Tag: <span>Leaves of Grass</span>

Kenneth Rexroth Appeals

Rexroth: Rapprochement of Cultures.

Featured Image: He’s an American poet. Kenneth Rexroth Street. By Beatrice Murch (blmurch), CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

Kenneth Rexroth.

The Association of World Citizens participates actively in the UNESCO-led International Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures (2013-2022). The rapprochement of cultures requires dialogue at many levels.  We are at a time of major change in history.  The accelerating pace of change in the political, social, economic and cultural areas;  has created new opportunities for dialogue as the world is inexorably being transformed into a global society.

It is true that to an unprecedented degree people are meeting together in congresses, conferences, schools and universities all over the globe. However; it itself such meetings are not dialogues.  There is a need to reach a deeper level.  One approach is to look at writers;  who in their work drew on more than one culture and provided a bridge for meaningful dialogue;  and the rapprochement of cultures. One such writer is Kenneth Rexroth.

Kenneth Rexroth;  an American poet often considered a father figure to the Beat poets of the 1950 San Francisco scene;  was also a world citizen who blended the influences of Japan and China, of failed revolutionary movements like the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt in Russia; along with a deep sense of the beauty of nature.  He was largely self-taught;  having dropped out of secondary school.  He read widely but was always mistrustful of academic trends in poetry.

In the late 1960s when US universities tried to calm student agitation by having courses that were “relevant” to their interests; Kenneth Rexroth taught some courses at San Francisco State College.  Nevertheless;  he had a dim view of academic teaching.

“If a college student’s mother died, his girl got pregnant, he acquired a loathsome disease, or he decided to become a conscientious objector, would he go to his philosophy professor for advice?”

Taoist and Buddhist thought.

Rexroth’s model was Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass.  Whitman envisions “a social order whose essence is the liberation and universalization of selfhood…participants in a universal creative effort in which each discovers his ultimate individuation…Today we know that it is Whitman’s vision or nothing.”  Like Whitman, Rexroth stressed an ethical mysticism, citing other major influences.  “For better statements I refer you to the work of Martin Buber, D.T. Suzuki, Piotr Kropotkin, or for that matter, to the Gospels and the saying of Buddha, or to Lao Tze and Chung Tze.”

His references to D.T. Suzuki; who introduced Zen thought to the USA and to the Chinese Taoists Lao Tze and Chung Tze are a sign of his affinity to Taoist and Buddhist thought. His short summery of the essence of Taoism also reflected his philosophy of life:

 

The combinations

Of the world are unstable

By nature. Take it easy.

 

But Rexroth’s Taoism had an activist tone to it. As in many of the great Chinese and Japanese poems, the outer landscape corresponds to the inner one, the macrocosm to the microcosm:

 

My wife has been swimming in the breakers,

She comes up the beach to meet me, nude

Sparkling with water, singing high and clear

Against the surf.  The sun crosses

The hills and fills her hair, as it lights

The moon and glorifies the sea

And deep in the empty mountains melts

The snow of Winter and the glaciers

Of ten thousand  years.

 

Kenneth Rexroth especially appreciates the Mahayana Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva.

“A bodhisattva, in case you don’t know, is one who, at the brink of absorption into Nirvana, turns away with the vow that he shall not enter final peace until he can bring all other beings with him.” 

And Kenneth Rexroth puts into poetic structure the words of the American Socialist leader Eugene Debs;  who had spent years in prison for his opposition to World War I:

While there is a lower class,

I am in it.  While there is

A criminal element,

I am of it.  Where there is

A soul in jail, I am not free.

 

Yet Kenneth Rexroth always rejected the notion that the arts should be subordinated to political demands.  He felt that lyrics that communicate genuine personal vision;  are ultimately more subversive than explicit propaganda. He called erotic love “one of the highest forms of contemplation”;  and he stressed its intensity in a Japanese style:

Making love with you

Is like drinking sea water.

The more I drink

The thirstier I become,

Until nothing can slake my thirst

But to drink the entire sea.

 

Rexroth was always enthusiastic about ethical world-affirming mysticism; always quick to encourage the joining of contemplation and community;

What is taken in 

In comtemplation is poured out

In love.

 

Notes.

For Kenneth Rexroth’s early life until he moved to California in 1927 see his An Autobiographical Novel (New York: Doubleday, 1966)

Most of his poetry is in two collections: Collected Shorter Poems (New York: New Directions, 1966) and Collected Longer Poems (New York: New Directions, 1968)

For an analysis of his bridge-building efforts with Asian culture, see Morgan Gibson.

Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom (Archon, 1986)

 

Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens.

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