Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexrothwas an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time Magazine. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku. He was also a prolific...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 December 1905
CountryUnited States of America
Kenneth Rexroth quotes about
Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.
This isn't the best town for what we're doing. Too many other things to pull the crowds away.
Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act.
Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.
Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy
Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.
As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.
A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light. Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Take all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.
You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.
The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.