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Sam Hamill Editor, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
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Kenneth Rexroth was a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and influenced generations of readers with his essays and consummate translations of Japanese and Chinese poetry. Born in 1905, Rexroth's career spans almost the entire century. Although forty of his seventy-seven years as poet, translator, essayist, playwright, and revolutionary activist were spent in San Francisco, his intellectual and artistic formative years occurred in the Midwest, mainly in Chicago, where he associated with artists, writers, and theorists of radical politics and philosophies. Rexroth's concerns were universal from his youth until his final years, focusing on politics, pacifism, erotic love, the environment, and a spirituality firmly rooted in both Asian and Western traditions. But he will forever be associated with the San Francisco Renaissance of the fifties in which he played a major role, promoting poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov and many others over FM radio station KPFA. Sam Hamill, editor of The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth writes of him, "The man who survives in these poems is a great man, wise beyond words, a poet polished by great loss and small glory. He has given in his work exactly what he sought in life: a sense of a compassionate moral center from which the possibility of ultimate awakening may be realized."* Hamill joins us in a June, 2003 conversation about Kenneth Rexroth, the man Time magazine described as the "Father of the Beats."
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JJM What drew you to Kenneth Rexroth's poetry? SH When I was about fourteen, I discovered the San Francisco Renaissance -- which at the time was in full swing -- and devoured the works of Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and basically that whole group. The experience of reading these writer's work revolutionized me. I ended up leaving Utah, where I had had a pretty unhappy childhood, and took to the streets in San Francisco for a couple of years before I realized that I was self-destructing. The entire beat scene was terribly important to me as a young writer. It basically made me decide what sort of person I wanted to be when I grew up. JJM What was Rexroth's creative spark? SH Kenneth had the most encyclopedic mind I have ever encountered. He read everything, he knew everything, and he had very near total recall. What excited me about his poetry first of all were the erotic poems. The erotic poems for women are really unique and splendid, and are equally physical and meta-physical. His poems about the wilderness are phenomenal. And when I discovered his longer poems, he seemed to be a master of everything I wanted to write about. JJM You mention being moved by his erotic love poems. What is an example of a poem that reflects his view of love? SH "Confusion of the Senses" is a terrific poem, written in the seventies. There are an equal number of splendid early poems, but I think "Confusion of the Senses" has it all in a short poem.
As clear and as simple as that poem is, it has everything in it. I would suggest that the "Voluptuous sorrow" is the human condition, and his placement of the lovers in nature completes the metaphysical picture. There are any number of poems in which he talks about our timeless flesh juxtaposing it to our mortality, as though both things were simultaneously equally true. Philosophically and artistically it is a very daring thing to do, and I think a wise vision of humanity. JJM Who were his early creative and poetic influences? SH They are so vast they are almost innumerable. In the teens and twenties he was basically a young poet following the romantic tradition. But as he evolved and his philosophy grew deeper and more complex, and as he began devouring Buddhism and Hinduism, his poetry opened up into a more expansive view of the universe. He was influenced by the cubists, by a lot of painters, as well as by tons of musicians, from Dizzy Gillespie to Erik Satie. He wrote poems for many jazz musicians. But he was basically a neo-classisist above all else. JJM What made him decide to abandon his attempts at cubist poetry? SH He decided that people simply didn't know enough to understand them, that they were basically too effete, and he wanted to write poetry that ordinary people could understand.
JJM Did World War II get him to reconsider his politics at all? SH Absolutely not. One of the things many Americans may not understand about World War II is that Franklin Roosevelt knew that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. He wanted it attacked because that was the only thing that would move the American people to enter the war, which he believed we should be a part of. Rexroth believed that war is an expression of a lack of moral courage, and he viewed this country's imprisonment and internship of Japanese Americans and the administration's knowledge that Pearl Harbor was going to happen as an utter failure of moral character on the part of our leadership. JJM What poem best communicates his outrage about the war? SH I would turn to a poem called "For Eli Jacobson," which was written in 1952. In the poem, he is looking back to the days when he and Jacobson were organizing for various worker's causes.
The point of the poem is that you do good work for the sake of good work, not because you actually expect super human change in the world. You do what is right because doing what is right is more gratifying than anything else. JJM He experienced tremendous personal trauma during his life. His mother died when he was a youngster, his grandmother frequently beat him with a cane, and he lost his wife at a very young age. With all this going on, how did he hang on to hope? SH He was fond of saying, "They have hope who have nothing else." Basically, he found comfort in reading.
JJM Rexroth called Tu Fu the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet in history. What did he share with the Chinese poets he so admired? SH With Tu Fu in particular, he shared his political commitment, his anti-war convictions, and a deep love of literary traditions. Tu Fu was very much a literary traditionalist, and a real "down and outer" who was never really known during his lifetime. In fact, he wasn't known until nearly 150 years after his death. We have only 1,554 of Tu Fu's approximately 10,000 poems, but among those 1,554 poems are many of the most spectacular poems in classical Chinese. Rexroth saw Tu Fu as an outsider, as someone who was politically engaged, and someone who was looking for a moral root in his life. JJM Rexroth attempted to bridge Eastern and Western traditions in his poetry. What is a good example of such a poem? SH In some ways, all of his late work is full of that, but let me turn to a poem called "Yin and Yang."
Here he has heaven and the virgin and the lion and all of these Christian images right along with the Easter moon and resurrection. And together with that, absolutely fluidly, the whole Taoist sense of Ying and Yang. It is a perfect merging of Eastern and Western theology, if you will, although you are pressed to call Taoism real theology since there is no faith involved. JJM I know Rexroth mainly from his work as a columnist with the San Francisco Examiner and his participation in the San Francisco Renaissance… SH He was often called the "Father of the Beat movement," which he really despised. When Time magazine called him the "Father of the Beats" he replied, "An entomologist is not a bug." Robert Duncan used to say that Kenneth was not our master, he was our librarian.
JJM Do you recall who the musicians were that played during the readings? SH Kenneth did an opera with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and he also worked with Nat and Cannonball Adderley. He played with a variety of other musicians who were just in and around San Francisco at various times. JJM Was there a Northeastern bias that prevented a Westerner like Rexroth to be taken seriously? SH If you look at the literary awards in this country you will see that there is still an East Coast bias. Westerners are still seen, to a large degree, as wild, wooly reactionaries or something. Otherwise, how do you account for the endless number of prizes for someone like John Ashbery, when the Rexroths and the Snyders are so very rarely acknowledged as the great masters that they are? I think there is also a difference in sensibility between the East Coast and the West Coast. The East Coast really looks to England and France, and far more East Coast poets have French or some other European romance language as their second language focus, whereas those in the West look to Japan and China. JJM The publication of this book is clearly a labor of love on your part, and an ambitious attempt to connect readers of poetry to Kenneth Rexroth's work. What about his poetry do you feel needs to be heard by a contemporary audience? SH I think nearly all of it. I am not crazy about his cubist poems, but the more narrative poems, his longer poems, and the shorter lyrical poems are full of joy, great humor, revolutionary conviction and plain old extraordinary courage. In addition to all of this, it is just very beautiful poetry. It is poetry, as William Carlos Williams used to say, "with a sweep of the mind," and Rexroth did have a great sweep of the mind. JJM You chose quite an unusual cover for the book. How do you connect the cover art to Rexroth's work? SH I chose the cover image because I thought that neoclassical torso represented something shared with Rexroth: its neoclassicism, its "bodiness," its very contemporary treatment of an ancient theme, and I suppose I wanted to shock people a little, to wake them up with that cover. Rexroth embodied what is contemporary in the Greek Anthology and in Noh drama. He loved to be shocking, "l'enfant terrible" to the end. He was dramatic to say the least, and never more so than in his rare understatements, like a great jazz musician. JJM What would you say Rexroth's most important messages for today are? SH I don't like to reduce poems to messages. It is more complex than that. Poetry changes one's life, but it changes it slowly and personally and privately. Each of us that reads Rexroth will be reading a different poem and a different poet, because we bring our own experience to the poetry that we read. It interpolates and weaves itself together. The simple fact is that Kenneth is a major vision and a major poet at a time when we really need poetry.
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The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth Edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow
JJM Who was your childhood hero? SH Only one? I had hundreds. Kenneth Rexroth was certainly one of my childhood heroes. Before Rexroth, probably some old dead Greek guy. Literary figures have always been among my heroes. JJM Any one stand out in particular? SH Well, Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder were very important to me as an adolescent, and shortly thereafter I would add Denise Levertov and Tom McGrath. ________________________________ Kenneth Rexroth products at Amazon.com
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Interview took place on June 16, 2003 * If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Jack Kerouac's musical collaborator David Amram.
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