The life and work of American poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth are marked by contradictions. Survey his literary profiles and you collide with Rexroth the "literary street fighter-anarchist" or "daddy-o Rexroth". Read his Japanese work and you're given a short, introspective Japanese-American with the moniker "Kenny". Examine the back cover photo on the 2003 The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, and you see a craggily handsome midwestern American, broad-shouldered and tall. Provocateur with a carney's instinct for self-promotion, he declared "professional revolution" his poetic mission. Serene and driven, contemplative and feisty, family man and profligate (four wives, countless lovers), he was ignited by combustible energies, his competing selves fighting amongst themselves for order and balance. Rexroth's proteg, Sam Hamill, describes Rexroth as "a poet polished by great loss and small glory," who was "sometimes paranoid, arrogant, or self-absorbed" but "much more often funny, generous, and compassionate."
To date, Rexroth has been held to the periphery of the literary record, partly by the fact that a distressing number of his books are out of print. But The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth should enable a fair reconsideration. Its more than 750 pages offer, in glorious sweep, his short and long poems, thoughtfully edited by poet and publisher Sam Hamill, and novelist Bradford Morrow, Rexroth's literary executor. The complexity, variety, and depth of his work are presented in all their grand-scaled "interior autobiography," as David L. Ulin exclaimed in the New York Review of Books. Ranging through political, social, philosophical, and theological themes, from personal to public registers, the poems reveal Rexroth as an incisive scholar who used his erudition to inform, not overwhelm.
>From the dialectical debate that comprised his first long poem, "The Homestead Called Damascus"-which he described as a "philosophical revery" between brothers Sebastian and Thomas who represent "two poles of a personality"-Rexroth understood that his contradictory energies could be a creative catalyst. This is most evident in his poetry's dynamic polarity between the erotic and the political. "Like his favorite poet Tu Fu, he was a deeply spiritual and political poet," Hamill notes, but "[u]nlike Tu Fu, he was a poet of erotic love." On one hand, we have consummate love poems that project a tender lover: "As we, with Sappho, move towards death /Your body moves in my arms /as though I held / In my arms the bird filled / Evening sky of summer." On the other hand, his political poems rail against the commercial debasement of values: "Out / Of my misery I felt rising / A terrible anger, and out / Of the anger, an absolute vow."
His earliest poems begin the collection, some from an unpublished, undated manuscript called The Lantern and the Shade, which the editors believe contain his first poetry. The sentimental efforts, mostly melodramatic elegies, are indebted to early Yeats, Edward Dowson, and Eliot: "Speak not, let no word break / the silence of my sorrow and your weariness." Their introspection anticipates Rexroth's later meditative work, such as "The Orphic Soul": "a large / Fritillary comes to rest / On my naked shoulder/fluttering over me / Like the souls on Orphic tombs." Astonishing is the absence of social commentary, with no hint of his soon-to-be-developed passion for politics, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and social commitment. By the 1930s, his poetics toughen up, taking two opposite directions. He experimented with literary cubism, seeking to revolutionize readers' thinking by manipulating syntax: "Do you understand the managing. / Mornings like scissors / Leaves of dying." And he delivered bold criticism: "Remember now there were others before this; /I have /Seen men's bodies burst into torches." The change in his poetics is epitomized by his abandoning an elaborate signature "Kenneth St. Charles Marie Rexroth", inked with calligraphic flourish, for a plainly stroked "Kenneth Rexroth".
A poem, for Rexroth, was not a integral, closed entity but an interchangeable sequence of units. He liked to salvage early material and recycle it in a new framework, a method of composition which became a lifelong practice: "Reconsidering and revising / My life and the meaning of my poem, / I gather once more within me / The old material, sea and stone." For example, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952) knits together several lyrics, which he also published separately: "Only Years", "Leda Hidden", and "The Mirror". The effect of all this reshuffling is that the philosophical and political thrust of his meditations is often punctuated by epiphanies and lyrical bursts, which are intended to be seen as sudden visions. Theological musings move into the lyrical: "The dual can be found in the / Void of the other//The intense promise of light / Grows above the canyons cleft. / A nude girl enters my hut / With/ fragrant sex." In On Flower Wreath Hill, the poem ascends to the revelation of "A night enclosed / In an infinite Pearl." Again musing on "insight / Into the void," his tone rises to a "Mist-drenched" vision comprised of the "architecture of pearls / And silver wire" where "Each minute / Droplit reflects a moon ."
Rexroth's prolific body of work, from pugnacious protest to celebration of wonders in nature and in love, is a profound accomplishment for one so bedeviled by a short fuse and conflicting desires. In The Love Poems of Marichiko (1979), Rexroth offers up the work of a Japanese woman poet: "Scorched with love, the cicada / Cries out. Silent as the firefly, / My flesh is consumed with love." Rexroth pretended to translate the poems, when in fact he was Marichiko, therefore adding the feminine to his roster of complex, competing selves. And these intense contradictions, though they created fissures in his personal life, enrich Rexroth's poetry, and offer readers the opportunity to discover for themselves the "blazing astrophysics" of The Complete Poems.