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Changing the world?
The poems of Kenneth Rexroth, the poets of World War II
BY WILLIAM CORBETT

The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
Edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow. Copper Canyon Press, 814 pages, $40.
Poets of World War II
Edited by Harvey Shapiro. The Library of America, 304 pages, $20.




"Most of the world’s poetry," Kenneth Rexroth wrote in "Codicil,"

Is artifice, construction.

No one reads it but scholars.

After a generation

It has grown so overcooked,

It cannot be digested.

The cleanly printed, well-designed 814-page whale of a Complete Poems ought to restore Kenneth Rexroth to the map of American poetry. Rexroth has been absent, or at least in the shadows, for more than a generation — he died at 77, in 1982 — because he is the most lucid of American poets. He writes with such clarity, he can be read like a popular novel. In our narrowing poetry world, this has hurt his reputation, because, inside and outside the academy, artifice and theory are in flower.

Although after abandoning the home-cooked surrealism of this collection’s opening 100 pages Rexroth embraced philosophizing, he seems never to have encountered a theory he did not want to dismantle and deride. He was mightily opinionated, strident, and uncommonly so, in his poems. This too worked to dim his luster. Rexroth saw a conspiracy of "fairies" in American life, and even his milder opinions have a bullying edge (he was an equal-opportunity bully). He was an autodidact who liked to throw his weight around.

He was also generous and kind to the generation of poets we know as the Beats. Acting as mentor to his near contemporary James Laughlin of New Directions, Rexroth influenced American poetry by advancing the careers of Denise Levertov and his San Francisco comrades Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder. He was an anarchist and a Westerner, a painter and lover of jazz, outdoorsman and translator from the Chinese, Japanese, and French, a man of broad interests who stomped, swore, and believed that American society had evolved so that there was no place in it for a poet, no place at all.

The centerpiece of his Complete Poems is the 200-page The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944–1950). Read here and there in it — you can pick up its thread on any page — and you will know whether Rexroth is for you. Begun in his 39th year, the poem is built around his trip to Europe in 1949, when he traveled, often hiking, in England, France, and Italy. This description he gave Laughlin of the poem’s "Part II" will give an idea of the ground he covered: it’s "all about Italy, economics, American fairies and the Revolution." It’s all readable, but the description of life and scenery and the accounts of meals eaten are what excite:

At the Papagallo, cold squid,

Spaghetti with vongole,

Panini which here, after two

Thousand years, is still fine Greek bread,

Stuffed veal, grilled birds, cold spinach,

Washed down with Lachryma Christi,

And finished with tortoni and

Coffee like a skyrocket,

Laced with grappa aruta.

Rexroth alternates these descriptions with philosophizing that is woolly and pretentious. The arid stretches do serve to sharpen the appetite for the next meal and his searching out of whores. Despite what he thinks, food, drink, architecture, and nature are the true verities. His commentary on post-war America, "A television set, a dream/House, designed by a fairy," is obvious, from this distance, and shrill. It seems that Rexroth the consummate hipster is square enough to believe every word Madison Avenue puts out.

But that’s part of the poem’s allure. Rexroth never buttoned his lip, and he couldn’t help presenting himself as the intelligent, sensual, life-loving, loud-mouthed jerk he was. He is always a man in full. A sharp-eyed, tender one with real feeling for the world’s "unapparent realities." At the end of the poem it is autumn, and he walks at night in an orchard where he kneels to see

. . . Under each

Pebble and oak leaf is a

Spider, her eyes shining at

Me with my reflected light

Across immeasurable distance.

If, as he writes to his older brother poet in "A Letter to William Carlos Williams," a poet is "one who creates/Sacramental relationships/That last always," then Rexroth is a true poet. The evidence is to be found throughout this book. A few of the poems I often return to are the elegies for Andrée and Delia Rexroth, "The Signature of All Things" (which ends, "And all about were scattered chips/Of pale cold light that was alive), "Time Is the Mercy of Eternity," and "They Say This Isn’t a Poem" — all works that go straight to the heart. These are poems of a heightened, reverent consciousness, as alive today as in the moment they were felt and written.

Rexroth’s last pieces are the "Love Poems of Marichiko," the erotic poems of a Japanese woman he invented and "translated" ("You take my pronoun,/And we are us") in an act of astonishing ventriloquism. At the end of his writing life, this lover of many women and most macho of men crossed over into "the first morning of the world." Re-enter this book from that vantage point and you will see how love animated Rexroth, even his tantrums. He is a Whitmanic spirit with a 20th-century personality, and he has the American virtue of believing in the worth of his independent experience. It’s a wonder that his final expression of this should come in the voice of a Japanese woman.

WORLD WAR II SHOULD HAVE BEEN Rexroth’s war, but as a conscientious objector he stayed clear of it. He wrote little about it and does not appear in Harvey Shapiro’s exceptional anthology (Shapiro was himself an Air Force radio gunner), one of four initial releases in the Library of America’s American Poets Project. Poets of World War II is a handsomely designed book that slips easily into a jacket pocket, where it may well be carried into yet another war.

The great American modernists Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams did not serve in the armed forces. Neither have more than a handful of poets born in my generation during World War II. But for the generation eligible to be drafted and fight after Pearl Harbor, war was democratic. Kenneth Koch (represented in Shapiro’s anthology by two exceptional poems), Louis Simpson, George Oppen, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Richard Hugo saw combat. Some who served but did not fight — Randall Jarrell, Alan Dugan, and Karl Shapiro — are here. (Robert Creeley and Frank O’Hara, who served but wrote hardly at all about the war, are not.) Shapiro’s wide net includes Lincoln Kirstein, founder of New York City Ballet, who’s hardly known as a poet; Robert Lowell and William Stafford, here as COs; Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and Woody Guthrie, who wrote from the home front; and, for a perfect ending, James Tate, whose father, "The Lost Pilot" of Tate’s poem by that title, was killed over Germany in 1944, when Tate was five months old.

"This is not a book of celebration," Shapiro writes in his introduction, "unless it is to celebrate man’s ability, indeed his compulsion, to turn terror into art." Terror is what we expect from mechanized 20th-century warfare in which, Koch writes, "As machines make ice/We made dead enemy soldiers. . . ." That we have a legacy of poems from this war is our luck. One wonders whether in our present-day world of shock and awe, of MOABS and a generation of smart weapons, the terror will be so annihilating to victim and victor alike that poetry will be a casualty. Will we only have a war poetry of dissent written by those whose imaginations have not been dulled by war movies and the images of tracer fire over Baghdad in the first Gulf War? Will we see again poetry written by those who go to war?

Kenneth Rexroth wrote as if poetry could influence events. He never held back his political opinions or his beliefs. His editor Sam Hamill, who launched this February’s poets protest against President Bush’s Iraq war, is his descendant. The poets are speaking, but Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Ashcroft are not listening. Shapiro’s anthology may be the better argument against war, for here is war as men and women lived to tell about it. Yes, one can endure war, and yes, there are always a hundred compelling reasons why we choose to submit ourselves to war’s brutalities. Either we cannot imagine the horrors of war or we can and we hunger for them. If it is the former, Shapiro’s anthology will address the problem. If it is the latter, we are doomed.

 

Issue Date: April 10 - 17, 2003
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