Kenneth Rexroth: Selected Poems (and Prose)
Edited by Aoki Eiko,* Taguchi Tetsuya and John Solt , translated into Japanese by Katagiri Yuzuru, Kitasono Katue, Shiraishi Kazuko, et al. Tokyo: Shichōsha,* 2017. Kaigai shijin bunko (“Library of Foreign Poets”).
Introduction by Tetsuya Taguchi
1. Preliminaries
20th century USA gave birth to Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82), who was a great poet, painter and thinker. He was a dyed-in-the-wool, non-violent anarchist. He wasn’t simplistically anti-establishment, but he rebelled thoroughly against the coercive means of linguistic expression of the societal system and was an embattled artist. The first poem included in this selection, “Portrait of the Author as a Young Anarchist” [1956] ends with the seven lines:
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 shat in the golf holes.
I don’t suppose such a poem would find its way into school textbooks. Because poetry from the outset has had the hidden capacity of subversion, in a work like the one above in which the political message is extremely explicit and the establishment recognizes it as subversive, it’s no wonder were it to get entwined in the net of censorship.
Rexroth’s development as an artist and thinker cannot be divorced from the historical development of the Modern West. For Japanese readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of that history, rather than rattle off a string of proper nouns associated with that history, I will introduce Rexroth’s relationship with Japan. Japanese might feel indebted to him in a number of ways. The efforts he exerted for Japan were definitely not those of the superficial literary merchant whose interest in the foreign cultures is calculatingly based on exploiting it for his own profit. Rather, Rexroth’s more genuine understanding is based on how he envisions the world that will emerge after the fall of Western civilization as we know it.
Ezra Pound’s immersion in Confucianism is well known, but Rexroth, unlike Pound, could actually read and write Chinese and Japanese. Although by no means perfect, Rexroth nevertheless had a working ability to converse in Japanese.
From early on, Rexroth was apprehensive about the inevitable destruction that he felt ultimately would be wrought on the earth as a consequence of the capitalism and individualism ushered in by the Modern West. One could make a case that his longtime interest in Asian cultures was because Japan provided him with the possibility of pursuing his idealized “community of love.”
2. Rexroth and Japan
Rexroth first went to Japan in 1967 and stayed in Kyoto. He had first become interested in Japanese culture already in childhood, and that influence is already evident in his 1944 book of poems The Phoenix and the Tortoise. His well-known book of translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, was published in 1955, twelve years prior to his first Japanese trip, but according to the correspondence in Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, the anthology was already completed in 1947.
The 1940s, especially the first half, were especially horrible for Japan-US relations. Nevertheless, as Morgan Gibson has pointed out, not only did Rexroth maintain his defiant “conscientious objector” status throughout the war, but he overtly and covertly aided his Japanese-American friends who were sent to internment/concentration camps by safekeeping their valuables that would have been confiscated. According to Kodama Sanehide, author of American Poetry and Japan, Kenneth was a tad inconvenienced when asked to hold several Buddhist ancestral altars (butsudan) of friends, but he rose to the occasion. (Japanese Americans were allowed to take only what they could carry on their backs.)
Rexroth’s interest in Japan wasn’t limited to the classical poetry but extended to his contemporaries. In particular, he was fond of and corresponded with Kitasono Katue, and they met in Tokyo. Incidentally, Kitasono’s art and poetry have been experiencing a resurgence of interest in the USA in recent years, and in 2013 there was a solo exhibit of his work at LACMA. In 1978 a joint poetry reading was held with Kenneth Rexroth and Shiraishi Kazuko at the Kyoto coffee shop Honyaradō (which burned down in 2015), with Katagiri Yuzuru as MC. At that reading Rexroth mentioned in passing that Kitasono and he were longtime friends and, regardless of the reason, Rexroth found it regrettable that Kitasono’s excellent poems were no longer being read and appreciated at that time.
When Rexroth made a short visit to Japan for a PEN International Conference at which he gave a talk, he was pleasantly surprised to see how monuments and traces from the classical literature still remained in the present. He then returned with his wife for a full year in Kyoto, and thereafter they made a few more trips to Japan.
For Rexroth’s life and the footprints left in his work after going to Japan, I refer you to Morgan Gibson’s explanation and Aoki Eiko’s “Chronology.” Rexroth’s encounter with living Japan left a number of passionate poems that are included in New Poems and The Morning Star. The Love Poems of Marichiko translated by Kenneth Rexroth (1978) is a collection of short poems by a young, uninhibited Japanese who sings in the first person the joys of sexual love. It turned out to be a hoax not translated but written by Rexroth himself. That’s why Katagiri Yuzuru’s famous translation of it into Japanese was billed not as a “translation” but with the forced expression “an experimental reconstruction” (fukugen no kokoromi), which sounded so odd that it let the cat out of the hoax bag.
Rexroth was well versed in Tachikawa Shingon (Tantric Buddhism), and he attempted to show the extreme of combining mysticism and love in this polished series of poems. Moreover, at Nawate-Shijō in Kyoto and Ueno in Tokyo there are unusual temples that are rooted in remnants of the original Indian, Buddhist teachings regarding the goddess Marichi. In former times Marichi was known as the protector of prostitutes and samurai, and later generations went there to console the souls of their ancestors.
Rexroth introduced in English many Japanese poets, mostly women, including Shiraishi Kazuko, Yoshihara Sachiko and Ishigaki Rin. Shiraishi’s Seasons of Sacred Lust and the book of translations co-edited with Atsumi Ikuko, Women Poets of Japan, among others, are still widely read today, and these translations comprise yet another major accomplishment by him. Rexroth was an active supporter of women poets his whole life, and in Japan he established at his own expense the “Kenneth Rexroth Poetry Prize for Women Poets,” which was awarded by a committee from 1975 until 1981.
Rexroth’s book of translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, was well received and a follow-up volume was issued, One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese. These two books, along with One Hundred Poems from the Chinese and One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, were so popular that they were given as Christmas presents. Harvard professor emeritus Howard Hibbett, who met Rexroth in Tokyo, considered his translations of classical Japanese poetry among the best English-language versions. As a translator, Rexroth’s achievements include poetry from various languages, including Greek, Spanish, Italian and French. It seems fitting that Rexroth, who translated and introduced so much Japanese poetry into English, should have a selection of his own fine verse published in Japanese.
3. Kenneth Rexroth: A seminal literary figure in the USA
Rexroth was a “self-made man” and autodidact. He was born in South Bend, Indiana and spent his adolescence honing his sensibilities in Chicago, which was even at that time a preeminent center of progressive culture. His action-packed Chicago life is vividly recounted in detail in his An Autobiographical Novel (1964). Rexroth used to read the whole, authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica once a year to refresh his memory, a feat difficult to imagine in the age of Google search and Wikipedia. Incidentally, he penned the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “The Art of Literature,” in which he traversed unrestrainedly the literary terrain worldwide from ancient to modern times. This survey has continued to be a must-read for literary scholars.
An article by Robert Kirsch (1922-80) attests to the extensive erudition of Rexroth. Kirsch wrote a book-review column for the Los Angeles Times from 1952 until his death. He described Rexroth as follows: “I have never mentioned a name, no matter how obscure, in Albanian or Zulu literature which did not bring forth an informed response or tasty anecdote from Ken. These matters are never trivial, never banal. They are always connected. That is his triumph as a poet and a critic, the sense of interaction between life and words, people and places, why his sensibility is complex and interesting.”
Furthermore, this knowledge wasn’t gained from a public education; rather, he was self-taught in the American tradition of the self-made man. In Japan, there has been the enduring tendency to belittle the self-educated, but according to author Koyama Shun'ichi, the essence of learning is in being self-taught, because one is not stymied within a framework, whereas the result of free conceptualizing is the accumulation of surprisingly vast knowledge with practical application.
To comprehend Rexroth’s literary work, it is important to grasp the specific characteristics of this very American phenomenon. Rexroth’s true-to-life image vividly emerges in the record of the poetry reading “Kenneth Rexroth at Honyaradō,” organized and recorded by Katagiri Yuzuru. At a reading in the USA, Rexroth once said to the audience, “My poems are about revolution, sex and mysticism. Which of the three would you like to hear?” Without missing a beat, a woman shouted out, “What’s the difference?” Rexroth was impressed and repeated the story on occasion when giving readings. That atmosphere remains in the Honyaradō transcript.
Rexroth lived through 1920’s and 1930’s Chicago, where he participated in a range of artistic and political experimentation. He found himself in the midst of Anarchism and Syndicalism [workers controlling the means of production], which were not fringe movements. In Japan the rapid urbanization, industrialization and expansion of capitalism exposed the contradictions in the society. Taishō (1912-1926) democracy gave birth to Ōsugi Sakae (1885-1923)—a rare Japanese anarchist—and murdered him in a gruesome manner. In a somewhat parallel way, Rexroth and the workers in the IWW felt an upsurge of angry emotion at the betrayal in the case of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, an event that symbolized “The Social Lie” he had discovered. If you search the web for “Sacco and Vanzetti,” you will arrive at a video of Rexroth reading the fierce words of his protest poem.
From the Paris Commune of the late 19th century through the anti-war movement during the 20th century USA invasion of Vietnam, revolution of the masses was considered a real possibility. Rexroth extolled the praises of revolution and free love, which are crystallized in his poems. Through these poems we can also experience revolution and free love, albeit vicariously.
Rexroth, who used to refer to universities as “fog factories,” probably was not holding his breath for his poems to gain acceptance into academic classrooms and textbooks. Why do academia and the lit-crit establishment not hold Rexroth’s achievements in as high a regard as one would expect? Nobody until now has clearly explained the reason for this lapse. Perhaps they fear that if the kernel of his thought were to be transmitted to the next generation and widely diffused, it would produce an unpalatable outcome.
In 1978, I attended Rexroth’s poetry reading at Honyaradō, the abovementioned cafe, considered the sacred hub of the anti-establishment, which was located in Kyoto near the Imadegawa campus of Dōshisha University. Right at the start Rexroth said, “Most of my left-wing friends and comrades in the workers’ movement were stuffed in concrete, and they sunk to the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.” I was blown away by the vitality of his words. In the 1960’s Rexroth spoke out publicly with no holds barred about police corruption, and, as a result, he lost three freelance jobs, including his popular column in the Hearst newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. John Solt’s article describes Rexroth’s clash with the authorities at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the poet taught, and their attempts to dismiss him. Rexroth was noble-minded, and over his lifetime he patiently endured both the oppression of blatant authoritarianism and the rigors of poverty. He came to represent what remained of the USA’s frayed conscience.
One of the reasons that Rexroth currently is not evaluated as highly as he should be is that the direct and intimate connection Rexroth and others had developed between writer and reader has since dissipated. Putting to use the technology that continues to develop at an alarming pace and magnitude, explanations appear at an astronomical rate, pass through the enormous media network and are swept away just as quickly. With incessant marketing and advertising, we have reached a state in which it becomes difficult to grasp the structural system, what Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) referred to as “cultural hegemony.” The problem is that if this newest stage of Western civilization’s overpowering market economy alters and subjugates nature to an irreversible degree and then disallows any human check on the market economy, because the decisions would be thereafter left to algorithmic logic, it has become abundantly clear that the market economy is a “ghost” that gobbles up everything in its path, and in the end the human environment will be fated to destruction. Rexroth already in 1956 published In Defense of the Earth (New Directions). He would often seclude himself in the mountains for months on end. What he learned from the experiment of coexisting in nature was especially important to him.
Rexroth didn’t fall into the characteristically simplistic thinking of “either you or I,” the absolutist dogma of “communists,” namely the ideology emanating from the lineage of Russian Marxists. Why was Rexroth adept at unreservedly elucidating the huge contradictions in capitalist society?
In his An Autobiographical Novel, which I referred to previously, there is a thought-provoking episode. Rexroth managed a nightclub when he was 16 years old and, because he was underage, the Chicago police arrested him and put him in jail. Without heat and to stave off the intense cold, Rexroth huddled for human warmth with African-American prisoners in their cell. In his 1961 newspaper column, “The Black Muslims,” Rexroth expressed his unequivocal solidarity with African-Americans. Considering the white supremacist thinking that was rampant in the USA during the early 1960’s and again today, his conspicuous courage is indeed startling.
When Rexroth received the California Book Award's Silver Medal for In What Hour (1940), he was so poor that he needed to borrow a suit to attend the ceremony. What did being in such financial straits mean to him? In the Lee Bartlett-edited book of his correspondence with James Laughlin, there are various incidents depicted. During his San Francisco years, he lived in the African-American part of town. There are vignettes showing the variety and breadth of Rexroth’s behavior and his interaction with different classes, such as in the following letter from 1947:
You’d love the night I saw Zorina! First, I spent till 3:30 eating cheese sandwiches in a depressing restaurant and talking—she being very much like most highbrow girls—but still—beneath it all—a really great person. Then—my head in a whirl—I went for a walk. This most dismal she-tramp stopped me and told me—while having a violent fit of shakes—that she had been hit over the head, raped and her purse stolen—and she had no place to sleep. This was all probably true—her back was covered with dirt, she had two handsome eggs on the back of her melon, and she had no purse. Since she was in no state to carry the banner and refused to go to hospital—I set out to find her a room in the Tenderloin. The town sure had changed. It took me about an hour of trudging around and trying to persuade night clerks. At last I roused an old madam I know, who took her in for $1.75. I then noticed, in her hotel, a light through the door of a girl I know and, being very tired by all this, paid her a call. She is not very young—is half Chinoise—though she looks full blooded Chinese—and has only recently kicked a son of a bitch of a habit. We sat on the bed & talked—she in her negligee, her body spotted like a leopard from shooting gen shi (scrapings of opium pipes, which leave a small ulcer, and then a scar like a bluish vaccination mark). If you put it in a book—nobody would believe it—I suppose there do not exist 3 more dissimilar women. I really do lead a strange life—or rather—I certainly know a strange assortment of people….
The following story is from the heyday of the Beats. A reporter showed up at Rexroth’s door to write a cover story for Time magazine featuring the poet who was dubbed the “Father of the Beats.” [Rexroth disowned the moniker, famously claiming, “An entomologist is not a bug!”] The reporter up to that time hadn't been especially versed in radical politics, ideological issues or Asian culture. After listening to Rexroth, he was deeply affected, realizing what fruitless drudgery his job had been. The reporter then quit his job at Time and became a Beatnik. Rexroth lost forever the opportunity of being on the cover of the prestigious magazine. He wasn't discouraged at all. Rather, he was delighted that he had changed someone’s life for what he considered the better.
In An Autobiographical Novel, Rexroth relates how he felt uncomfortable when offered substantial sums of money for his paintings. He questioned the materialistic values of capitalism. Rexroth was oftentimes economically overwhelmed by the system, but he created in its place artistic values as a by-product that helped enable the development in the reader of an elementary sense of esthetics. By doing so, he led away from sheepish choices towards more reasonable directions.
Finally, I would like to say a few words about the principles involved in editing this volume. Included is a historically significant translation of a Rexroth poem by Kitasono Katue. However, most of the poems in the selection were translated by Katagiri Yuzuru, whom Rexroth knew well and completely trusted. Katagiri was also one of the few poets in Japan who had experienced first-hand the Beat scene in San Francisco. From Rexroth and Katagiri’s witty banter—like rock stars on the stage at Honyaradō—we get a sense of how much fun and how engaging poetry and poets can be. Also, we have included Rexroth’s most representative poetry from his early to late years, the latter a ripe period when his works reveal a deep connection to Japan.
Aoki Eiko selected and translated five of Rexroth’s newspaper columns, which demonstrate various aspects of his far-ranging interests. From these columns we can apprehend a critical mind about societal issues that are still extremely fresh and relevant in the contemporary world. People who can read English should avail themselves of the many prose works left by Rexroth that are obtainable either in print or in the “Kenneth Rexroth Archive” at Ken Knabb’s website, www.bopsecrets.org. To round out aspects of the poet and his works, we solicited articles from Shiraishi Kazuko, John Solt and other poets, scholars and journalists who had a deep connection to Rexroth. The humanities require a determined reading of texts. If texts become incomprehensible—no matter how pleasing the literary works may appear to be—as with profound, philosophical pools, they will merely vanish from the face of the earth. Even if they encounter dark ages, they survive without decaying. I would hope that readers who take this book in hand might experience from Rexroth a kind of torchlight transmission of what amounts to a flickering of the wisdom of the species.
Translated by John Solt
*The Shichōsha series of world poets currently includes William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Charles
Baudelaire, W. H. Auden, Walt Whitman, Paul Verlaine, e.e. cummings, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Ezra
Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Fernando Pessoa.
Significantly, Kenneth Rexroth (volume 17) is now standing shoulder to shoulder with his literary peers in Japan
before he has gained similar recognition in the U.S.A. Also significant is that he precedes any Beat poets in the
ongoing series.