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(WHIMSICAL MUSIC PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was Poet Laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Kenneth Rexroth. Kenneth Rexroth was born in 1905 in South Bend, Indiana. His mother and father died early, leaving Rexroth an orphan at 14. He was taken in by an aunt who lived in Chicago. But when he was expelled from high school, he struck out on his own and discovered another kind of education in literary salons, nightclubs, and lecture halls. Rexroth also backpacked through the hobo camps of Depression Era America and traveled to expatriate Paris. He is also very likely the only American poet to have both owned a brothel and lived in a monastery.

In 1927, while in his early 20s, Rexroth settled in San Francisco. He began to publish poems and soon became a major figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. He introduced Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg and convinced New Directions to publish Denise Levertov and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He also organized the famous six reading, which led to Ginsberg's obscenity trial. Rexroth's Support of Beat Culture led Time magazine to name him 'The Father of the Beats'. After that article, many called Rexroth himself a beat, to which he replied, "An entomologist is not a bug." Rexroth's poetry is accessible and direct, as he once said, "I have spent my life striving to write the way I talk." His poems deal with politics, mysticism, and the natural world. He was opposed to institutions like the state, the church, and universities, and what he saw as their byproducts - racism, sexism, and academic art. In addition to his work as an organizer and a poet, Rexroth also introduced Western readers to Japanese and Chinese poetry, editing two classic anthologies. Rexroth married four times and died in Santa Barbara, California, in 1982. He is buried there in a cemetery overlooking the Pacific, but his grave is the only one that faces the sea. The epitaph reads, "As the full moon rises, the swan sings in sleep on the lake of the mind."

KENNETH REXROTH:
This poem was written immediately after the outbreak of the Second World War. It's called 'Falling Leaves and Early Snow'. That is written a couple of months after in Yosemite Valley, I believe. "In the years to come they will say, 'They fell like the leaves in the autumn of 1939.' November has come to the forest, to the meadows where we picked the cyclamen. The year fades with the white frost on the brown sedge in the hazy meadows, where the deer tracks were black in the morning. Ice forms in the shadows; disheveled maples hang over the water; deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream. Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold. The yellow maple leaves eddy above them, the glittering leaves of the cottonwood, the olive, velvety alder leaves, the scarlet dogwood leaves, most poignant of all. In the afternoon thin blades of cloud move over the mountains; the storm clouds follow them; fine rain falls without wind. The forest is filled with wet resonant silence. When the rain pauses the clouds, cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls. In the evening the wind changes; snow falls in the sunset. We stand in the snowy twilight and watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud. Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight, glimmering with floating snow. An owl cries in the sifting darkness. The moon has a sheen like a glacier."

Now this poem, the next poem, is about what we call, you know, climbing on practice rocks. You know, mountaineers commonly find bits of rocks sticking out of the countryside in the neighborhood and scramble up and down. Anyway, it's called 'On What Planet'. "Uniformly over the whole countryside the warm air flows imperceptibly seaward; the autumn haze drifts in deep bands over the pale water; white egrets stand in the blue marshes; Tamalpais, Diablo, St. Helena float in the air. Climbing on the cliffs of Hunter’s Hill, we look out over fifty miles of sinuous interpenetration of mountains and sea. Leading up a twisted chimney, just as my eyes rise to the level of a small cave, two white owls fly out, silent, close to my face. They hover, confused in the sunlight, and disappear into the recesses of the cliff. All day I have been watching a new climber, a young girl with ash blonde hair and gentle confident eyes. She climbs slowly, precisely, with unwasted grace. While I am coiling the ropes, watching the spectacular sunset,

she turns to me and says, quietly, 'It must be very beautiful, the sunset, on Saturn, with the rings and all the moons.'"

'Delia Rexroth'. "Under your ill-kempt yellow roses, Delia, today you are younger than your son. Two and a half decades— The family monument sagged askew, and he overtook your half-a-life. On the other side of the country, near the willows by the slow river, deep in the earth, the white ribs retain

The curve of your fervent, careful breast; the fine skull, the ardor of your brain. And in the fingers the memory of Chopin études, and in the feet slow waltzes and champagne twosteps sleep. And the white full moon of midsummer, that you watched awake all that last night, watches history fill the deserts and oceans with corpses once again; and looks in the east window at me, as I move past you to middle age and knowledge past your agony and waste."

This is called 'Lyell's Hypothesis Again'. Lyell's Hypothesis, and the subtitle says of Lyell's 'Principles of Geology', this is the regnant of scientific principle, modern geology, "An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Causes Now in Operation." "The mountain road ends here, broken away in the chasm where the bridge washed out years ago. The first scarlet larkspur glitters in the first patch of April morning sunlight. The engorged creek roars and rustles like a military ball. Here by the waterfall, insuperable life, flushed with the equinox, sentient and sentimental, falls away to the sea and death. The tissue of sympathy and agony that binds the flesh in its Nessus’ shirt; the clotted cobweb of unself and self; sheds itself and flecks the sun's bed with darts of blossom like flagellant blood above the water bursting in the vibrant air. This ego, bound by personal tragedy and the vast impersonal vindictiveness of the ruined and ruining world, pauses in this immortality, as passionate, as apathetic, as the lava flow that burned here once; and stopped here; and said, 'This far and no further.' And spoke thereafter in the simple diction of stone. Naked in the warm April air, we lie under the redwoods, in the sunny lee of a cliff. As you kneel above me I see tiny red marks on your flanks like bites, where the redwood cones have pressed into your flesh. You can find just the same marks in the lignite in the cliff over our heads. Sequoia langsdorfii before the ice, and sempervirens afterwards, there is little difference, except for all those years. Here in the sweet, moribund fetor of spring flowers, washed, flotsam and jetsam together, cool and naked together, under this tree for a moment, we have escaped the bitterness of love, and love lost, and love betrayed. And what might have been, and what might be, fall equally away with what is, and leave only these ideograms printed on the immortal hydrocarbons of flesh and stone."

This is called 'Doubled Mirrors'. " It is the dark of the moon. Late at night, the end of summer, the autumn constellations glow in the arid heaven. The air smells of cattle, hay, and dust. In the old orchard the pears are ripe. The trees have sprouted from old rootstocks and the fruit is inedible. As I pass them I hear something rustling and grunting and turn my light into the branches. Two raccoons with acrid pear juice and saliva drooling from their mouths stare back at me, their eyes deep sponges of light. They know me and do not run away. Coming up the road through the black oak shadows, I see ahead of me, glinting everywhere from the dusty gravel, tiny points of cold blue light, like the sparkle of iron snow. I suspect what it is, and kneel to see. Under each pebble and oak leaf is a spider, her eyes shining at me with my reflected light across immeasurable distance."

This is written to Erik Satie, 'Gymnopédie'. I used to do this to jazz and everybody thought that it was a piece by George Shearing or something, but it's really... It was written for... In the great days of poetry and jazz, Sinatra was going to do it. And he was going to do a show and he was going to do a record, but poetry and jazz fell apart due to invasion by Barefoot Boys and whatnot. And so he never did. But Marty Paich and I put this together for him. And I guess Shirley MacLaine or somebody reads him books, because he said, "Gee, it sounds like Dunne, you know," Sinatra reads Dunne up there in Benedict Canyon in the moonlight, I guess. But anyway, it accounts for the very Sinatroid opening. The girl and I, to whom this was written, never did get to Malibu. But anyway, it's called 'This Night Only'. In fact, I haven't been to Malibu in 40 years.

('GYMNOPÉDIE' BY ERIK SATIE PLAYS)

"Moonlight now on Malibu, the winter night the few stars far away millions of miles. The sea going on and on forever around the earth far and far as your lips are near, filled with the same light as your eyes. Darling, darling, darling, the future is long gone by and the past will never happen. We have only this, our one forever so small, so infinite, so brief, so vast. Immortal as our hands that touch, deathless as the firelit wine we drink, almighty as this single kiss that has no beginning, that will never, never end." Every once in a while—she's getting middle aged now—I fly down to Los Angeles and we get in a gold-plated Thunderbird and say, "Let's go to Malibu." But we never get to Malibu.

"It's rained every day since you went away. I’ve been lonely. Lonely, empty, tenderness—Longing to kiss the corners of your mouth as you smile your special, inward, sensual, and ironic smile I love, because I know it means you are content—content in French. A special, inward, sensual, and ironic state of bliss. Tu es contente, ma chèrie? I am, even if lonely, because I can call to mind your body in a warm room, in the rainy winter night, a rose on the hearth of winter, a rose cloud standing naked, in the perfume of your flesh. Moi aussi, je suis content."

(MUSIC ENDS) (APPLAUSE)

SPEAKER:
That was Kenneth Rexroth, recorded at the Library of Congress in 1965 and used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. You have been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast, produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Kenneth Rexroth and other essential American poets and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.