multiple ailments, he was
always energetic. “When Rexroth
performed, he was very well received”
(358). She quotes Sam Hamill, “the poems
were magnificent . . . his delivery was
perfect” (363); Joe Bruchac, “his body
old, but his spirit still as young as
the lovers in those poems” (363): and
Joyce Jenkins, “magnificent, so full of
knowledge and life” (364). Instead of
the persona of the performance poet,
which Rexroth pioneered and that has
since become standard fare, we get an
unattractive shot on the jacket cover of
an unwashed Bohemian who is supposed to
metamorphose into a Beat and
proto-Hippy. Incidentally, when asked if
he was indeed the “Father of the Beats,”
Rexroth retorted, “An entomologist is
not a bug.”
I would like to mention in passing that
I was also disappointed with the cover
chosen by Copper Canyon Press when it
published the otherwise fine compilation
The Complete Poems of Kenneth
Rexroth (eds. Sam Hamill and
Bradford Morrow, 2003). These two
leading Rexroth specialists opted for a
1963 painting of a torso by Leo Kenney
titled “Relic.” I don’t see a connection
between that painting and Rexroth, and
whoever made that decision neglected a
rare opportunity to tie Rexroth’s poetry
and painting into an organic whole. Why
wouldn’t the editors have chosen a
painting by Rexroth? Maybe Copper Canyon
had a reason to choose Leo Kenney, but
that chance won’t come again easily
(mirroring the mostly wasted effect of
Hamalian’s flawed biography). As
publisher, Morrow had aptly put a
photograph of a Rexroth painting on the
cover of the poet’s Excerpts From A
Life (NY: Conjunctions, ed. Ekbert
Faas, 1981). Therefore, the omission of
a painting on The Complete Poems of
Kenneth Rexroth is doubly puzzling,
because Morrow already had used the
idea—he merely needed to recall it.
The “mugging” of Rexroth continues
unabated inside the book. Since Rexroth
has told his own story in An
Autobiographical Novel (NY:
Doubleday, 1966) and Excerpts from A
Life, one wonders why Hamalian
titles hers A Life of Kenneth
Rexroth, until we fill in the blank
later and realize her intended title is
“A Wife-Beating Life of Kenneth
Rexroth.” Surely Rexroth deserves
better, especially since the book was
published after his death when he could
no longer defend himself. It’s a shame
he isn’t around, because he could write
an erudite review listing the great
authors whose reputations were
done irreparable harm by third-rate
biographers. I don’t have such a list,
but I know Hamalian has veered off track
in hunting down her subject only to have
him elude her, despite her quoting him
left and right. We could reconstruct a
very different portrait of Rexroth
merely by extracting some of the same
quotes she presents and interpreting
them, depending on what issue we wish to
highlight. To make better sense of the
poet and his work I needed to read his
quotes against the grain of her
continuous bashing him for sexual
infidelities. I extracted a selection of
those quotes and placed them at the end
of this article to give a flavor of his
thinking.
Hamalian gets entangled in
psychologizing Rexroth as if she were
defense attorney for his ex-wives who
had turned into hungry ghosts because of
his maltreatment. She sounds shriller
and shriller, interposing herself like a
spurned lover. More telling for me than
her superficial analysis is the fact
that Kenneth’s second wife, Marie, who
also apparently alleged mistreatment,
remained a devoted lifelong friend of
his for over 50 years. Whatever occurred
between them, Marie seemed to have
forgiven him, but Hamalian can’t. In her
self-righteousness she castigates Marie
for being weak, but
Hamalian doesn’t deal with the issue in
depth (perhaps believing that Marie was
suffering from the Stockholm syndrome).
I kept wondering what accounts for
Hamalian’s intractability and vicarious
intrusiveness, but of course she never
turns her psychologizing inwards. Why
should readers be subjected to
Hamalian’s dredging up of negativity for
its own sake? Incidentally, Rexroth hung
a 1935 portrait he had painted of Marie
(123) on his dining room wall in Santa
Barbara, and it remained there for the
rest of his life.
Japanese have a proverb—“Fuufu genka wa
inu mo kuwanu,” 「夫婦喧嘩は犬も食わぬ」 which
means, “Even a dog won’t eat a husband
and wife’s quarrel,” the point being
that marital spats are usually temporary
flare-ups and after harmony is restored,
the meddling outsider will be
ostracized.
Perhaps Hamalian’s evangelical defense
of all women allegedly wronged by
Rexroth was sheer opportunism—trying to
ride the wave of the feminist movement
in a timely manner. Unfortunately, her
one-pointed attitude clouds her judgment
and she has difficulty reading poems
even at face value, let alone with any
insight. For example, she quotes
Rexroth’s series of six poems titled
Hojoki 「方丈記」(which she says means
“‘Monk’s Record’ or ‘Record of a Monk’s
Hut,’” but more accurately means “Record
of a 4.5 mat room”):
I am startled until I
Realize that the beehive
In the hollow trunk will be
Busy all night long tonight
She interprets, “These six tightly structured poems are particularly informative because they reveal so well an inner peace that contradicted the tenor of Rexroth’s worldly, personal life” (310). This becomes one of her central arguments. It seems to me peripheral to invoke his so-called contradictory personal life as to what is “particularly informative” about the poem. Why shouldn’t he feel the stirrings of nature? After all, he went to meditate and write poetry precisely to get away from his mundane city existence, that’s a given. It seems that Hamalian is goading here, wanting to deny him any happiness. Should he have stayed home? Would she have been placated had he written a poem in the woods about marital discord? Is his “inner peace” only informative of his lack of inner peace? Is that the import of the poem? If so, we are reading in an upside-down mirror, Linda in Wonderland. Her line of inquiry begs the question of why readers get immense pleasure from Rexroth’s nature poetry. As a professor of English and American literature with Rexroth as her preeminent credential, her appreciation of the literary seems skewed and superficial. Can’t we expect analysis beyond stating that the poems are hiding something that the poet doesn’t think belongs there in the first place? Even if we bracket the poet’s intention as unknowable and irrelevant, why should her intention for his poem be privileged as significant? If Rexroth’s poems indeed have the potential to enact a displacement of his emotional turmoil into sublime art, is the purpose of the critic to reactivate the displacement backwards in time from the poem to the emotional stress that was supposedly masked by the release of language into the poem? If that is the role of the critic, then I prefer to stick with reading the poetry and foregoing the analysis.
Here’s another typical example of
Hamalian’s miniscule powers of
interpretation and relentless whipping
of the dead white man (despite her
noting that in 1965 Rexroth was declared
officially by the Oakland Mayor’s Office
“an honorary Negro” [319]). First she
introduces a special event honoring the
subject of her biography, no doubt one
of the peaks of Rexroth’s career up to
that time, earned after forty years of
being relatively neglected but having
persevered and written prolifically
nonetheless.
“When the National Institute of Arts and
Letters awarded him $2,500 in May 1964,
he did not fly to the ceremony. Malcolm
Cowley made the presentation of the
award, and praised the absent Rexroth
for ‘maintaining under difficult
circumstances, the integrity of the
arts, and for communicating his
understanding of experience with lucid
candor, energy and compassion. Memorably
and movingly he presents both minute
particulars and the large vistas opened
by his secular religiosity.’” (316)
Cowley packs a lot into his brief and
straightforward encomium. First, he
mentions “integrity . . . under difficult
circumstances.” Among other struggles,
Rexroth had been a conscientious
objector, housed and aided Americans of
Japanese descent as well as Japanese
nationals in California when they were
rounded up during World War II, was a
freethinker during McCarthyism, and
became the subject of investigation by
J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious F.B.I. more
once. Such integrity is always
significant but especially so during
times of strife and war. Cowley then
praises Rexroth for his talent
at “communicating his understanding of
experience.” Those who are familiar with
Rexroth’s oeuvre realize that Cowley is
referring in part to the poet’s mystical
experiences. Without entering into
paradox, Cowley alludes to Rexroth’s
uncanny talent at seemingly conveying
the ineffable, as well as his more
mundane experiences. Cowley’s use of the
words “lucid candor, energy and
compassion” are worthy of pondering by
the biographer or general reader. The
“lucid candor” reflects back to the
aforementioned “integrity of the arts,”
and “energy” to his sustaining a lofty
and disciplined tone throughout
book-length poems. (Charles Olson
commented, “That long poem of his,
The Dragon and the Unicorn, that’s
really something! He gets the whole
thing down there.” [227])
Cowley’s reference to “compassion” is
important. Hamalian may not make the
connection between Rexroth’s activist
Buddhism which implied an engaged
compassion towards the poor and
downtrodden and his relentless
denunciation of what he termed the
Social Lie (Peter Tosh referred to it as
the “Shitstem”). Rexroth’s religiosity
and politics were in synch, and central
to his humanity was his “compassion,” a
virtue that Cowley found in Rexroth’s
work. Cowley ends by praising Rexroth’s
poetry for its “minute particulars and
large vistas.” One can ask of which
poets alive in the USA today the same
could be said—that they “memorably and
movingly present” the micro and macro to
the extent of anything close to
Rexroth’s achievement? Then to the depth
and vastness add the aforementioned
compassion and integrity, and how many
would be left standing? I have parsed
Cowley’s
statement to make the simple point that
it is a very positive introduction that
is worthy of pondering and maybe even
commenting on. How does Hamalian deal
with these statements by Cowley about
Rexroth’s poetic work? Directly
following her quote of Cowley, she
writes:
“For those people in the audience who
were familiar with the turmoil of
Rexroth’s private life, Cowley’s remarks
regrettably underscored the split
between the poet’s persona and the man
himself.”
Rexroth experienced a wrenchingly sad
divorce from Marthe Larsen, his third
wife and the mother of their two
children, Mary and Katherine, the former
born when he was already 44 years old.
Rexroth was devoted to them, especially
Mary, with whom he was able to spend
more time. Near the end of their
marriage, he wrote reassuringly to
Marthe:
“Dearest Marthe, surely you must know
that I love you devotedly and want only
to see you happy and would do anything
to help you. Never be afraid to let me
know if you need me. I will always
respond. Certainly I need you always in
every way. I love you.” (306)
Tender, compassionate and in a
melancholy mood, Rexroth was assuring
her that she could count on him through
thick and thin. Even if they were apart,
he was aware that they shared two
children and should remain friends, and
he expressed his feelings in an
eloquent, seemingly heartfelt manner.
Kenneth and Marthe thereafter sought the
counsel of a therapist, Steven Schoen.
Marthe quickly divorced Rexroth and
married Schoen. Hamalian doesn’t probe
if there is a question of ethics
regarding a couple sharing their most
vulnerable secrets with a counselor who
then compromises and betrays their trust
in an unprofessional manner for selfish
gain. Rather, Hamalian brushes the
incident off, “In the process of
therapy, Schoen, who himself was married
with three children, and Marthe fell in
love” (305). Was Rexroth ripped off? As
a reader, I find it extraordinary that
the author has become so disillusioned
with her subject that she injects such a
noticeable bias in her chilly
assessment. She doesn’t seem to exhibit
a shred of compassion for him under what
must have been exasperating
circumstances.
Marthe “sued him for divorce on grounds
of extreme cruelty” (305), and in the
settlement Kenneth gave her their $6,000
savings and paid her $275 monthly
alimony and child support (307). He was
noticeably shattered by this turn of
events, because he had a lot invested
emotionally in their relationship, so he
decided to replace Marthe’s name with
the anonymous “she” when reprinting the
moving love poems he had written to her.
Hamalian finds fault with Rexroth for
doing this, but wouldn’t an empathetic
biographer (or reader) find it
understandable if he felt bitterness
attached
to the name and exchanged it to recover
his poems? Was Rexroth so out of line in
his behavior? Here follows Hamalian’s
judgment with her psychological spin:
“Such editorial changes indicate that
Rexroth felt humiliated and betrayed not
only by Marthe, but also by his own
dreams and self-delusions” (313). Did
he necessarily feel “humiliated,” or did
he just want to keep the poems without
keeping the dedication to a woman whom
he felt—whether mistakenly or not—had
betrayed his love? For Hamalian the
problem seems to be in deleting the
name. And why is it “self-delusion” to
rescue the poems as art? She seems to
mean that his act was calculating and
willful, which would sound correct, but
“self-delusion” implies that he was
fooling himself, and I don’t find that
element indicated by the “editorial
changes.” And to insist further that he
was “betrayed by his . . . self-delusions”
turns the analysis into cloak-and-dagger
psychobabble. If Hamalian never has
experienced writing a poem that she was
proud of and dedicating it to someone
whom she later had a
falling out with, then she could at
least have tried to empathize with that
point of view instead of treating the
act as the deceptiveness of a cruel man.
She then hobbles along harping, “All
eight poems indicate that Rexroth was
reaching a point where the women in his
life had become a single Woman” (314).
Incidentally, I remember a professor of
Spanish I had in college, Gavin Hyde,
who told me that in middle age he
realized in a mystical sense that all
women are one woman and all men are one
man. I don’t imagine Hamalian is
suggesting that Rexroth couldn’t
differentiate the personality of
individual women whom he knew, so what
is she suggesting? She seems not to
distinguish between his anti-bourgeois
values and her own thoroughly bourgeois
outlook towards marriage and sex. He was
a self-proclaimed Anarchist (he used to
specify Anarcho-Pacifist not to be
misunderstood) who came from a
distinguished tradition of
free-thinkers. Hamalian is not a
free-thinker and cannot catch his drift
or import whatsoever. She acts like a
gleeful but twisted Mother Superior
exposing a masturbator.
Hamalian’s reference to Rexroth as an “old
goat” (quoted without source, 309),
her malicious and unsourced claims that
“some people said that ‘he’d screw
anything that moved—male or female,
two-legged or four’” (415) and
“Rexroth once told a friend that he was
afraid he had damaged his mouth and
throat from too much oral sex” (418, my
italics) are rabbit punches which speak
to the low consciousness (and subsequent
lack of conscience) of the biographer,
as well as inattention or worse by the
editor and publisher. Who are some
people and a friend?
She also quotes hearsay in a flagrantly
derogatory fashion, “Rexroth…would
‘fuck a snake if it would hold still for
him’” (182, my italics). This last
remark is sourced as second-hand gossip,
“According to David Koven, Jim Harmon
described Rexroth’s sexual behavior in
these words.” (402-403). Hamalian even
interviewed and gained the confidence of
Rexroth’s two daughters and fourth wife,
Carol Tinker, before publishing her “old
goat,” “male or female, two-legged or
four,” and “fuck a snake” vulgarities.
Hamalian chose to include allegations
without sources and hearsay, and one can
only wonder why she would do so except
as a forced attempt to seem both
politically correct and “juicy”
(Hagedorn, jacket back cover).
Hamalian grew up on slapstick cartoons,
and she swipes with a wooden plank,
hitting a defenseless man in the back of
the head. Rexroth is now headless and
beyond responding, and her damage
continues unabated. Ironically, Rexroth
spent over half a century actively
standing up for the weak and defenseless
and could amply take care of himself in
any argument or physical confrontation.
The main thesis of Hamalian’s
biography—tediously underlined in the
preface, body and epilogue—is that
Rexroth was abusive. Because in her
estimation he was an abuser, she’ll
abuse him back now that he is six-feet
under. Her approach is conceptually
parallel to the eye-for-an-eye mimicked
by Henry Miller in his World War II
pacifist pamphlet Murder the
Murderers (157), but Miller’s
courageous public stance stands in stark
contrast to Hamalian’s personal
hostility.
Hamalian is not only one-dimensional in
a way that I don’t happen to like, but
she is at times guilty of deceptive
scholarship. I wonder if she would
approve of a student of hers pulling off
the following misuse of materials:
“Rexroth said his poems were about the
ordinary things in his life—[1] ‘the
stuff I see, the girls I’m sleeping
with, or something else like that.’ He
liked to sound casual: [2] ‘The girl I
fuck in this poem must now be about
forty-five. I look her up sometimes’”
(341);
“a variation on his standard [3] ‘this
is a girl I used to screw’
introduction” (353).
In the above three quotes the first is
from a journal interview Rexroth did in
1976 answering questions about his
poetics. Speaking off the cuff, he
mentioned that his poems came from
everyday life, including “the girls I’m
sleeping with.” That seems honest
enough. When I read the second quote
attributed to him, “The girl I fuck in
this poem must now be forty-five. I look
her up sometimes.” I thought it sounded
quite crude and unlike my memory of how
Rexroth used to speak in public, yet
Hamalian described him liking “to sound
casual.” Checking her endnote (419) I
was surprised that Rexroth never spoke
those words, in fact they were written
by Stephen Spender who “attributes the
remark to a poet named ‘Waxwrath.’”
Stephen Spender’s playful mocking of
Rexroth while he was alive has, in
Hamalian’s rush to belittle him,
undergone a transformation into words
uttered by Rexroth himself.
Waxwrath = Rexroth and you’d never know
unless you happen to check the endnote.
This is not only sloppy scholarship but
a willful and malicious merging of
disparate sources. If she had cited a
source’s misquote, that would be a
forgivable mistake (called in Japanese
“magobiki” 孫引き [“pulling a grandchild”]),
but in this case she is misquoting her
own source. I shudder to imagine how she
would analyze that conduct were it by
Rexroth. Here she is revealing more
about herself than her subject.
And, now that Hamalian’s head is full of
recycling Rexroth equals Waxwrath and
has naturalized the concept of him
introducing his poetry at readings with
crude boasts about sexual conquests, we
find her flippantly writing a few pages
later, “. . . a variation on his standard
‘this is a girl I used to screw’
introduction” (353). Circular logic
implants Spender’s mocking comment and
now she delivers it as factual. I kept
wondering if it is or isn’t odd that
someone who pulls such a stunt—evidence
of a palpable (unconscious?) bias
running throughout her work—can sit
accredited by an English department in
an American university.
Hamalian’s pitch unfortunately gets ever
more strident as the book progresses.
Despite Rexroth’s sympathetic
translations of women poets of China and
Japan, she reads his attitude in a
negative light, “His identification with
these poets suggests that, despite
outward appearances, he too felt
trapped” (341).
Why did he necessarily feel “trapped”?
Hamalian, the English professor, seems
unable to grasp the point that Rexroth
sought and found and translated
excellent poetry. She seems to need
reminding that he was first and foremost
a poet, and poetry and emotion can be
intertwined (although not necessarily),
and the act of translating poetry isn’t
always to cover up marital shortcomings.
Much more significant than if he “felt
trapped” is that many literati consider
Rexroth’s translations of Japanese
classical poetry to be among the best so
far produced in the English language
(including Howard Hibbett, a
highly-respected Japanese literature
specialist and professor emeritus at
Harvard University). Hamalian, however,
in her myopic crusade and acting like a
“hysterical bride in the penny arcade”
(Bob Dylan), declares unequivocally that
Rexroth is “doomed . . . to a life where he
would feel betrayed by love, and
disappointed by his family and friends.
Unlike these [Asian] women poets,
Rexroth had built his own prison”
(341). Does she mean Rexroth’s
“prison” was the home where she had been
invited for a fun dinner and wished he
had written a poem for her? (x). Does
she mean that his mind was a prison, if
so why was he so jolly most of the time
and how could she extrapolate her
existential condemnation from a cursory
reading of his empathetic translations?
Given the choice between her derailed
judgments and Rexroth’s considerable
accomplishments, it’s a no-brainer
(versus a “genius” [x]).
In the Epilogue, highly-strung Hamalian
gets in her final licks with, “[his]
nasty level of sexism” and “[despite his
spiritual aspirations] he was too much
in the world” (375). Like a matador
going for the final thrust of the sword,
she ends her biography reiterating her
main point, “he was genuine in his poems
the way he could not always be in his
life” (375). Does that back-handed
compliment mean that he was “genuine” or
“not genuine,” assuming it was not in
his life but only in the poems? Is she
suggesting that he was genuine only in
the realm of the poem as autonomous
object? If so, what does “genuine” mean
(crafted, crafty)?
Rexroth the poet certainly got
sideswiped by what Hamalian had to offer
in her analysis of his extraordinary
talents. Ken Knabb is the sole reviewer
who comes to a similar conclusion (“A
Clueless Life of Kenneth Rexroth”). No one would
suggest that Rexroth was perfect. Some
of the faults Hamalian chooses to focus
on were also noted in his own
correspondence, so he dealt with those
issues. Sure he was a bundle of
contradictions like anyone else. Who
expects poets in our society to be
saints? But Hamalian’s overarching bias
and relentless bashing cloud any
reasonable assessment of Rexroth’s
legacy, because she turns her years of
research into a hatchet job.
She often quotes Rexroth’s disdain for
east coast, academic, reactionary,
establishment critics, and ironically
Rexroth got one of them as his
biographer. How could he have known what
havoc the twenty-one year old Hamalian
would wreak on his reputation a decade
after his death? I’m sure she would
never have dared write that kind of book
while he was alive. He would have
pulverized it in a review with far more
eloquence than I could ever muster.
Hamalian notes that she visited Rexroth
with her husband a few weeks before his
death, after a stroke rendered him
unable to speak, “His steely brilliant
blue eyes lit up in recognition, but
only a series of grunts issued from his
mouth” (422). Behind the grunting was
Kenneth desperately trying to say that
he didn’t think her broccoli was perfect
after all and that he wished she’d leave
his life alone?
I think that not to bracket what she
highlights of Rexroth’s alleged behavior
towards some of his wives is also to
turn a blind eye to what he was up
against in the larger picture of his
struggle to fight the Social Lie at all
costs in the US during the middle fifty
years of the 20th century. Selden Rodman
summed up the situation already in 1951:
“The whole dull, grey, standardizing, conformist, amorphous weight of contemporary American civilization is pitted against the few remaining individualists in the Emerson-Thoreau tradition, of whom Rexroth is a splendid example. If his isolation makes him occasionally outrageous and shrill, that is understandable, and more power to him.” (176)
That is not to excuse any inexcusable
behavior—which I’m sure as a sensitive
human being Rexroth would have amply
regretted—but in general is it too much
to expect empathy rather than disdain
for the subject of a biography? Is it
her duty to take the side of all the
women she feels were wronged by him and
then re-fight their battles as a proxy
without his participation?
Everyone who knew Rexroth seemed to
enjoy his hipness while he was alive. No
one was as sharp and direct and funny.
He could elucidate subtleties of world
history and Christian, Buddhist and
Hindu metaphysics, and the next moment
transition to an off-color joke, all
smoothly and effortlessly. Once in my
presence, late in the evening, Kenneth
was lying on the couch listening to
Thomas Parkinson, a professor from the
University of California at Berkeley and
an old friend of his who was trying to
engage him in conversation. Kenneth had
spent the day driving back with Carol
and Tom to Santa Barbara, and I had been
house-sitting in their absence. Kenneth
was admittedly tired and seemed to have
exhausted his patience with Tom’s
nagging. To show displeasure while Tom
bellowed away, Kenneth slowly turned his
back to him, loudly farted and then fell
fast asleep. It was a hilarious
performance. No one was earthier in
action and loftier in thought than
Kenneth Rexroth, and that dichotomy was
difficult for some people to handle.
I don’t usually read biographies that
are unsympathetic to their subjects. To
give examples from rock ‘n roll, books
that raid the skeletons in the closet
(such as Albert Goldman’s The Lives of
John Lennon [1988], Elvis [1981] and
Elvis: The Last 24 Hours [1990]) don’t
interest me, whereas I prefer portraits
such as those by Jerry Schilling (Me and
a Guy Named Elvis [2006]) and Jerry
Hopkins (No One Here Gets Out Alive:
A Biography of Jim Morrison [1980]). The
genre of ransacking dead people’s lives
for their purported weaknesses has
always seemed inherently unfair, lame
and sleazy. I know that it is part and
parcel of trashy tabloid culture, and
since Christina Crawford’s scathing book
Mommie Dearest (1978), the
genre has gained in popularity. Readers
naturally eschew hagiography, but
wanting a generally amiable biographer
should not be out of the question. I am
disturbed that the goalposts of “fair”
and “honest” have been moved in the last
few decades, if Hamalian’s book is
normative. Authors should beware if fame
necessarily implies being skewered after
death.
I am amused that some writers have
praised the Rexroth biography, even if
they happen to be blurbs on its back
cover.
--Diane Wakoski: “How refreshing! A
biography which seeks out truth
without distorting or vilifying the
subject” (jacket blurb; my
italics).
I wonder how much more Hamalian could
vilify Rexroth. I know we are in the age
of intensified double-speak, and I
expect it from the political news—based
on the Social Lie—but not necessarily
from an intelligent poet.
Jessica Hagedorn also writes a blurb for
the book. A poet whom Rexroth had
nurtured from age fifteen, Hagedorn is
described in Hamalian’s book as follows:
“[Rexroth] was very sympathetic to her
artistic aspirations, her Filipino
childhood, and her education. He set her
on a course of reading—which included
anthologies of black writers and French
writers like Apollinaire, Artaud, and
Clevel—and invited her to use his
library whenever she liked . . . Rexroth
decided that Jessica needed to develop
her ear, and invited her to read with
him at a small coffeehouse.” (320)
This sounds to me like a generous mentor
in the Bohemian tradition and,
significantly, there is no hint of
sexual impropriety involved. Hagedorn
“repays” his unusual gift (in the book
she is quoted as saying, “Rexroth was
magical” [320]) by writing a
blurb for the book’s jacket:
“Hamalian is both a fair and
honest biographer—revealing his
dark side without stripping Rexroth of
his dignity” (my italics).
I imagine he would have thought that his
dignity had been stripped by the
examples I’ve already cited, even the
single sentence: “[he] would fuck a
snake if it would hold still for him.”
Maybe Jessica didn’t have time to read
the book closely or was flattered with
the opportunity to write a blurb.
Nevertheless, I think the book is
neither “fair” nor “honest” unless
vicious hearsay, unsubstantiated libel,
and poor literary criticism are the
order of the day.
--Donald Gutierrez: “Hamalian has
turned out a . . . generally judicious
account” (1993; zinkle.com; my
italics).
---Herbert Gold: “Gradually Linda
Hamalian allows developing understanding
of the rogue poet’s flaws—a
fabulizing of his own life, plus vanity,
capriciousness, erratic judgment ,
abusiveness toward both enemies and
ex-friends—to stain the portrait .
. .”
(jacket blurb; my italics).
Gold at least seems to be discussing the
same book that I read. The publisher
significantly puts Gold’s list of
qualities on the jacket cover as a way
to titillate readers about a “rogue”
poet’s life. Gold notices that there is
mudslinging (or exposing) going on, and
yet he is circumspect in eluding the
main thrust of her book, namely
Rexroth’s alleged mistreatment of women.
In my opinion, Hamalian’s book has done
irreparable harm to Rexroth’s
reputation. During the almost two
decades since it was published, his
literary stock has fallen precipitously.
Because of her fastidious research into
many of the facts of his life—despite
her bias—few writers are likely to redo
the project anytime soon. His work will
not be consistently under-appreciated,
it rises like cream in a myriad of
fields, yet her book, as the most
comprehensive “biography” of his life,
is where many readers will continue to
go for an appraisal of the man as a
whole. While reading her unflattering
portrait, I started to imagine how
readers who never met him would evaluate
him. A crucial tenet of Rexroth’s belief
system was that a poet must be an
intelligently functional human
being, but ironically Hamalian has
reduced him page after page to the
dysfunctional freak stereotype demanded
by straight society. [Note: Two years
after writing this paragraph I was
delighted to hear that a new biography
by Rachelle Katz Lerner, A Rage to
Order: Kenneth Rexroth, is
forthcoming from the University of
Michigan.]
In sharp contrast to Hamalian’s rude and
crude approach, most of Rexroth’s prose
essays, several on topical issues, are
resilient and often more poignant today
than when they were first published. And
some of his poetry still defies
assimilation by bourgeois society,
because the Social Lie he unmasks so
articulately has become ever more
transparent as the hypocrisy of USA
foreign policy unravels (cf. Harold
Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize speech).
Incidentally, Rexroth was using the term
“post-post-modernism” already in the
1970s, before theoretical works by
Fredric Jameson and others on
postmodernism became popular.
It is high time to move past Rexroth’s
controversial personality and delve into
his provocative ideas. He and
like-minded friends started the Randolph
Bourne Council in the early 1940s and
the Libertarian Circle right after the
war in San Francisco, the latter to
“refound the radical movement after its
destruction by the Bolsheviks and to
rethink all the basic principals and
subject to searching criticism all the
ideologists from Marx to Malatesta”
(149). At the very least we can enjoy
Rexroth’s insights and humor in his
poetry and prose, but it would be even
more important if people could come
together to “refound the radical
movement” and “rethink all the basic
principals,” perhaps on a blog site
(while keeping in mind Robert Fisk’s
caveat: “ ‘Activists’ spend hours and
hours emailing each other to no purpose
it seems to me, other than to say,
‘we’re losing.’ ”).
The ideas of Rexroth’s generation of
anarchist poets run the risk of being
marginalized as those of quaint
dinosaurs. I hope that people like him
who dedicate their lives for more than
personal fortune will not be demonized.
Kenneth Rexroth’s multi-faceted
activities make him difficult to
classify. He reminds me of the Japanese
game “mogura-tataki” 「土竜叩き」(wack-a-mole)
in which you hammer down moles with a
mallet but they reappear elsewhere. The
object of the game is to be faster at
striking them down than they are at
reemerging. Rexroth’s various talents
are akin to the moles in the game that
refuse to stay put.
Right-wing critics might shoot down
Rexroth’s radical politics, but they’d
probably be moved by his exquisite love
poetry. Critics who consider his love
poetry compromised by not being in synch
with his life story as they understand
it (like Hamalian) can still have high
regard for his nature poetry. Refer to
the nature verse as merely California
regional “bear-shit-on-the-trail” school
of poetry (as he self-mockingly did),
yet you might acknowledge that Rexroth
was a great translator and a philosopher
who encompassed wisdom of the west and
east (cf. Morgan Gibson’s fine study,
Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of
East-West Wisdom [Hamdon, CT:
Archon Books, 1986]). For those who
knock the profundity of philosophical
and theological meanderings, he was a
thoroughly down-to-earth poet (like this
unpublished ditty in his old age: “Love
Poem: All over the world/ At this
moment, beautiful/ Women are wiping /
Their assholes.”) (355) You may find
his ribald side inappropriate to your
bourgeois taste (Hamalian refers to his
“bad jokes and sophomoric remarks”
[401], forgetting that Rexroth was a
repository of American humor from
cowboys, vaudeville, the Ozarks and
elsewhere, and in this respect he
resembled Gershon Legman [1917-1999],
who faithfully copied graffiti limericks
from toilets and other locales around
the USA). Disregard Rexroth’s bawdy side
and his paintings might impress you as
exploratory and sophisticated, way
beyond the dilettantism associated with
most writers who pick up a brush. His
paintings were as much his essence and
as meaningful to him as his poems. (He
told me, “If the house starts
burning, just save the paintings.”) And
if you happen not to be moved by his
painting (like Hamalian), you might
still respect Rexroth’s detailed
guidebook to flora and fauna of the High
Sierras. If poetry with jazz or original
poetry or translations don’t suit your
fastidious tastes, you probably would
still consider his erudite essays on the
world’s classical literature to be an
education in itself. And so on and so
forth.
Rexroth’s house of culture has so many
windows and doors open that he will not
be relegated to obscurity because of bad
press in any one section. Wack-a-mole
here and there, but Rexroth will still
astonish you with another fascinating
angle. One day if “The Complete Works of
Kenneth Rexroth” is published, then
readers will be astonished at the
breadth of his diverse achievements.
Hamalian wrote that the first time she
visited Rexroth he “talked . . . politics (of
the conspiracy theory kind) into the
early morning hours.” What if the F.B.I.
or C.I.A. or N.S.A. or a nameless
intelligence organization was troubled
by what a nation of people who agreed
with Rexroth’s revolutionary (not
“re-volvo-lutionary”) politics and
cultural attitudes could do? After all,
he was a key figure in the break-apart
1960s and had mentored Allen Ginsberg,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other Beats
before they were radicals, and the Beats
then merged into the Hippies before
spreading worldwide. There would be no
better way to neutralize such a figure
than to have a biography like Hamalian’s
downplay his or her overall importance
by harping on a perceived personality
shortcoming. Highly significant is that
she never once addresses the potential
of Rexroth’s ideas in the contemporary
world but continually bashes him until
he is trivialized as a cantankerous
buffoon. The history of the anarchist
movement in the USA also deserves better
treatment of one of its leaders. Along
the way, Hamalian impoverishes us and
herself. The neo-cons currently in
Washington, D.C. should be proud to have
her book on their shelves and I’m sure
they wish they had such a biography for
each and every radical thinker with
potentially threatening ideas. Hamalian,
whether inadvertently or not, in the
cloak of feminist righteousness has been
doing the Man’s job.
In my opinion, Rexroth’s foremost talent
was his “ability” (the literal meaning
of the Japanese “Noh” theater that he
was so fond of) to construe almost any
situation—grave or ludicrous—into a
phrase that is eminently quotable. His
times and what he said were quite
different from those of Samuel Johnson,
Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, but Rexroth
had a similar knack for witty and
memorable utterances.
I see Rexroth’s legacy as radiating out
from his quotes to people who
subsequently search out his paintings,
poetry, prose and recorded performances.
Using Linda Hamalian’s book exclusively,
I fished out some of the gems she quotes
from various sources (including An
Autobiographical Novel) under
topics that I titled. I did so to
recuperate his voice, because reading
her book made me think that his quotes
were lotuses blossoming from her
unfriendly mud. In his own words he is
freed from the scandal and gossip, the
agenda-raising and rancor, as if to
present the reader a plateful of
vegetables without pouring an
unnecessary spicing on top to make their
edibility questionable.
If you enjoy the mind behind any or some
or all of the following Kenneth Rexroth
quotes, then I suggest that you skip
reading Linda Hamalian’s A Life of
Kenneth Rexroth (unless you are
researching “unfaithful poets and their
[un]faithful wives” or taking Professor
Kevin Blackburn’s “Tutorial 1:
Biographers Who Hate Their Subjects”
which focuses on “the pitfalls of bias
in the writing of biography”). You may
prefer to go directly to the dozens of
books Rexroth wrote and translated and
the website that has much prose material
by him and some about him:
www.bopsecrets.org.
Now that almost a quarter century has
passed since Rexroth’s death, we should
be able to evaluate which of his
utterances turned out to be correct and
which were off the mark. He managed to
be ahead of the curve, if not prescient
on many matters, and his work pushes us
to consider seriously the importance of
ecology, individuality in art praxis,
the dehumanization and alienation under
hyper-capitalism, and strategies to
recover sacramental human relationships
in a vapid political climate. He might
even have some insights about what to do
about people like Hamalian who have
“discovered the use of the rhetoric of
radical politics for reactionary
purposes” (360).
Hamalian really shouldn’t have the last
word on Rexroth (and neither should I).
Until a more sympathetic biography is
written, I prefer to let him speak for
himself. His quotes follow my untitled
poem.
* * *
* * *Kenneth
when you were alive
you were larger than life
you never said
when dead
you'd be larger
than death
you pirouetted integrity
your best friend, Laughlin
called you omniscient
in your late thirties
you wrote him a letter
admitting you couldn't
feed yourself and
were a beggar
from sheepherder
cowboy cook
horse wrangler
painter and poet
driver for Al Capone's lieutenant
you almost had to take a job
as a rat catcher not
even a dog catcher
a poetry book of yours
won a California prize
you had to borrow a suit
to attend the dinner party
you were rough on some
no patience for evil
you pushed yourself
to starburst heights
pioneer of jazz poetry
points massager
front guard aiding Japanese and
Japanese-Americans in San Francisco
to escape from horse stable fate
you hid them in your four rooms
you sent many mid-west
on a scam you devised
enrolling them in
correspondence schools
yet you couldn't afford a $10 pair of shoes
when you were almost forty years old
you saw the capitalist system as doomed
but wouldn't be fooled by Stalin's tactics
you led a hard life for a long time
because you always kept it real
as everything unravels
people will catch your worth
bodhisattva among reeds
shaken by the mindless
and soulless
humans never again
free as you were
future prohibits it
like the softly waving hand
of an Indian dancer
your poetry will last
as long as the language
ON CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM
“I starve under capitalism, and I would
starve under a dictatorship of the
proletariat for the same reasons. After
all I am interested in perpetual
revolution in a sense other than
Trotsky’s—the constant raising into
relevance of ignored values. Poetry has
for its mission in society the reduction
of what the Society of Jesus named
‘invincible ignorance,’ and the true
poet is as much to be feared by the
proletariat as by the bourgeoisie.”
[1931] (76)
Doom and destruction are inevitable
until humans escape “from the frozen
embrace of this dead economic system.”
(115)
ON IDEAS IN 1941
“Maybe I am slowly growing up and
learning that it is idle and tedious to
quarrel with others about their ideas.
After all, ideas are going to play a
very scant role in the world we are
entering.” (116)
ON REGISTERING AS A CONSCIENTOUS
OBJECTOR DURING WORLD WAR II
“Under such circumstances I feel one has
a responsibility to his species—it is
silly to spend one’s life talking about
‘Mutual Aid’—and then make socks in jail
or plant trees while one’s species tears
itself to pieces.” (107)
ON HISTORY
“The problem is to control history/ We
already understand it.” (104)
ON HIS DISILLUSIONMENT WITH A STALINIST
“Mr. Humphries is welcome to his opinion
of my vocabulary, but I came into the
Popular Front from the Left, and went
out by the same door. Mr. Humphries
knows this. He has either locked himself
in the burning building or left by some
other exit.” (105)
ON POETS’ WIVES
“Only Blake and Cowper ever got the kind
of wives poets should have, and Blake’s
was illiterate, and Cowper’s wasn’t his
wife.” (132)
“You marry a poet so you can have a
social feather in your cap, and then
treat him as though he had the nerves of
a ditch digger.” (169)
ON MEETING JANINA LEPSKA, HENRY MILLER’S
GIRLFRIEND IN 1942
“Like all Slavs, she gives off a sort of
muffed and booted aroma of Venus in
Furs.” (134)
ON BEING PUZZLED WHY EDITOR SELDEN
RODMAN WOULD PRINT E. B. WHITE
“Has he got, locked up at the bank, an
autographed picture of you fucking a
sheep?” (174)
ON POET JOHN CROWE RANSOM
“A late anal arch deacon.” (174)
ON REPORTING TO ENGLISH POET CHARLES
WREY GARDINER AFTER ENGLISH WRITER
CYRILL CONNOLLY HAD PASSED THROUGH SAN
FRANCISCO IN 1947
“We fed him and got him drunk and gave
him a marijuana cigarette and
everything.”
ON HIS OWN POETICS
My poetry aims to get into my “own
bowels and into the physical intimacies
of my relations with others and the
world. Most poetry is best when it is
about what the poet thinks of some pink
beloved pussy and not at all about
H[enry] A. Wallace and J.C. God.” (175)
ON THE BEATS AFTER CHAMPIONING THEM AND
FEELING BETRAYED (284), SPOKEN TO ALLEN
GINSBERG
“I know what you’re doing. I feel as if
I walked into a candy store and got
beaten up by a bunch of juvenile
delinquents.” (259)
ON JACK KEROUAC’S AUTOMATIC WRITING
“[T]errifying gibberish that sounds like
a tape recording of a gang bang with
everybody full of pod, juice and
bennies, all at once.” (269)
ON THE FACULTY OF BARD COLLEGE IN 1948
They like to get “drunk as perch orchard
swine.” (177)
ON ROBERT CREELEY WHO HAD AN AFFAIR WITH
REXROTH’S PREVIOUS WIFE, SPOKEN AT AGE
71 IN 1976
“Don’t mention that name in my presence;
I’ll beat the shit out of him if I ever
see him again.” (359)
ON HIS FRIENDS CHARLIE PARKER AND DYLAN
THOMAS
“like pillars of Hercules, like two
ruined Titans guarding the entrance to
one of Dante’s circles. . . . Both of them
were overcome by the horror of the world
in which they found themselves, because
at last they could no longer overcome
that world with the weapon of a purely
lyrical art.” (231)
ON CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
“[Trungpa is] a counter Buddha,
sometimes considered his brother, who
always goes about seeking whom he may
devour with ignorance and trying to
destroy the Buddha word.” (365)
ON CHILDREN
“Children [are] safest in a convent or a
whorehouse.” (292)
EUROPE FIRSTHAND---ON ENGLISH FOOD IN
1949
“Every time they set a plate in front of
you in a restaurant, you feel like suing
the management. . . . They can spoil
anything. All they have to do is take
food out of a package or tin and put it
on a plate and it becomes inedible.”
(404) “I’d rather be/ Fed
intravenously.” (294)
---ON ENGLISH ANARCHISTS
“You people are not anarchists, you are
just exceptionally English. You are even
more brutally rude than the rest of your
countrymen.” (193)
---ON HEARING SPOKEN FRENCH (HE
TRANSLATED THE WRITTEN)
“[It sounds like] “farting into
lettuce.” (202)
---ON VISITING GERMANY IN 1966
“The only civilized Germans departed in
smoke from the gas ovens.” (322)
ON WHY IN 1951 HE STARTED CHARGING 50
CENTS ADMISSION TO HIS FRIDAY LITERARY
EVENINGS
“To keep out the people who drop
cigarette butts in the goldfish bowl.”
(221)
ON HOW TO SURVIVE PRISON
Based on his experience in some “nasty
jails,” he said the trick of getting
through a prison term was never to think
of “any screw or warden as human.” (229)
ON EAST COAST ESTABLISHMENT LITERARY
CRITICISM
The kind favored by “the castrated
rabbits of Puddle, a magazine of
Piddle.” (239)
ON SEEING AN EMPTY CRATE ON THE FLOOR
WHILE ACTING AS M.C.
“This is a lectern for a midget who is
going to recite the Iliad in haiku
form.” (244)
ON COMMITMENT TO HIS WORK IN 1960 AT AGE
55
“I must get certain jobs done soon. This
is a debt—not just to society—but to the
society of generations to come. Of this
failure to do my duty, I am always
terribly aware.” (303)
ON THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN 1961
“[The social revolution has become] pot
and pussy.” (307)
Life deteriorated among the Flower
Children of Haight-Ashbury because
“nobody did the dishes; they were
screwing one another and everybody got
diseases. It was love time. No one
cleaned the bathrooms, the kitchen, the
urinals.” (412)
ON THE BOURGEOISIE
“Never trust a bourgeois millionaire.”
(354)
“My god, they think if you do it on your
side, you’re a freak.” (309)
“A snob is a person who imitates the
manners of the class above him.” (373)
ON “THE FUZZ” PLAYBOY (1967)
“[Police are involved] in a symbiotic
relationship within the illegal
communities—narcotics peddlers,
prostitutes, and gamblers—that function
as subcultures in the society.” (326)
“The Boss Heat in San Francisco got me
fired from three jobs at once, one of
which I had held for almost ten years.
Can I prove it? No. My informants refuse
to testify.” (330)
ON ILLUMINATION
“The Catholic contemplative, the Sufi,
the Buddhist monk follow counsels of
perfection—illumination comes as the
crown of a life of intense ethical
activism, of honesty, of loyalty,
poverty, chastity, and above all
charity, positive, outgoing, love of all
creatures. The good life creates the
ambiance into which spiritual
illumination flows like a sourceless,
totally diffused light.” (328)
ON CONFERENCES IN 1964, “PANELIZING
DISSENT”
“A characteristic social mechanism [is]
the institutionalization of dissent and
revolt. . . . Today Malcolm X is invited to
address executive seminars at
Shangri-las nestled in the snow-clad
Rockies.” (343)
ON THE JAPANESE ECONOMY IN 1975
“Japanese businessmen are only too well
aware that they owe their ever expanding
economy to the fact that seventy percent
of their taxes do not go for wars, past,
present and future.” (350)
ON THE USA IN 1975
“[It’s] a long dead corpse full of
fighting maggots cannibalizing each
other.” (351)
ON PSYCHOLOGY AND MENTAL ILLNESS
“The idea that you can lie on a couch
for five years, spend twenty thousand
dollars, suddenly remember the first
time you saw your grandfather’s penis,
rise illuminated, and walk away in
complete mental health… is pure
bullshit.” (109)
Rexroth believed that mental illness
was, like tuberculosis, a disease of the
poor, and not “an indoor sport of the
Viennese upper class.” (109)
While on duty as an orderly in a mental
hospital, “No patient was put in
seclusion, unless he was so completely
demented that he ran around, threw
himself in all directions, and attacked
people. And no one was kept in restraint
except people with brain damage from
strokes or trauma who were unconscious
and would roll out of bed and injure
themselves.” (108)
[Rexroth said that the only people he
thought should ever receive capital
punishment were the doctors who ordered
shock therapy and lobotomies for their
patients. (394)]
ON RESPONDING TO A FEMINIST WHILE ON
STAGE
“I may not look that way, but I was a
feminist before most of your mothers
were born.” (353)
“[I write poetry to] please women—not to
bitch about them.” (353)
ON RACE IN 1947
KR translation of an epigram
by Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330-395),
the last great Roman historian:
Dawn after dawn comes on the wine
Spilt on books and music,
And on the stained and tumbled pillows.
And then, while we are paying
No attention, a black man comes
And roasts some of us, and fries
Some of us, and boils some of us,
And throws us all in the dump.
ON RESPONDING TO THOSE WHITES IN 1961
WHO CLAIMED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
HAD ACHIEVED ITS OBJECTIVES
“If you are being raped in the kitchen
or burned alive in the woods, it is
small consolation to know that all the
world condemns your persecutors as evil
men. . . . The end of the road is total
social indifference as to race, not in
the Five Spot or the Blue Note [jazz
clubs]; not in City College; not in a
political rally. . . . It means that race
won’t make any difference if you’re a
plumber and go to the Plumber’s
Convention. It won’t make a particle of
difference with your neighbors in your
apartment house or suburb. It won’t make
any difference to the kids your kids
play with, or to the young men and women
your sons and daughters choose to
marry.” (307-8)
ON HIS FIRST TIME IN NATURE (1924)
“To the southwest the great mountain
rose up covered with walls of ice. There
was no one near me for miles in any
direction. I realized then, with
complete certainty, this was the place
for me. This was the kind of life I
liked best. I resolved to live it as
much I could from then on.” (32)
ON HIS STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA AT SANTA BARBARA
“They’re all stoned and they’re all
illiterate.” (332)
This critique by John Solt of Linda Hamalian’s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth was originally published online (along with several other articles on Rexroth) here. For a briefer critique along the same lines, see Ken Knabb’s A Clueless Life of Kenneth Rexroth.