Uri Hertz

The King is Dead: Long Live the King!

A Critical Study of the Literary & Cultural Impact of Kenneth Rexroth’s
Poetry & Jazz on the 1950's San Francisco Literary Bohemia

Rexroth reciting poems from In Defense of the Earth at a salon in his Scott St. apartment, February 5, 1957: (l to r) Ruth Witt-Diamant, Ida Hodes, Eva Triem, unidentified person, Jack Spicer, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Ariel Parkinson, William Everson and Kenneth Rexroth

I

During the postwar era, key sectors of government and industry dominated a field of production of cultural symbols consisting of radio, film, television, print media and billboards. Collective energies previously harnessed by the victorious war effort were directed into building infrastructures for suburbanized conformism. Social engineering was put into place which generated uniform identities for mass consumerism through freeway systems remapping zones of urban design and construction as through images projected by mass media. A parallel, antimatter dimension of literary bohemianism had broken away from this dominant cultural habitus yet mirrored it under conspiratorial guise and in distorted forms. As bohemian literary culture in San Francisco actually reached its postwar peak of the 1950’s before it was co-opted and sold to the masses, Kenneth Rexroth was the lightning rod charging a dynamo of poetic, critical and political energies which swirled around him. Knowledge channeled by Rexroth into younger generations enabled authentic literary-historical experience to survive under threat of oblivion. The encounter between Rexroth and the beats caused shifts in the center of gravity of literary counterculture. It was an alarm set to go off ten years later (with San Francisco at its leading edge) and awaken farther-reaching cultural change by releasing explosive social forces built up along generational fault lines. Ironically, consumerism eventually cannibalized and absorbed many of the most marketable of the changes during and after the 60’s, blurring the distinction between authenticity and stereotype.

Whether from memory or imagination, picture Rexroth at any stage of his literary life reciting poetry in front of a jazz band, pacing the stage like a lion, wiser than a sphinx, his proud head held high like an ancient sculpture, his face a classical yet expressionistic mask of tragedy reflecting untold literary, political and personal struggles. The unrelenting bite of Rexroth’s world-weary yet angrily impassioned voice cut the air with the sting of his ironic humor and highly- sharpened intellect. His voice was a dramatic instrument for expressing the meaning and impact of each line of a poem as well as what lay behind it. He had been honing it to expressive precision since he first acted on stage as a young man in Chicago.

His dramatic range and encyclopedic knowledge had been gained on the boards, as it were, through performing, reading, observation of and direct experience in nature, political activism and behind-the-scenes participation in literature, art and theater. Due to the authenticity of his experiential connection to the traditions which flowed through these sources, he had a broad concept of literature and the arts rooted in people’s political and cultural institutions from revolutionary movements such as anarchism and socialism to popular forms of entertainment including the music hall and vaudeville. Tragic inflections of classical theater with the dignified bearing of high art and literature met the low spiel of a vaudeville emcee or a carnival barker in the intoxicating matrix of authentic cultural-historical reality where his conception of jazz-poetry had originated. Midwestern, cosmopolitan and polyglot, the international strands which constituted different aspects of Rexroth's poetic vision were woven into recordings he made fronting jazz bands in the late fifties.

Kenneth Rexroth entered the 50’s doing poetry and jazz two decades after he had first begun reciting his poems to live jazz accompaniment. Rexroth’s history with this hybrid medium extends from 1920's Chicago to 50's San Francisco and beyond. In liner notes for his Fantasy Spoken Word Series album, he tracked jazz-poetry’s proto-origin to 19th century French poet, Charles Cros (Rexroth had translated his “Hareng saur”). He wrote that Cros recited poetry fronting Parisian café bands which played popular dance music behind his verse. In these liner notes, and in subsequent newspaper and magazine articles, Rexroth stated that Langston Hughes, Maxwell Bodenheim and he were reciting poetry with “the jazz of the time” at the Green Mask in Chicago back in the 20’s. The mistaken claim that poetry and jazz began in the 1950’s is based on Kenneth Patchen’s assertion that he pioneered it in 1950 as well as on readings and recordings by Patchen, Rexroth and Ferlinghetti done in years which followed.

Poetry and jazz was an art form with which Rexroth had long been developing his connection, but it made up only one aspect of his wide-ranging poetic, literary, political and theatrical activism. Rexroth referred to the 50’s as the time when he, Patchen, Ferlinghetti and Lawrence Lipton had revived it (on the west coast) in a modern-jazz context. He sardonically characterized beat poetry and jazz as a fad which died away. He wrote in a 1975 article in the San Francisco Examiner that he had grown tired of the shadiness of underworld nightclub owners and had gotten out of performing poetry and jazz in clubs when it became a craze despite working thousand-dollar-a-night gigs at key venues around the country and enjoying the musical backing of the house band at The Cellar in North Beach.

Lyrical, neo-classical, modernist and politically-committed, Rexroth brought his highly-developed philosophical point of view to this vehicle of poetic and musical expression rooted in popular culture. Rexroth’s poems performed to jazz were generally around the length of a popular jazz standard, each chorus consisting of thirty-two bars with a bridge. When he wrote and started performing “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (his elegy on the death of Dylan Thomas) with jazz backing, he extended the length to over twenty minutes and opened up the composition into a sequence of movements, expanding from the format of the jazz standard into theatrical dimensions of mid-20th century experience depicted through modes of ancient ritual. The poem’s synthesis of sound and sense should be received like a spoken jazz opera rather than as a poetic or musical product measured against forms tied to conventions of genre. Totally up-to-date yet already grounded in earlier decades of the jazz age and in a modernist interpretation of ancient drama, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” charted a historically- rooted, hyper-charged, moment-to-moment, satirical anarchist critique of the postwar militaristic mega-state machine.

On Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk, Rexroth draws upon a spectrum of moods ranging from absurdist humor to lyrical meditation on love and death, demonstrating a developed understanding of jazz phrasing and intonation through his interplay with the music. He recites “Married Blues” to the backing of his band which plays a slow-to-medium tempo bop take on Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” with the head consisting of arranged blues horn lines. After an opening horn salvo, Rexroth takes the stage intoning staccato syllables in a voice which is warm and humorous, yet intimate and confidential, making it effortlessly clear when to come in on the measure and when to hold back behind the beat. The poem explores accepting erotic contradictions which permeate relationships in the ways they are anchored to day-to-day aspects of mundane urban existence, or at least resigning oneself to this state of affairs. “That’s the way life is / everybody’s in the same fix / it will never be any different,”2 he concludes, synchronized with the rhythm section as it walks up to an ending played by the horns.

The dynamic interlocking of poet and instrumentalists is up front in the opening line of “Nicholas, the Experimental Dog,” Rexroth’s translation of Raymond Queneau’s grotesquely whimsical “Nicolas chien d’experience.” The tune kicks off with the band swinging “St. James Infirmary.” Rexroth does a tongue-in-cheek rendering of Queneau’s pataphysical descriptions from the life of a misfit, whether dog or man, afflicted with ill-fated misfortunes and weirdly-placed body parts. “State and 32nd, Cold Morning Blues” is an uptempo bop number. Rexroth explores an urban street aesthetic consisting of cubistically juxtaposed minute particulars spliced into images and phrases depicting disintegrating situations. Desperate city tableaux roll in clear, direct language riffing along with abstract piano blues and bopping horn lines. With humoristic and amused immediacy, Rexroth’s voice communicates that as grim as the reality of the streets may seem too early on a desolate morning, the poet’s eye sees human comedy with a sublime sense of pathos embedded in the unadorned starkness of the situations upon which the poem is based.

“Do Not Talk Anymore” (extracted from Rexroth’s “When We with Sappho”) is musically and poetically unlike the three playfully humorous numbers. A bowed bass opens and ends the poem in ballad tempo, signaling a complete change of atmosphere and mood to the listener. The horns play sad lyrical lines and Rexroth recites in a melancholy yet inspired voice. This poem is a deeper and more serious reflection on his resolve to savor languid moments of love on a warm afternoon with time and the season passing, “as summer moves to autumn,” even in the face of the inevitability of death. The instrumental sections of the number swing into double time. The saxophonist improvises a solo before the band slows back down to ballad tempo. Rexroth evokes the moment. Once again the band swings double-time behind a trumpet solo and then changes again to ballad tempo, opening up a big space in the composition for Rexroth to take his poem and the moment out to the ending in ecstatic yet regretful tones.

II

“Thou Shalt Not Kill,” Rexroth’s elegy for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, is his contribution to Poetry Readings in the Cellar2, a Fantasy LP cut with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in live performance. Rexroth’s musically perceptive, jazz-hip intoning of poetic lines aggressively interacts with the dynamics of the music by exploring their tonal and emotional potentials. There is a striking difference between the push and pull of Rexroth’s dialogue with the musicians and Ferlinghetti’s straightforward reading of his poems. Ferlinghetti’s “Autobiography” alternates between the poet reading lines and the band playing, but there is none of the call and answer improvisation essential to jazz. On “St. Francis,” the poem is read over the music while it is being played, yet once again they are not mutually responsive. The musicians are swinging their parts while Ferlinghetti reads in his laconic style, his voice sounding more animated than when reciting the poem solo. Other than that, poetry and music are performed at the same moment but on parallel tracks which fit together to make a whole composition. The combination of voice and instruments produces theatricality abstractly connected and synchronized, possibly an understated reference to Samuel Becket meets Merce Cunningham and John Cage in a straight-ahead bebop groove. Rexroth’s delivery, on the other hand, changes in response to shifting dynamics as he leads the music played by the ensemble, cueing the musicians with his voice and directing them as to when and how to come in, intensify and, at key moments, explode. Reciting the way a jazz vocalist does but without singing, he explores the intonation and range of his spoken voice as an instrument in a kind of neo-classical American vocalese swinging in a deeply dramatic international groove.

The musical backing for “Thou Shalt Not Kill” dwarfs the humorous and/or lyrically rendered blues, bebop and ballads of Rexroth’s other recordings. This jazz-poetry suite is structured in a series of four movements corresponding to clusters of stanzas in the long poem. It has a range of musical and vocal dynamics marking a most ambitious point of development of his jazz-poetry concept, and it is in a class of its own in the field of recorded collaborations between poets and musicians. The musical setting begins with the lone voice of a trumpet playing a single anguished yet heraldic tone. A solemn, muffled drum roll and a bowed bass playing long tones bring in Rexroth’s voice. He utters the opening line in elegiac mode which sets up one of the poem’s dominant motifs, “They are murdering all the young men.”4 This movement of the poem is spoken as if on a theatrical set of a scene of ancient and timeless tragedy. Gazing upon the charred battlefield of the 20th century, he bears witness to the predatory victimization of the young in war. Rexroth recites in a mournful voice charged with immediacy, accompanied by the ceremonially ominous sound of muffled drum and bowed bass which creates a sense of benumbed anticipation. He narrates a ritual stoning of young men carried out before shocked witnesses. This disturbing sequence ends with Rexroth singling out those who are culpable in the killing with the exclamation, “You!”5

The third stanza of this movement begins with brooding horns punctuated by the accusatory second-person pronoun, “You.” “You are the murderer / You are killing the young men.”6 Speaking directly to those responsible for the slaughter, yet unnamed, Rexroth catalogues a sequence of cannibalistic torments. The horns and bowed bass play long tones as the fourth stanza invokes the tortures and persecutions suffered by St. Sebastian, identified as the one who is being ritualistically abused and killed. “You shot him with arrows, / then you beat him with stones.”7 In the fifth and closing stanza of the first movement, Rexroth focuses on surrealistic images of savagery and greed with a grotesquely modern character to characterize the depraved moral as well as social position of the killers: “You, / The hyena with polished face and bow tie/ in the office of a billion dollar corporation … The vulture dripping with carrion / Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds … The jackal in double-breasted gabardines … Barking by remote control / In the United Nations / The vampire bat seated at the couch head … / The superego in a thousand uniforms / You, the finger man of Behemoth …”8 Rexroth introduces a dominant motif which develops as the poem progresses through its four movements: the killer has countless horrific faces and identities concealed among the corporate intelligentsia. The killer is a member of the university-educated elite who turns away from the lessons of history, economics and the social sciences in order to make a compromise with commercial capitalist/imperialist militarized society which generates and feeds a behemoth war machine devouring its young. The second movement’s modulation is from the archetypal, primitive and biblical images describing the murders – along with the poet’s accusations hurled at those responsible – to specific references to people Rexroth had known who met tragic ends before the time of the poem, many in violent acts of suicide. Invoking poets and literary bohemians such as Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, Sarah Teasdale, George Sterling, Ezra Pound, Maxwell Bodenheim and Edna St. Vincent Millay, he stridently asks “what happened to…” and “where are they?”9 Rexroth progresses through a series of questions which constitute the stanza, his voice modulating between the sacred liturgy of a high priest and the profane intonations of a carnival barker. Intensity builds, phrase by phrase, and the lives and deaths accumulate. Before the pause in each sequence of evocations, in a voice heavy with the gravity of resignation to time’s disintegration toward death, he answers. A saxophone moans and wails mournfully in the background. Increasing in bitterness each time, Rexroth alternately repeats timor mortis conturbat me10 (I am tormented by the fear of death), extracted from medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers.”11 Dunbar’s poem, written five hundred years earlier, is a crisply-rhymed and darkly somber meditation on death’s cruel finality. The poet reflects on deceased writers he has known and the circumstances under which they met their ends. Despite differences accounted for by the five hundred years which separate the two poems, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is in direct historico-poetic alignment with Dunbar’s “Lament.” Dunbar laments that he will never again see friends who have been taken by death. The poem rings with the names of departed friends as they are invoked stanza by stanza with a phrase which follows, telling something essential about what became of each one. Rexroth recounts the fates of doomed writers in the parallel section of his poem, every stanza punctuated with the phrase, timor mortis conturbat me, as a closing rhyme laced with equal parts of fatalism and finality.

The third movement of the poem begins with a solo walking bass joined by the piano playing blues chords as Rexroth asks, “Was their end noble and tragic / like the mask of a tyrant / like Agamemnon’s secret golden face?” He answers, “Indeed it was not.”12 While the parallel with Dunbar’s “Lament” is strongest in this section, Rexroth’s twentieth-century scope goes into complex and intricately developed literary, historical and cultural detail. He focuses on the problematic relations between radical bohemian poets, the protagonists of this section of the poem, and the social order which they refuse to join due to reasons ranging from political convictions to madness. One after another, beginning with a weary, injured soldier in a foxhole followed by a man mired in lice-ridden poverty, Rexroth describes the different ways these people’s lives were ended, each a fatal episode in dead-end situations characterized by urban misery. Each made a desperate, grimly-decisive move to violently put an end to life by self-abusive means. Two drowned themselves; another threw herself down a flight of stairs while yet another jumped from a balcony. One set herself on fire, another threw himself under traffic and still another turned on the gas. The trumpet comes in as the key question of the stanza turns into, “How many…” asking about the ones who “stopped writing at thirty”13 and sold out to mass commercial culture, taking jobs in the academy or in the corporate structure, and the ones who succumbed to alcoholism or were institutionalized.

The brief sequence which follows suddenly, but only briefly, changes the saturnine mood of lament which has dominated the poem up to this point. Drum and trumpet break into a short, staccato fanfare then stop. Rexroth announces in circus phrases, punctuated by another trumpet and drum fanfare, the name of French Dadaist or Surrealist poets or Russian Futurists whose deaths were tragically premature: “Rene Crevel! Jacques Rigaut! Antonin Artaud! Mayakovsky! Esenin! Robert Desnos! Saint-Pol Roux! Max Jacob!”14 Each of these revolutionary twentieth-century poets was destroyed, directly or indirectly, by the state or its apparatus in their uncompromising and relentless pursuit of a radical poetic and political vision. Rexroth places himself among poetes maudits whose tragic lives and deaths are recounted in the poem by using the first-person plural for the first time in the poem, indicating a shift in the progression. “All over the world / the same disembodied hand / strikes us down,”15 the poet exclaims as he relates these deaths to archaic sacrificial rites from mythology. Rexroth relates that he is no less subject to the situation which hounded his peers to death, nor to the collective and individual fate of radical bohemian writers of his generation.

Victor Serge’s elegiac poems, “Constellation of Dead Brothers,” “Max” and “Dialectic,”16 all three written during imprisonment or exile, reveal deep connections between his poetry and Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Serge, a life-long revolutionary, born in Belgium to Russian parents in 1890, who went to Russia in 1919 to participate in the Russian Revolution, was imprisoned and deported after his intellectual independence compelled him to stray from the party line. Suicided Russian poets Mayakovsky and Esenin were his peers. His book of poems, titled Resistance (City Lights), bears witness to lives of revolutionaries lost in ideological struggle with a revolution that had hardened into dictatorship, closing off possibilities dreamed by visionary poets, artists and theorists. He also criticized leading poet/activists of West European intelligentsias who remained silent about these imprisonments and executions out of unquestioning faith in Stalinism long after Soviet repressive measures, state crimes and mass murders had become known.

“Constellation” invokes ten dead friends, fellow conspirators during years of revolutionary struggle. Referring to each by first name, Serge gives the site and circumstances of their deaths one by one: Latvia, Spain, France, Shanghai and Hong Kong. “David… / in a quiet orchard in France… / six bullets for a 20-year- old heart / Vassili… / the wind effaces your tomb / in the cornfields of Armavir. / … the square resembles the cemetery… / and you are dying, / Nguyen, in your prison bed.” In “Constellation,”17 dated 1935, Victor Serge, after years of imprisonment and exile, concludes this desolate sequence of deaths with an unexpectedly affirmative statement: The course is set on hope.18 He concludes the poem repeating this phrase. Rexroth offers readers of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” no hopeful prospects. Written in the fifties, twenty years later, Rexroth’s poem reflects his take on the revolutionary struggle against the massive state machine in its postwar American manifestation.

III

Half a century of revisionism can obscure sources and tributaries as well as confuse effects for causes. To grasp the breadth and scope of Rexroth’s innovations in poetry and jazz, it is essential to trace their resonance on surrounding subcultures and examine his impact. The scene was set in mid-1950’s San Francisco where a new literary bohemia had emerged with Rexroth’s influential participation and leadership. Enter a generation of hungry poets converging on the San Francisco Bay Area from the East Coast, the Midwest, Southern California and the Pacific Northwest, born and raised during The Great Depression, who, by 1950, were rising from a lumpen proletariat of drug and sexual outlaws as well as descending from the college campus. By the time the beats were connecting with San Francisco, their jazz-hip ears could feast on poetry performances backed by rhythm section and horns. At a crossroads of fate converging in galleries and cafes, Allen Ginsberg encountered Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and the impact of this collision between politically-committed elder statesman Rexroth and ex-ad executive turned bohemian Ginsberg, driven by ambition to make it as a poet and determined to take the next step at any cost, changed the San Francisco poetry scene into beat counterculture later popularized in Kerouac’s novels and caricatured in corporate mass media..

At the close of the third section of “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” Rexroth invokes the name of Moloch, Babylonian devourer of children: “The-first born of a century / slaughtered by Herod / stuffed down the jaw of Moloch.”19 Allen Ginsberg was among young writers around Rexroth who were championed by him on the scene as well as in the press. Ginsberg repeats the name “Molloch” in a major section of “Howl”20 invoking a monstrous vision of the modern industrial state’s culpability in the destruction of the best minds of his generation. In long bopping poetic lines supercharged with strident prophecy, the poet denounces a system which feeds the young into a vicious war machine yet he affirms resignation to the beast’s thrall: “Molloch who entered my soul early.”21 Unlike Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” “Howl” neither incorporated song forms nor was accompanied by music, and in this sense was a different type of performance-poem, yet Ginsberg appropriated significant elements like Rexroth’s fusion of ancient imagery with modern poetics of “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” adapting and embedding them into “Howl” at an atomically-charged pace approximating the accelerated tempos of situations and hopped-up lives of the people depicted in his poem. For Rexroth, as for the beats, poetry went far beyond the bookish art relegated to hushed libraries, buttoned-up bookstores and hallowed halls of academia. Nevertheless, Rexroth was skeptical of what he considered to be the beats’ co-opting of the San Francisco Renaissance and their vulgarization of poetry and jazz into a tattered pop stereotype: “every petty imitation beatnik was ‘blowing words’ to pawn shop saxophones mended with scotch tape…”22 Jack Kerouac cruelly caricatured Rexroth in a satirical account of the Six Gallery reading in an early chapter of The Dharma Bums. In a letter written to Philip Whalen in June of 58, Kerouac expressed an almost paranoiac fear of what he perceived as Rexroth’s political attacks and revolutionary ambitions: “Lucien [Carr] says that Rexroth would destroy me if he had the chance. I can just see him ordering my head cut off in a revolution.”23 Beats who were close to Rexroth around the time of the Six Gallery reading later distance themselves from his influence. “We younger, hipper poets cringed to hear his jazz- backed recital of his death-ode to Dylan Thomas,”24 wrote David Meltzer for a Rexroth festschrift in Third Rail No. 8, 1987. In relation to the new streamlined, stripped-down and souped-up riff of postwar beat poetics, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” must have appeared anomalous in its expanded structure, uncompromising political commitment, relentless moral outrage and over-the-top vocal delivery compared to beat recordings in the genre.

The older mentor was writing dismissively about the beats not long after he had first championed them in the press. In a piece he wrote ten years after the fact, Rexroth described Kerouac and Ginsberg as a couple of out-of-town rubes who glommed on to the San Francisco underground and ran it into the ground: “…two prize students… showed up in San Francisco….Their names were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Both were extremely conventional writers with an inflexible Madison Avenue orientation. The liberating San Francisco atmosphere, free of market pressures, exploded them or maybe just gave them an incurable case of the bends. They took up and vulgarized any number of San Francisco customs—poetry-and-jazz, for one—which they almost immediately succeeded in destroying.”25 Rexroth’s jazz poetry carried seeds of revolutionary change which underwent mutation under the hands of poets of a younger generation, and he reacted to it in the press. Rexroth, in reviews of Kerouac’s writing in San Francisco papers and in the New York Times, characterized the younger beat’s prose about a jam session at a black jazz club south of Market Street as “missionary fricassee,” an overheated indulgence in primitivizing the sophisticated avant-gardism of the musicians.

Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is an angry lament for the disturbing fate of writers of his generation as well as an indictment of the system which victimized them. Ginsberg’s “Howl” recounts self-destructive lives of peers who were part of a cultural underground soon to become known as the beat generation. In the first half of the 20th Century, the pressure on psyches and nervous systems of poets made them too aware to ignore contradictions ripping apart the fragile human fabric. Both poets took a stand against the false front of normalcy in conformist American society. Both poems pulsate with the reckless abandon of radically bohemian fates burning against the superstructure brought upon them by the monolith of state as it dictates terms of surrender to its relentless system. Both battle against the ethical hypocrisy of the American nightmare. Both invoke biblical and mythological gods and monsters symbolizing primordial drives and libidinous forces seething beneath the veneer of postwar mass civilization. Rexroth, in “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” makes a single reference to Moloch as the devourer in whose jaws poets are stuffed. Ginsberg works the motif until it dominates a major section of “Howl,” identifying Molloch as the insidious state behemoth responsible for the reckless destruction of his generation.

Contrasts between the two poems reflect generational and individual differences between Rexroth and Ginsberg in terms of background, point of view and agenda. The dominant verb tense in Rexroth’s poem is the past. There is grief over the loss of literary-political-cultural personages of high value to the development of a society which neglected their contributions and compelled or left them to abusive fates. Although the early sections of “Howl” are in the past tense, Ginsberg’s poem unfolds in an apocalyptic present taking place after the fall, when what has been lost has already been consigned to oblivion. It is a lament for and celebration of generational peers he knows at the time of writing the poem. There is little residue of nostalgia for what has gone before but hyper-enthusiasm for the now.

The world of “Howl” was years in development, but the historical and human scope, political yet prophetic energy and subversively bohemian stance of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” revealed strategies to Ginsberg for synthesizing disparate elements of his poem into a generational context. Ginsberg discovered “Thou Shalt Not Kill” at a key point in the conceptualizing and writing of “Howl.” He adapted poetic and oratorical devices embedded in the structure of “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” focusing them on the experience of his depression-born beat generation in place of Rexroth’s lost generation born around the turn of the century and come of age between the two world wars. The Rexrothian spin Ginsberg put on “Howl” helped set in motion socio-symbolic forces which, as they played out, radically restructured literary social space. Howl's obscenity trial’s synergy with the national impact of Kerouac’s On the Road impelled a generational shift in the direction of the literary underground. Rexroth’s jazz rendition of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” burned with nihilistic rage against the death trip of the system while beat jazz-poetry was cool in the 50’s sense of the word, meaning uninvolved or detached, grooving or goofing. Despite the fact that “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was clearly a major influence on “Howl,” this influence has not been widely acknowledged. However, during a cab ride taken by Allen Ginsberg across Tokyo with John Solt and Japanese poet Torii Shozo in the early 80’s, when Shozo asked Ginsberg point-blank if it was true that Rexroth’s poem had exerted a strong influence on “Howl,” Ginsberg readily admitted that indeed it had.

IV

The music in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” settles back into a brooding torment to set the scene for the fourth and final section which, focusing specifically on the death of Dylan Thomas, gradually builds to a montage of images cascading to the poem’s climax. Abruptly as the heraldic announcements of the names of doomed poets had altered the entire mood of the performance in the previous stanza, now the bowing of the bass and a sparse, staccato three-note figure played on the trumpet bring in the key phrase of the stanza: “He is dead!”26 We know he is speaking of Dylan Thomas because he makes reference to the recently-deceased poet’s Welsh origins, crying out in strident tones of immediacy, “He is dead / the sparrow of Cardiff. / He is dead. / The canary of Swansea.”27 Rexroth’s exclamation, synchronized with drum/bass triplet figures punctuating the three syllables, repeats again and again. Intensity keeps building as Rexroth answers each repetition in the form of accusatory phrases hurled with force, speaking directly to and identifying the murderer. “Who killed the bright-headed bird? You did, you son of a bitch. / You drowned him in your cocktail brain. / He fell down and died in your synthetic heart.”28

The question “Who killed him?” is the key phrase repeated again and again. Rexroth answers in darkly satirical phrases, relentlessly driving his point to the poem’s extended climax. He asserted from the outset of the poem that mid-20th century civilization has become a predatory war machine feeding on its young. Now he pinpoints the sector of its intelligentsia connected to the establishment and its institutions, whose members live at the cutting edge of modern culture and enjoy the extraordinary benefits of its highly civilized yet crassly commercialized culture. The prosperity and refined cultural habitus of this class depend on a global economy backed by the destructive force of armies and high-tech weaponry. This dominant ideology has marginalized a subculture of outsiders and their bohemian, politically-progressive literary and artistic output and products. The focus of Rexroth’s accusation is a predatory and vampiristic class which commodifies ideas and symbols generated from below and puts them into play within the context of a global market made possible by militaristic imperialism. It is the brain trust of the ruling class, charged with the task of generating the symbols of its hegemony, held by Rexroth to be responsible for justifying the image of and fabricating a front for the ever-expanding growth of a monster-state with primordial destructive power made possible by high technology.

Rexroth quotes Lorca's “Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter." The great Andalusian poet was dragged out of a friend’s home where he had sought refuge and then brutally dragged through the streets and killed by the fascist Civil Guard in Granada before the Spanish Civil War: “He is dead / Like Ignacio the bullfighter / At four o’clock in the afternoon… / I too do not want to hear it.”30 Rexroth then exclaims “I want to run into the streets shouting, Remember Vanzetti!”31 Sacco and Vanzetti were two anarchists sentenced to death in 1927 and executed, ostensibly for a robbery and murder, but at the core, because they were foreign-born left-wing radicals during the time of the red scare. It is of interest to note that Vanzetti wrote, in halting immigrant English, the following to one of his supporters in a letter from prison before his execution: “Authority, Power, and Privilege would not last a day upon the face of the earth, were it not because those who possess them, and those who prostitute their arms to their defence to suppress, repress, mercilessly and inescapable every efforts of liberations of each and all the rebels.”32 This statement could be interpreted as forming the cornerstone of Rexroth’s premise for “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

Rexroth makes it clear that decisive and radical steps are required to resist the repression of primitive drives redirected into the destruction of the young in war’s violence by order of state. His poem becomes an incendiary device anarchistically and satirically striking at the heart of bourgeois society’s superstructure: “I want to pour gasoline down your chimneys. / I want to blow up your galleries. / I want to burn down your editorial offices. / I want to slit the bellies of your frigid women. / I want to sink your sailboats and launches. / I want to strangle your children at their finger paintings. / I want to poison your afghans and poodles.”33 This extended tirade against the state and its lackeys, with its dark humor pushed to extremes, further accentuates the contrast between the insurrectional thrust of his rage against the system expressed in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and Allen Ginsberg’s resolution of the contradictions put into play by “Howl” in ecstatic transports of erotic spirituality. Both poems take ironic, nihilistic positions in relation to society and state repression, but, rather than take a Rexrothian stand in militantly defiant opposition to the system and its agents, Ginsberg’s reply in the final sections of “Howl” to the problematics of the situation posed by the all-powerful Moloch in his poem is a turning inward to celebrate liberated pleasures of the body and the devotion of friendship. “Howl” gets mileage from the earlier poem’s apocalyptic/biblical tone and aggressively revolutionary outrage but without defining clear terms of a political position or formulating a response to the cultural and psychological effects of state oppression beyond sexual liberation in the moment.

Rexroth does not propose an idyll in reply to the destructive and dehumanizing effect of global imperialism on American and planetary culture. Although erotic sensuality is a strong motif woven through the body of Rexroth’s poetry, it is nowhere to be found in this poem. He is playing for keeps in “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” He invokes the death of Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet whose collapse and death during his second tour of America in November, 1953, from alcoholism at the age of thirty-nine, shocked poets across the U.S. and worldwide who had embraced him as a leading young voice among them. In 1957, Rexroth wrote, on the fatal trajectory of Dylan Thomas’ alcoholism, “The last time I saw Dylan, his self-destruction had not just passed the limits of rationality. It had assumed the terrifying inertia of inanimate matter. Being with him was like being swept away by a torrent of falling stones.”34 In the same essay, Rexroth articulated his take on the poet’s existential dilemma: “Dylan Thomas’s verse had to find endurance in a world of burning cities and burning Jews. He was able to find meaning in his art as long as it was the answer to air raids and gas ovens. As the world began to take on the guise of an immense air raid or gas oven, I believe his art became meaningless to him.”35

Rexroth does not name the poet at any point in this poem. The trumpet plays the three-note phrase to punctuate each line with the saxophone playing long tones and low trills in the background. Rexroth returns to the he is dead motif with an ominous, slowly-building drum roll and bowed bass, he refers to the dead poet in terms from Welsh folklore: “They have stuck him down, / The son of David ap Gwilym. / They have murdered him, / The baby of Taliessin.”36 David ap Gwilym lived and wrote in the middle-ages and is still considered to be the greatest Welsh poet. Taliesin was a hero-bard fabled to have had the power to overcome both past and future time with his tales which contained authentic historical content. Rexroth characterizes Dylan Thomas as a direct descendant in this lineage, a bearer of poetic-historical tradition.

The horns and rhythm sections drive relentlessly on as the poem hurtles toward its climactic end. Rexroth suddenly transitions in and out of the bardic thrall which has been gathering in intensity, and, still building to climax without dropping a beat, he invokes symbols of American global hegemony: “There he lies dead, / By the iceberg of the United Nations. / There he lies sandbagged, / at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.”37 Rexroth harnesses archetypal and revolutionary power with his fusion of primordial mythic images with present-day conditions and symbolic objects representing the modern state. Times and places collide as sea birds are wheeling over the Gulf Stream, which “smells of blood,”38 breaking on the legendary Welsh shoreline. The musicians play long tones building to a climax then suddenly stop. This poem, written during the postwar rise of what Eisenhower referred to when he warned the nation to beware of the military-industrial complex, ends in an accusation. In strident tones of biblical wrath directed at ruling classes of the imperialist war machine as well as intelligentsias which manipulate its symbols for mass consumption to depoliticize public consciousness, Rexroth fiercely declaims his accusation: “And all the birds of the deep sea rise up/ Over the luxury liners and scream, / "You killed him! You killed him. / In your god damned Brooks Brothers suit, / You son of a bitch.”39

After “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was published and became widely known, Brooks Brothers gave Kenneth Rexroth a suit of their manufacture.

EPILOGUE

Beyond a shadow of doubt, Rexroth’s position concerning where a poet is compelled to take a stand in relation to the human cost of late capitalism is defined in “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” He sought no niche in an intelligentsia hiring out as a dominated sector of the dominant class to create intellectual and artistic products for consumption in a mass market. Rexroth knew that the fetish character of the commodity had mutated into commodification of the human without humanization of the commodity. The commitment to political philosophy in action which informed his highly-charged performance of “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” with its ironic fusion of prophetic biblical anger and 20th century satire pushed to its darkest extreme, immunized him from morphing into an image replicated through electronic broadcast or mass production. He never let himself get caught up in the game of producing simulations into which fantasies could be projected by masses of spectators rendered passive recipients of ideological programming. This is in contrast to what happened to key beats able to parley cultural notoriety into careers as cultural figures after On the Road placed them in Kerouac’s beat narrative. Authentic and important as the impact of the beat movement was to the counterculture revolution of the 60’s as well as on every generation since, the commodity fetishization of its image is one of the unforeseen consequences of their legendary status in both collective psyche and mass market. The beats first sought to counter and then to mold their public perception in response to how it changed through the decades which followed their rebellious entry into mass mind.

Rexroth refused to provide new generations of the bourgeoisie with spectacle in which to celebrate rites of false consciousness. In “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” he exposed the military-industrial underside of the dialectic subjecting culture to exchange value of the commodity under conditions of a market economy. The poem reveals a phantasmagoria of apocalyptic destruction of individual and collective bodies and souls in a world brought to its knees by militarized high technology. While Rexroth’s vision encompassed a historical sweep of poetic traditions ranging from epic literature and classical drama of the ancients to discontinuous and subversive anti-traditions of the modern, his anarchistic revolutionary program was uncompromising in its opposition to the system. There is no way back into society from his radical critique of contradictions soon to rupture globally-militarized postwar America.

Rexroth’s involvement with poetry and jazz during and beyond the jazz age – from early swing-era Chicago through modern jazz San Francisco then 60’s changes and later Santa Barbara – spans colossus-like over those eras of bohemian literary and musical history. Rexroth’s brilliant synthesis of poetic strategies, devices and traditions would be enough to put “Thou Shalt Not Kill” at the cutting edge of recorded performances of poetry and jazz as well as among the greatest products of mid-20th century American poetry. The dynamic sustained intensity of his performance anticipated extended free jazz solos and was more articulate than angrily ecstatic beat rants and Vietnam-era antiwar protest-poetry. The impact of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” on Allen Ginsberg when he was writing “Howl” further indicates Rexroth’s position at the headwaters of bohemian poetic traditions flowing into tributaries which include, but are not limited to, the beat generation and the 60’s youth movement.

The true extent of Rexroth’s pivotal role in turning on poets of the beat generation when they hit San Francisco has not been given its true estimation. If the denial of Rexroth‘s influence has become more pronounced in recent years, it would not be due to beat rancor from when Rexroth was attacking them in the press back in the 1960’s. Kerouac died over thirty-five years ago, yet there was more positive play given to the role of the older poet then than now. I recall a poetry reading at UCSB in the early 70’s when Rexroth hosted Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and other leading beats in an atmosphere of literary, ecological and political congeniality. Could Rexroth denial more than twenty years after his passing partly originate in the beats staking claim to literary-cultural history as time imposes its limit? Kenneth Rexroth was an authentic bearer of 20th century avant-garde traditions who constructed a bridge of international poetry, pacifistic anarchism and bohemian subculture between at least three generations, yet his contribution appears to have been given short shrift in proportion to its magnitude.

Notes

1 Rexroth. “Poetry and Jazz at The Blackhawk.” Fantasy L.P. 7008. 1960.
2 Rexroth/Ferlinghetti. “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959.
3 The Complete 3 Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Dunbar, William. “Lament for the Makers.” The Oxford Book of English Verse (Quiller-
Couch, ed). Oxford: Clarendon. 1919.
13 Rexroth. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959. The 14
Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Serge, Victor. Resistance. SF: City Lights Books. 1989.
19 Ibid. p. 34.
20 Ibid. p. 35.
21 Rexroth. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959. The 22
Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
23 Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. SF: City Lights Books.
24 Ibid.
25 Rexroth. The Beat Era. S.F. Examiner 4/75.
26 Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters 1959-69 (Charters, ed.). NY: Viking. 1999. p. 127.
27 Meltzer, David. “Rexroth in San Francisco.” Rexroth Festshrift (Hertz, ed.) Third Rail (no. 8).
LA: Third Rail. 1987.
28 Rexroth. “A Hope for Poetry” SF: Holiday Magazine. 1966.
29 Rexroth. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959. The 30
Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Lorca, Federico Garcia. “Selected Poems.” NY: New Directions. 1964.
34 Rexroth. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959. The 35
Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
36 Ibid.
37 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo. Selected Letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti from the Charlestown State
Prison, 1921-24.
38 Rexroth. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959. The 39
Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
40 Rexroth. “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation.” The Alternative Society. NY:
Herder. 1970. p. 3.
41 Ibid.
42 Rexroth. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” “Poetry Readings at The Cellar.” Fantasy L.P. 1959. The 43
Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. 2004.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.

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