The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

Rating:
Summary: An overdue Celebration of a great poet
Review: Kenneth Rexroth Complete Poems

This is a long overdue publication, uniting all of Rexroth's short poems and all of his long poems, previously published as two separate volumes. Rexroth has unfortunately become an marginalized figure from the American poetic canon, to everybody's loss. Rexroth in life and in art was and is a bit too much of an iconoclast, a cantankerous rebel, more interested in being in and of the world as a progressive than in pursuing some aesthetic ideal or in enhancing personal reputation among the academic, ivory-tower gatekeepers who have taken control of the canon.

It is too easy for students raised on a steady diet of contrived formalist poetry (Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, etc) to find fault with Rexroth's poetry - that it could be less of this, more of that. Of course we can say we don't read Rexroth any more because he doesn't write "real poetry" in post-Eliot tradition of meters and forms. This of course is antithetical to Rexroth's work and life and also ignores the very real, but very personal, form and structure of Rexroth's prosody and poetics. For Rexroth, a poem is never a lab specimen to be methodically dissected under the knife of analysis. he doesn't sit down to construct a perfect sestina or sonnet on the nature of snow with appropriate classical references and a sprinkling of Italian phrases to show off. Fortunately I discovered Rexroth when I was an eighteen year old. I still read Rexroth. I haven't read Lowell in years.

Poetry, especially Rexroth's poetry, is a practice in dialogue with life. And poetry, like life, transcends the structures and contexts which contain us and our words. Rexroth's life and poetry were united in a way that is stylistically modernist, lyrically Romantic and clearly in the anti-academic line of poetry running from Whitman to the present. So many of Rexroth's poems are filled with I's and You's and names of places and people and experiences Rexroth lived through and form touchstones in his art. One can almost piece together an autobiography (in fragments) out of his poems.

I find that my appreciation of Rexroth's poetry is enormously enhanced by an appreciation for his life, and for the five points that defined the star of Rexroth's life: a radical politics, an urgent need for contact with and quasi-scientific scrutiny of the natural world, a strong sexual appetite, an ecumentical love of the arts and literature, and a search for the experience of the with the diaphanous, the mystical, the metaphysical, and the religious. These elements of Rexroth's poetry blend and merge and interplay with each other in fascinating ways. For example, the August 22, 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti becomes a powerful point of reference in Rexroth's poetry for Rexroth's politics - there is an elegaic nostalgia in Rexroth's politics, a longing for a time when the future still seemed full of hope for change. S & V are Rexroth's loss of political innocence. Throughout the 1930's Rexroth found himself hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains in August, on the anniversary of the death of S & V. In much of Rexroth's poetry from that time, then we find him present in a world of pine forests, clouds, and mountain peaks - often accompanied by a lover - looking down on and looking back to the world of politics, injustice, and societal violence with a combination of nostalgia and disappointment. In "the Phoenix and the Tortoise", one of Rexroth's great long poems, we find the poetic "I" on camping on the beach, reaching back through language across the ages of the planet, the onlooker of a scene of a dead japanese man's body found by beachgoers washed up on the beach at the height of the second world war. Rexroth the outsider, conscientious objecter to WWII, reflecting on the ages of the earth, the passage of his own life, and the tragedy that is unfolding in his own society as it mobilizes to crush a nation whose culture by this time was already becoming a powerful counterpoint to his own. Finally, in December, 1952, Rexroth wrote "For Eli Jacobson," which is my favorite Rexroth political poem, we read

"There are few of us now, soon / There will be none. We were comrades /Together, we believed we / Would see with our own eyes the new / World where man was no longer / Wolf to man, but men and women / Were all brothers and lovers / Together. / We will not see it. / We will not see it, none of us. "

Rexroth has always been a pleasure to read. And that is all that matters at the end of the day. Even if we cannot get Rexroth back into the syllabi of college English classes at first, he at least belongs on the shelves of the rest of us.

Of course, the Rexroth library is not complete until we see a Complete Prose volume to accompany this. That is another Amazon review in the making, however. If any readers of this review are in Santa Barbara, CA, place a flower on Rexroth's grave for me.



Rating:
Summary: An entomologist, not a bug.
Review: Kenneth Rexroth was one of the most significant and influential American poets of the last half of the 20th century. This long overdue volume collects all his published poetry, as well as a wealth of previously uncollected material. Rexroth's erudition is remarkable, and his strongly syllabic verse is sometimes subtle, sometimes didactic, but always richly musical and intellectually sophisticated. His long poems, particularly "The Phoenix and the Tortoise" and "The Dragon and the Unicorn" are especially recommended, as are the "translations" he wrote in the guise of a Japanese woman poet, "The Love Poems of Marichiko."

Rexroth has for too long been overshadowed by his brief association with the Beats. Hopefully, this collection will demonstrate the lasting contribution he made to American literature.

Now with any luck Sam Hamill and Company at Copper Canyon will see fit to publish a collected translations, and perhaps a collected prose...

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: This collection of Rexroth's complete poetry is long overdue. Maybe this volume will force academia to revisit his work and finally place him among the greatest American poets of the last century, which is precisely where he belongs. His poetry is learned and has a deceptive simplicity. With the exception of his early cubist work, his poetry is remarkable for its clarity. He wrote some of the finest nature and love poetry of his generation. The beauty of Rexroth's poetry is that the reader gets to experience what it is like to engage with life fully. Buy a copy for yourself as well as one for a friend. You will not regret it.