Poetry and community or, what is wrong with the West’s conception of artmaking? Learning from the poetry of Chinese Women

Perhaps, as Oskar Kristeller’s renowned essay has it, in ancient cultures, there was no philosophical discipline equivalent to the modern discipline of aesthetics.¹ What is nevertheless uncontestable is that pre-Classical and Classical philosophers reflected on the nature of art, the characteristics of aesthetic properties, proportions and the order of the cosmos, the origin of harmony, the ultimate source of beauty, and the features of μίμησις (mīmēsis, mimesis) and representation. The earliest philosophical notion of making rested on the notion of a maker as one who understands the environing conditions that generate novelty and how to nurture that creativity.² However, as the Roman world overtook the Greek, and the Roman idea of causa supplanted the Greek idea of αιτον (aiton) as the cardinal idea in the theory of making, this notion of nurturing bringing-forth was eschewed. The Roman idea of causa elevated efficient causes above the other three categories of occasioning factors that Aristotle enumerated—causa efficiens was elevated above causa materialis (material cause), causa formalis (formal cause), and causa finalis (final cause, or the purpose or end that any thing’s or event’s existence serves—as the purpose of a bed is to encourage sleeping, or the purpose of a teacher is to encourage curiosity, deliberation, and contemplation³). When efficient causes were elevated to the key factor conditioning an object or event, no longer was coming-into-being understood to be the result of four antecedent energies co-operating with one another to create a novel reality.

Eventually the idea of final cause was altogether rejected from metaphysics and along with it went the idea that the cosmos was created to realize a preordained harmony and to bring forth an ensemble of beings, each contributing to the harmony and beauty of the whole.⁴ The ascendency of Newtonian physics extended this development, so in the modern (Newtonian) era sciences rested on the conviction that to give an account of coming-to-be, one need only identify (and quantify) the efficient causes that impelled matter into movement and thereby brought about the explanandum. (Why does rain fall? Wind blows over a body of water, and since water retains heat and reflects the sun’s warmth, the air above the water is heated, and it absorbs water. The air cools as it moves inland and can no longer hold the moisture it had absorbed, and it drops in on the ground. This explanans rejects any suggestion that an ensemble of conditioning factors providentially fosters living things, natural development, and beauty.)

The new “natural philosophy” brought forth a new conception of artmaking. No longer were superior makers believed to succeed by virtue of possessing special insight into the particulars of the complex of factors that environed a generative process and an intuitive understanding how makers can cooperate with many energies to nurture the coming-into-being of a work of art. Later, a strain of the Romantic view of art and artmaking proclaimed that the artist’s mind is a spiritual force and, as such, its reality value higher is higher than that of nature (and indeed, similar to the divine in its creative power). The artist’s imagination conceives of a form and treats material drawn from nature as stuff to be used—stuff to appropriated for his or her purposes (to be sure, this is a very masculine conception of artmaking, and across the eras the dominated by this notion of making, nearly all artists were men). Materials drawn from nature should be beaten, stretched, twisted, and pushed into the exact shape the artist had imagined: a strong maker possesses virtuosic skills at imposing his will on natural materials, forcing them to assume the form he imagined.

This concept of making has revealed its shortcomings in the ecological catastrophe we are facing. Among the first artists to develop a profound understanding of the deleteriousness of that view of making and to work out a theoretical alternative that would guide his practice was the San Francisco painter, poet, and essayist Kenneth Rexroth. He was immensely influential on artistic developments in California from the 1940s to the 80s. In the 1950s and 60s, he held weekly salons at his home, which were attended by poets, painters, dancers, and filmmakers; there he passed on his thoughts about art, religion, and society. The spiritual anarcho-pacificism we identify with West Coast art from the 1950s to the present was in large measure his creation.

Rexroth had been a participant in a lively circle of Dada artists in Chicago in the 1920s and began writing in the international vanguard style of the time—which was greatly influenced by Cubist painting. He published with the Objectivists.⁵ He soon renounced the international modernist style and adopted what many characterize as a more Classical verse form. I do not believe the change in his writing that occurred during World War 2 (works in the new style first appeared in 1941, in the book In What Hour?) constitutes a retrenchment. To the contrary, I believe it marks a renewal of the project of the purification of language that Ezra Pound had embarked on in his Imagist days. An early review of In What Hour? remarked on the expanded personal and social commitments of the just released volume; it virtually opens with the assertation that Rexroth “has moved away from earlier poems in which he made use of much purely personal and subjective imagery, to give us in this volume long free verse poems concerning the hungers and the unwisdom of men” and goes to on to note that “Mr. Rexroth, together with many others, has inherited the Wasteland [early T. S. Eliot’s] technique.”⁶ The reviewer recognized the humane purpose of the Rexroth’s new methods: the poet had set out to reform language, enriching it with a communicative, interpersonal depth; and like Pound’s, Rexroth’s program for the rectification of language was influenced by his encounter with Chinese poetry and his efforts at translating the works of the Chinese poets that meant the most to him.

In the first section of the present essay, I probe Rexroth’s understanding of poetry as the profound encounter of the depths of one completed, individuated person with another’s. I hope to show that this profound understanding of communication had spiritual determinants in Daoist and Chinese Buddhist ideas Rexroth learned about as he prepared himself to translate Chinese poets and learn from their wisdom. In the second part, I reflect on experiences I had with modelling nude for my films. I found myself answering to a rhythm and an energy beyond me: a new meaning enfolding my total being dawned. I learned through this that artmaking is not declamation nor a statement of truths discovered, but the fruit of an open, undecided sense of being-on-the-way.

Background: From Modernism to Postmodernism

With the development of technologies of mass communication—beginning with the pulp press and broadsides, and later, photographic images capable of mechanical reproduction, and later still, radio and voice-recordings (which greatly expanded the importance of political speech)— late-nineteenth century thinkers, in ever-increasing numbers, became increasingly troubled by language’s potential for deception and dishonesty. What is more, many concluded that ornate and embellished forms of speech and writing serve to conceal language’s treacherous operation—cases in point are the elaborate, dreamy, rhythmically intoxicating writing of such Victorians as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the studied artifice of Gabriele D’Annunzio that conceals its artificiality in a penumbra of indifference, and the exotic flourishes of the Scapigliatura writers (for example the Emilio Praga and Igino Ugo Tarchetti). One antidote for language’s malaise was to strip it of ornamentation so as to present the thing itself, in its naked truth.

Another countermeasure against language’s perceived loss of authority has hardly been recognized, but in my view it is by far the more telling. That countermeasure was to make the literary object itself (the poem) into a secure, real object, by emphasizing its constructed character and its independence from anything beyond itself. Guillaume Apollinaire, in Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (1913–1916), and Gertrude Stein, in “Orta or One Dancing” exemplify this conviction, and in early twentieth century, they had many followers. These writers modelled their works on the Analytical Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from the years 1910 to 1912, works that similarly strived to arrest the dematerializing forces that Faraday and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory had unleashed and to foreground the artwork’s status as a constructed object, an entity that is as much a part of the real world as any other fabricated thing. If the Expressionists and the Futurists strived to create an art that celebrated phenomenal processes and fluxing energy fields as the ultimate truth, Picasso, Braque, and the Gallery Cubists, to the contrary, strived to put a brake on that tendency, by reinforcing the solidity of the art object.⁷ Like Calligrammes and “Orta or One Dancing,” Rexroth’s first poems (after the indisputably precocious and still rewarding A Homestead Called Damascus) brought those same aspirations over into writing.

Rexroth’s encounter with Chinese verse led him to abandon the compositional methods of his early poetry and to ally himself with a poetics of deep, interpersonal communication. In what follows, I attempt to probe Rexroth’s personalist understanding of poetry as the profound encounter of two completed, individuated persons. I hope thus to show the influence Chinese art and thought had in reshaping his ethical and socio-political beliefs as the Second World War was ending. In working out these ideas on profound interpersonal communication, Rexroth drew on a range ethical, religious, and philosophical traditions. But Chinese Buddhism was the principal tradition—it contributed to Rexroth’s repudiating modernism and formulating a postmodern poetics.

The Metaphysics of Chinese Buddhism, Non-grasping, and Direct Communication.

For Rexroth, ethics gives form to aesthetics. The implicit claim staked by Rexroth’s translations mocks the tenets of New Criticism (and much of what is implied weights just as heavily on postmodernism). Against the claims of the New Critics (for example, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom), Rexroth insisted that poems are not purely formal objects. While the New Critics proclaimed that neither personal responses to literature, nor historical scholarship, nor linguistic scholarship, nor what Ransom termed “moral studies” should influence literary criticism, Rexroth argued that our response to poetry is the complex response of a complete (and embodied) human being encountering another complete human being, in all his or her uniqueness, and that such encounters with genuine otherness enrich us.⁸ Our being is re-formed and re-animated in all our life experiences, and we bring the evolving product of those experiences to our encounter with a poet, her poetry, and her circumstances. Such beliefs make postmodernist efforts to debunk subjectivity seem downright evil.⁹

The metaphysics of Tang and Song poetry developed out of the Confucian and Neo- Confucian assimilation of Daoist and Buddhist beliefs. Central to this cluster of beliefs is the notion of a continuous logical progression from the primal unity of Qi (气; Wade-Giles: ch’i, potentiality or energy), through its first division into Yin (阴) and Yang (阳) and successive iterative divisions into binary opposites, which divisions give rise to the rich variety of the world.¹⁰ Rexroth built his poetics of direct communication on this metaphysics.

Rexroth believed a metaphysics grounded in the reconciliation of opposites to be the metaphysics that love discloses. One of his core ideas is that contemplation results in the unification of self and other, and this process goes on at increasingly larger scales. That an image of an external scene or external object can reveal the state of the self and suggest the mirroring of self and world (or self and other) is a commonplace of Chinese poetics, where it often appears under the rubric of the fusion of qing 情 (emotion) and jing 景 (scene, external world). The fusion of qing and jing is a touchstone of Rexroth’s poetic method. Ultimately the experience of reconciliation leads to a decreation of the self, the absorption of the self into the cosmic order, which presents itself as an epiphany. Several passages in Rexroth’s poetry celebrate that experience of revelation.¹¹

Rexroth’s poetry and poetics were radically syncretic and Chinese Buddhism was by no means the sole influence on his theory of direct communication. As World War 2 neared its end, Rexroth’s political commitments changed: he became estranged from many of the left activists who had been his closest associates. Before the war, his public persona in San Francisco was primarily that of a union organizer, and many activists in the labour movement could not abide the pacificism he continued to espouse during the war years; indeed, many of Rexroth’s closest friendships dissolved and his political comrades turned on him. The preface to The Phoenix and the Tortoise shows that as a result of this upheaval, personalism became increasingly important. But personalism became central to Rexroth’s outlook at the same time that Daoism and Chinese Buddhism assumed importance in shaping his new ethics, politics, poetics, and poetry. Rexroth stated forthrightly that reading Du Fu (Rexroth used the form Tu Fu), and making Du Fu’s experience part of his own had “made [him] a better man, a more sensitive perceiving organism, as well as, [he hoped], a better poet.” A part of what he meant was Du Fu’s ethics, politics, poetics, and poetry had help steer him towards his particular version of personalism. The spiritual learning he derived from Chinese Buddhism, from Daoism, and from Chinese poetics and verse led Rexroth to break with the dogmas of Anglo-Modernism. This amalgamation of Daoist and Chinese Buddhist ideas with Anglo-Catholic personalism became the model for the religious syncretism West Coast artists have embraced since.

In his introduction to The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), Rexroth articulated his understanding of the developmental process of this ever more expansive, ever more comprehensive love that is the cynosural notion in his theory of direct communication.¹² The shorter poems in that volume, he tells us, have as their purpose the of a basis for the recreation of a system of values in sacramental marriage. The process as I see it goes something like this: from abandon to erotic mysticism, from erotic mysticism to the ethical mysticism of sacramental marriage, thence to the realization of the ethical mysticism of universal responsibility—from the Dual to the Other.¹³

When it seemed World War 2 might be never-ending and hate go on unbridled through all the coming ages, The Phoenix and the Tortoise held out hope in the redemptive power of love.

Rexroth offers a more precise, and deeper, description of the process by which love rises out of the limited self in The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952). There he uses the rather clunky term extrapersonalization to refer to the transforming, liberating power of an ever more comprehending love. The term suggests the influence of personalism on Rexroth, for he suggests the spiritual practices leading to extrapersonalization are useful as an antidote to the state’s depersonalizing effects.¹⁴ The 1952 volume offers as well his most incisive analysis of the process through which community emerges, as it proposes that “mutual love is the principle that enables community, which grows in love.”

The Dragon and the Unicorn was written just after the end of the Second World War, when Rexroth’s activist friends distanced themselves from him. The class-based ideal of the brotherhood of the proletariat fell apart, and The Dragon and the Unicorn takes on the task of founding the ideal of community on a basis different from class solidarity and different even from simply a commitment to a more just sharing of goods and resources. It proposes that community begins with love:

The person is transcended By the reflexion of himself In the other in love, the Unique is universalized

In the dual, any important Crux of reality is

On the emergence of A person into a love

Perspective, experience Has no other real content.¹⁵

The self attains the status of some sort of universal through this extrapersonalization.

Each Person’s experience grows From an insignificant Indivisible atom to

An infinite universe.¹⁶

It is important to point out that this process does not eventuate in a state that carries one into a realm beyond the quotidian actual, though the experience does bring one to see everyday events in a new way.

Rexroth maintains that the unio mystica—for him, not an experience of particular being drowned in the transcendent, but the experience of fleeting particulars emerging as the domain of ultimate reality—is the natural element of poetry. So natural is this element to a strong poet that, while she dwells in it, she hardly takes any notice of it.¹⁷ A common image for this unio is light, for through the experience, one becomes enlightened and luminous. This is one of my favorite poems by Rexroth:

A ray of the Morning Star

Pierces a shaft of moon-filled mist. A naked girl takes form

And comes toward me—translucent,

Her body made of infinite Whirling points of light, each one A galaxy, like clouds of

Fireflies beyond numbering. Through them, star and moon Still glisten faintly. She comes To me on imperceptibly Drifting air, and touches me

n the shoulder with a hand Softer than silk. She says “Lover, do you know what Heart You have possessed?”

Before I can answer, her Body flows into mine, each Corpuscle of light merges

With a corpuscle of blood or flesh.

. . .

Grasping and consequence

Never existed. The aeons have fallen away.

Suddenly I am standing

In my garden, nude, bathed in The hot brilliance of the new

Risen sunCstar and crescent gone into light.¹⁸

The reference to grasping and consequence imports into the poem key notions (and feelings) from Rexroth’s ethics. In The Heart’s Garden, the Garden’s Heart, Rexroth writes, “He who lives without grasping / Lives always in the experience / Of the immediate as the Ultimate.” A similarily Buddhist ethic is conveyed in his “The combinations / Of the world are unstable / by nature. Take it easy.” ¹⁹ Those lines come from Rexroth’s “On Flower Wreath Hill,” whose title alludes to the Avatamsaka (Flower Wreath) Sutra. They refer directly to a remark made by Siddhārtha Gautama himself: Shakyamuni’s last words were “The combinations of the world are unstable. Monks strive without ceasing.”

Of all Buddhist texts, it is the Avatamsaka Sutra that Rexroth prized most and referred to more frequently than any other.²⁰ The central concept of that Buddhist scripture is that of the dharma (the Law, but this idea should be understood as the harmony that guides and sustains all things in their being).²¹ The dharma is there presented as the source of all truth and of all being, and as the “wheel of becoming” (Sanskrit: bhavacakra). Earlier forms of Buddhism had taught that Tathagata (the Buddha) is dharmakaya. The Buddhist scholar Reginald Ray characterizes the dharmakāya as “the body of reality itself, without specific, delimited form, wherein the Buddha is identified with the spiritually charged nature of everything that is.”²² The Buddhist concept of dharmakāya resembles the pagan conception of the λόγoς (logos) insofar as it guides the unfolding of the universe.²³ The dharmakāya “pervades the universe and manifests itself before all beings according to causality; nowhere is [it] not found, yet [it] is immovable from the seat of enlightenment.”²⁴ Dharamakāya is by nature pure and tranquil, and though the phenomena of the world seem variegated, in reality they are all simply manifestations of a common underlying reality (tathatā, often a synonym for dharmakāya and often translated as suchness), in whose nature they partake.²⁵

Each thing is a complete manifestation of the whole. Huayan’s third patriarch Fa Zang’s 法藏 (643–712), Calming and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of Huayan 華嚴五教止觀(Huayan wujiao zhiguan) offered one of Chinese Buddhism’s great metaphysical images:

The jeweled net of Sakra is also called Indra’s Net, and is made up of jewels. The jewels are shiny and reflect each other successively, their images permeating each other over and over. In a single jewel they all appear at the same time, and this can be seen in each and every jewel. There is really no coming or going. Now if we turn to the southwest direction and pick up one of the jewels to examine it, we will see that this one jewel can immediately reflect the images of all of the other jewels. Each of the other jewels will do the same. Each jewel will simultaneously reflect the images of all the jewels in this manner, as will all of the other jewels. The images are repeated and multiplied in each other in a manner that is unbounded. Within the boundaries of a single jewel are contained the unbounded repetition and profusion of the images of all the jewels. The reflections are exceedingly clear and are completely unhindered.²⁶

The image is renowned because it captures so splendidly the great theme of Huayan Buddhism: the perfect realm of the Buddha (理, li, often translated as principle) is interfused with the ordinary world (事, shi, which is ordinarily translated as event, affair, or thing). In Chinese philosophical writings, li 理 usually refers to the principal metaphysical order that subtends events as well the rational principles that explicate that order. The word is often used in Chinese Buddhist writing as a synonym for emptiness. Shi 事 is the realm of things that are experienced as discrete individual items. The relation of li to shi became an important topic of study in the work of the great Korean Buddhist scholar Wônhyo (617–86): Wônhyo’s Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna proposes that there are four realms of dharmadhātu, the realm of li, the realm of shi, the realm of the mutual interpenetration or “non-obstruction” of li and shi, lishi wuai 理事无碍(trad: 理事無礙), and the realm of the mutual interpenetration or non-obstruction of shi and shi, shishi wuai 事事无碍 (trad: 事事無礙)—the character of the last two realms is what is conveyed in the splendid image of Indra’s Net. After Wônhyo, the analysis of the relation between li and shi became a fundamental problematic of Huayan Buddhism. In time the li-shi model became an important tool for thinking in East Asian philosophy generally, whether

Buddhist or non-Buddhist. By the late Tang, Huayan Buddhism’s widespread acceptance raised the notion of li to the status of a philosophical idea and established it at the very core of Chinese Buddhism; the notion became so central to Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism that the later thinkers referred to the Neo-Confucianism of that period as Song–Ming lixue 理学 (trad. 理學), the study of li (usually translated as the Learning of Principle or the School of Universal Principles), and Zhu’s particular development of those ideas, into what became known as Cheng–Zhu Neo- Confucianism—named after the two principle philosophers shaping its ultimate form— dominated Chinese thought right up until the Chinese Revolution of 1911–12.

A principle of harmony allows all the phenomena that reality comprehends to co-exist, each interacting with all others, with the products of all other interactions, and with the products of the products of all other interactions. Each of the jewels in Indra’s net is a separate being, yet each contains reflections of all the others. The image being offered here avoids the dualism between suchness (真如, chen-ju) and the phenomenal world (事, shi). Further, it offers a notion of one thing (理, li) manifesting itself as many (事, shi). In fact, Zanning’s 贊寧 (919–1001) Biographies of Eminent Monks 宋高僧傳 (Song gaoseng zhuan, 988) tells a story about how Fa Zang illustrated the idea of a core reality manifesting itself wholly and completely in each of many separate things:

He took ten mirrors, arranging them, one each, at the eight compass points and above and below, in such a way that they were a little over ten feet apart from each other, all facing one another. He then placed a Buddhist figure in the center and illuminated it with a torch so that its image was reflected from one to another, all facing one another. He then placed a Buddhist figure in the center and illuminated it with a torch so that its image was reflected from one to another. His students thus came to to understand the theory of the passing from “land to sea” (the finite world) into infinity.²⁷

Yu-lan Fung notes of this example, “each mirror not only reflected the image of the other mirrors, but also all the images reflected each of those other mirrors.”²⁸

These ideas are Buddhist, but they are not exclusively Buddhist—Daoism shares with the Avatamsaka Sutra an idea of a process resembling dharmakāya as its central core.²⁹ In Daoism, this process is called the Dao, or the Way, from which all things come. To be attuned to the Dao is to experience the mysterious process that is the final reality. The working of the Dao is characterized by wu-wei (无为, no action), spontaneity, non-interference, or allowing things to unfold as they will. To be attuned to the Dao is to live a life that is the opposite of grasping, or controlling: by getting beyond grasping, one lives in the experience of the ultimate, as the poem says.

The neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) maintained that people are born with a rational (good) principle, li (理), intrinsic to their constitution. Li interacts with qi (氣), a fundamental life-energy, to produce the things of the natural world (including our bodies). Qi is material, and as such, it is subjected to the vagaries of experience; in the course of this experience, it becomes muddied. To bring one’s mind back into alignment with li, Zhu Xi counselled “quiet sitting” and an investigation of things. He maintained that mind (call it qi) is corrupted by grasping, and can be brought back to health by contemplation and the direct experience and acceptance of the transience (emptiness) of things. Rexroth writes,

Sung times produced the two greatest founders of Neo-Confucianism, Chu Hsi [朱熹 or, according to the new system of romanization, Zhu Xi], China’s greatest “philosopher” in our sense, and [Chu’s leading opponent] Lu Hsiang-shan [陸象山, or Lu Xiangshan; also 陸九淵, or Lu Jiuyuan, a philosopher who proposed the idea of universal mind: “The universe is my mind, and my mind is the universe”] . . . They not only made Confucianism a more systematic philosophy, they turned it into a personal discipline of sensibility.³⁰ To use Western philosophical jargon, which is misleading but will do, Chu and Lu both developed reality from Not-Being, the unconditioned, through the interaction of form (li) and potentiality (ch’i [or qi]). For Chu, these two metaphysical principles always interacted, although the world of form was, eventually, one—pure, empty—the void of the Buddhists. For Lu, form was always primary, its substantiation an illusion.

The only trouble with this glib summary is that both thought of li (form, principle) as itself a realm of potentiality in our sense and ch’i as really a sort of bare matter, serving as a principle of individuation. For Chu, man’s mind was a combination of li and ch’i. For Lu, man’s mind had strayed from the realm of world of li, pure form, to which it had originally belonged, and the aim of the wise and good man was to find his lost mind or true nature again by quiet meditation and begin to understand its relation to the whole. At the end would come, without words or ideas, the sudden illumination, the knowledge that the individual was in fact the totality.³¹

Rexroth summarized this history of Neo-Confucian borrowings from Chinese Buddhism so elegantly because he in turn borrowed these ideas in forming his ideas on non-grasping, meditation, and redemption. To recover the quiet understanding that each being belongs to all others, an understanding that is often eclipsed by the hustle and bustle of modern life, Rexroth would go on retreats in the High Sierras. In one of his regular San Francisco Examiner columns, for 23 August 1964, he writes,

When you read this, I will be far away in a tent in the High Sierras with my daughters, Mary and Katherine . . . I go to the mountains not to get away from it, but to get with it [to bring his qi into alignment with li]. As 11 months roll by, I feel myself getting more and more mechanical in my attitude towards other men. Imperceptibly men take on the masks and costumes of causes and tendencies, and classes and forces and ideologies and all the false faces of generalization with which we classify human beings .

. .

Our whole society strives, inhumanly and insensibly, to make instruments of us all, one to the other. We are all corrupted by a world in which everything and everybody is a means to something else. I resist it always, but it creeps over me like an infection, the virus that turns each other man, himself an “I” like myself, into a thing in my eyes—and so secretly turns me to a thing likewise.

So if I go away for a little and associate with rocks and stars and flowers and fish, the living perspective comes back . . .

It is August, and as I lie under the sky of late summer and watch the Great Nebula of Andromeda swim past overhead—a cloud of millions of stars all as big as our sun—I think of the world down below the mountains. There are over 2 billion men out there.

Each one of them is an animal like me, naked under his clothes. Under his skin his body is full of blood and bones and meat and mysterious capsules and sponges which hold his life. Sometimes these things hurt him, and one day they stop working and he dies and decays away. He doesn’t represent anything except himself, a self called Barry or Nikolai or Wang or Nkekerere. There will never be another one like him. Each one of them swims by my imagination like the Andromeda Nebula, a 2-billion-fold cloud, and each one of him says to me the word that denies absolutely that he can ever be a thing, the word I call myself—“I.”³²

In another column, for 13 September 1965, he presents these very neo-Confucian ruminations:

What holds a civilization together, and what is the difference between creative growth and decay? What is the foundation that underlies and sustains all the activities of a people and energies and forms that very special unity we call culture? Peace. The peace which comes from the habit of contemplation. It is not intellectual knowledge of the unity of human endeavor, nor a philosophical notion of the ultimate meaning of the universe. It is an inward sense and an abiding quality of life, a temper of the soul. It is not rare nor hard to find. It offers itself at moments to everyone, from early childhood on, although less and less often if it is not welcomed. It can be seized and trained and cultivated until it becomes a constant habit in the background of daily life. Without it life is only turbulence, from which eventually meaning and even all intensity of feeling will die out in tedium and disorder.³³

Rexroth had come to believe that one of art’s principal virtues was to help cultivate this temper of the soul—to create occasions to welcome this inward sense so that it does not turn away.

Poetry activates a poetic sense of reality and helps it become the atmosphere in which one lives one life. He had to develop theory of making that would square with that view. After all, the modernist view of making was entirely hostile to that belief.

Rexroth became convinced that the health of a society depends on contemplative experience being available. In an interview with Cyrena N. Pondrom, Rexroth remarked,

when the light of contemplation goes out, the civilization collapses, and there is a kind of ecological point of no-return. (When you kill off enough California sardines, the enemies of the sardine take over, and although they seem to be very abundant still, lo, in three years they have vanished . . .) The interrelatedness of contemplatives is a skeleton or web which holds the social body. There is a critical point when there isn’t enough of this web. We have long since reached that and passed it in America, and the society goes completely to pieces, however healthy it may seem. And of course the participants in the society violently deny that this is happening.³⁴

Many American artists of the second half of the twentieth century embraced the idea that by letting go—by developing the self beyond grasping and controlling—one prepares oneself to experience the process (the Dao) that is ultimate reality. It was especially widespread in San Francisco in the 1960s. San Francisco artists’ acceptance of chance operations as an artistic method is generally said to have derived from Surrealism, and specifically from a unique version of Surrealism based principally on the writings of Antonin Artaud that emerged in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. This unique Surrealist-derived strain in poetry and visual art is generally said to be exemplified in the work of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Wallace Berman, David Meltzer, and filmmaker Lawrence Jordan.³⁵ That description is right, as far as it goes. But it should be noted that all of those mentioned (as well as the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who also extolled the virtues of spontaneity) were part of Rexroth’s circle in the 1950s, when Rexroth’s Marxist-inspired activism had waned, and he turned increasingly toward Asian poetry, Asian religion, and Asian philosophy.³⁶ The Buddhist/Daoist aesthetic of letting go, of allowing the creative process to take its own course, prepared the ground for the flourishing of the Surrealist- derived aesthetics of spontaneity in the Bay Area. ³⁷ Moreover, the San Francisco version of Surrealism, as Lawrence Jordan likes to remind us, had a quieter and gentler character that was close to that of the Daoists (as expressed in their idea of wu wei 无为).³⁸

Rexroth understood that the Dao (or dharmakāya) is a creative ground out of which beings emerge. This notion of the Dao allowed him to relate the Chinese world view to a central tradition of American thought, that of Emerson and Whitman. So, like Emerson, Rexroth believed that poetry would generate the new consciousness that would save the nation.

No literature of the past two hundred years is of the slightest importance unless it is disaffiliated. Only our modern industrial and commercial civilization has produced an elite which has consistently rejected all the reigning values of the society . . . Capitalism cannot produce from within itself . . . any system of values which is not in essence of itself . . . Artist, poet, physicist, astronomer, dancer, musician, mathematician are captives stolen from an older time, a different kind of society, in which, ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values.³⁹

As for Whitman, Rexroth extolled the poet for working to bring forth a community of love.

Today, when intellectual and politicians hold each other in supreme contempt, few remember that America was founded by, and for three generations ruled by, intellectuals. As they were driven from power in the years before the Civil War, their vision of a practicable utopia diffused out into society; went underground; surfaced again in co-operative colonies, free-love societies, labor banks, vegetarianism, feminism, Owenites, Fourierists, Saint-Simonians, Anarchists, dozens of religious communal sects.

Whitman was formed in this environment. Whenever he found it convenient, he spoke of himself as a Quaker and used Quaker language. Much of his strange lingo is not the stilted rhetoric of the self-taught but simply Quaker talk. Most of his ideas were commonplaces in the radical and pietistic circles and the Abolition movement. This was the first American Left . . .

Walt Whitman’s democracy is utterly different from the society of free rational contractual relationships inaugurated by the French Revolution. It is a community of men related by organic satisfactions, in work, love, play, the family, comradeship—a social order whose essence is the liberation and universalization of self-hood. Leaves of Grass is not a great work of art just because it has a great program, but it does offer point-by-point alternatives to the predatory society.

He even traced the historical lineage of Whitman’s ideas on the role love plays in generating the order of the cosmos:

The Middle Ages called hope a theological virtue. They meant that, with faith and love, it was essential to the characteristic being of mankind. Now hope is joy in the presence of the future in the present. On this joy creative effort depends, because creation relates past, present, and future in concrete actions which result in enduring objects and experiences. Beyond the consideration of

time, Whitman asserts the same principle of being, the focusing of the macrocosm in the microcosm—or its reverse, which is the same thing—as the principle of individuation. Again and again he identifies himself with a transfigured America, the community of work in love and love in work; this community with the meaning of the universe, the vesture of God; a great chain of being which begins, or ends, in Walt Whitman, or his reader—Adam-Kadmon, who contains all things—ruled in order by love . . .

Only recently it was fashionable to dismiss Whitman as foolish and dated, a believer in the myth of progress and the preacher of an absurd patriotism. Today we know it that it is Whitman’s vision or nothing.⁴⁰

This summary of Whitman’s importance is at once the most breathtakingly radical reading of Leaves of Grass that I know of and a cogent capsule statement of Rexroth’s own critique of the Enlightenment contractarianism and the predatory societies it has produced and its antidote, the organic community formed by love, whose members work to bring about the good of all.

Perhaps Rexroth’s most forceful statement is of the vital importance of poetry for his time, put forth in his 1957 essay “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation.” That essay is at once a lament and a reflection on the death of two great carriers of the creative force, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and the bop-jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, and a heartfelt accusatory tract waged against a dehumanized society as their murderers. It asserts that both Thomas and Parker communicated one central theme: “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act.”⁴¹ Against the social lie, genuine poetry sought “clarity of image and simplicity of language”—and this stands in contrast with the overly embellished “metaphysical conceits which fascinate the Reactionary Generation still dominant in backwater American colleges.”⁴² Poetry, Rexroth contends, is direct communication founded in the spoken word, an easily understood “statement from one person to another”—from one completed person to another.⁴³ This was the sort of writing he sought to bring forth, after he moved on from his Cubist experiments. The encounter with Chinese poetry helped persuade him of the importance of the moment when total, direct communication transforms itself into a complete absoption—a boundless identification, without limits. This change in Rexroth’s poetry reflected a deepening conviction that the significance of a fact can be apprehended, in all its nakedness and innocence—that (contrary to the modernist belief) the unity between language and the world has not been broken. A poem is not an assembly of fragments, suggesting the projection of disjunctive images on the screen of the mind, seeking a wholeness they can never attain. It is the direct communication of what is (even its muteness). Rexroth developed a faith in the possibility of the poet conveying the ultimate depths of experience; this faith might seem old-fashioned (so utterly opposed is it to what the avant-garde stands for)—but in fact it grew out of a radical strain in English poetry.

A Sacramental Conception of the Thing

Rexroth’s efforts at revitalizing the power of the word—of taking language back from the fallen condition to which an impersonal capitalist society has reduced it—aimed at finding a way to convey our deepest experiences of encounter. The opening of the self to a concurrence with an other begins with the experience of the luminous reality of the particular thing as the ultimate existent and of the macrocosm focusing itself within the microcosm, develops into the identification of the self with another human, and finally culminates with the merging of the self with the streaming energy that guides the unfolding of all that is. Communication, for Rexroth, is a sacramental experience. A notion of the sacramental lies right at the heart of Rexroth’s poetics—it is central to his beliefs about the direct communication between one person and another. He writes in An Autobiographical Novel (a lucid, rambling, open-eyed, peculiarly jointed, and very magnanimous account of the poet’s first twenty-one years, in which he discovers radical politics, DADA, and international modernism and learns of America’s broken covenant with itself), “For me the Sacraments transfigured the rites of passage, the physical facts of the human condition—birth, adolescence, sexual intercourse, vocation, sickness and death, communion, penance. Catholicism still provides a structure of acts, individual and at the same time communal, physical responses to life.”⁴⁴ For Rexroth, then, the sacraments are associated with time and passage. Rexroth attributes the greatness of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in Look! We Have Come Through! to his relationship with Frieda Weekley, which he experienced as sacramental, the total communication between oneself and the effulgent, completely individuated other.

That is why the poems of Lawrence and Frieda on their Rhine Journey are such great poetry. Reality streams through the body of Frieda, through everything she touches, every place she steps, valued absolutely, totally, beyond time and place, in the minute particular. The swinging of her breasts as she stoops in the bath, the roses, the deer, the harvesters, the hissing of the glacier water in the steep river—everything stands out lit by a light not of this earth and at the same time completely of this earth, the light of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, whose source is the wedded body of the bride.⁴⁵

Sacramental love between man and woman and the sacramental marriage (which is the most complete social form that the religious ligature of love between the sexes can assume) are also the principal topos of Rexroth’s 1944 book The Phoenix and the Tortoise, which is especially notable for its long poem that, in its deep Christian personalism, is a sort of companion piece to The Dragon and the Unicorn. Written at a time of global enmity among peoples, it develops themes Rexroth first proposed in A Homestead Called Damascus, a book-length poem written in his teenage years (between 1921 and 1925, though it was not published until 1957).⁴⁶ Homestead is a companion piece to “A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy” (a early Cubist poem from 1925– 1927) that makes use of a dialogue form (perhaps reflecting the young poet’s love of Plato’s writing style), presenting two brothers (two aspects of the self) who discuss metaphysical, aesthetic, and social issues.⁴⁷ Both Homestead and “A Prologmenon” are long philosophical poems—and Rexroth noted that “all of my long poems could be called a theodicy and an attempt to answer the question ‘why does anything exist?’ Theodicy you can find in the dictionary and I use all of its meanings, but most especially ‘whyness.’”⁴⁸ The long poem in The Phoenix and the Tortoise, too, has the attributes of a theodicy. That poem also gives powerful expression to his anarchopacifist ethic, which acknowledges that each person must take total responsibility for every one of his actions. Some of the shorter poems, for example “Suchness,” evoke the sacred marriage (ἱερὸς γάμο, hieros gamos):

In the theosophy of light, The logical universal Ceases to be anything more

Than the dead body of an angel. What is substance? Our substance Is whatever we feed our angel.

The perfect incense for worship

Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes.⁴⁹

Rexroth maintains that this experience of suchness provides the sacred grounds for the solution of the problems of epistemology and communication alike.⁵⁰

If belief and anxiety, Covetousness and grasping, Be banished from experience Of any object whatever, Only its essence remains, Only its ultimate being.

He who lives without grasping Lives always in experience

Of the immediate as the Ultimate. The solution

Of the problem of knowing And being is ethical.

Epistemology is moral.⁵¹

The epistemology here is of a gnosiological variety. Rexroth’s description of vision has much in common with Eastern Orthodox ideas of theoria (θεωρία) and theosis (θέωσις, divination).

According to this teaching, ascetic practices (contemplation, prayer, and centring the heart through theophilia) lead to dispassion (that is, a purity of heart that eliminates the affliction of passion). This kenotic effect eventuates in theosis—in one’s becoming Godlike, or of achieving union with God.⁵² Rexroth’s gnosiology describes exactly the same path to achieving the perfection of knowing as does the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The poet’s acquaintance with East Asian philosophy and with philosophical traditions of the West before Scholasticism made him sense how strange it is that, from the beginning of the early modern period on, epistemology has dominated Western philosophy: the principal purpose of philosophy, accordingly, has no longer been to lay out a vision of reality. Rexroth traced epistemology’s rise to dominance back to alienation—to anomie, fostered by the capitalist mode of production and the “final fragmentation of agent-action-act-result, in what had once been one dense reality.”⁵³ He shared Pierre Hadot’s conception of philosophizing as something more than the systematic formulation of ideas for resolving abstract, theoretical issues; he conceived of philosophy as a search for noesis, that is, as a search for a means to cultivate attitudes of mind that might make one susceptible to truth. In earlier times, those problems of classical and scholastic philosophy that we look on as epistemological were not, at least not in the psychological sense. The contrary or contradictory worlds of Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, were theoretical models of ways of being, not primarily of ways of knowing. . . 

Capitalist philosophy has turned these concerns into the sausage grinder of its epistemological worry and dilemma.⁵⁴

For Rexroth, knowing is an activity that results from our interaction with the world, ourselves, and others—one carried out by an integral, situated person, and one that transforms simultaneously the person and the world he or she knows. Rexroth connects this with Lonergan’s themes in Insight, especially his claim that insight involves the whole person’s self- understanding.

Of course, it’s true that it is the whole man who knows he knows. The atomistic Newtonian machine that manufactures knowledge in the English empiricists of course cannot know it knows. So the system of production which came to birth with it cannot know what or why it is producing. Maritain realized this and it was his improvement on the Thomistic theory of knowing, an improvement he always insisted was orthodox Thomism. As I recall it was always the theory of Father Harper, S. J., the now forgotten and quietly discouraged author of the unfinished Metaphysics of the School. The intactness of the response of the whole human being to being itself was a favorite notion of the anti-Thomists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—the Modernist Transcendentalists—and even, I suppose in their way, of their opponents, the Immanentists.⁵⁵

What sets Rexroth apart from Hadot (and most other contemporary exponents of philosophy as a way of life) is his belief that life finds its meaning in a reality that is charged with ultimate significance and that the completed person lives in the abiding experience of its embrace. This conviction is likewise aligned with beliefs of Orthodox thinkers—except that unlike the Orthodox, Rexroth maintains, time and again, that this meaning is immanent in reality (in the fact itself), and that meaning is bound to time, and will waste away, as all that is real does. In this, he is closer to the Buddhist and Daoist than to the Orthodox tradition.

Martin Buber’s Hasidic personalism was another key that helped Rexroth work out his post–World War 2 poetics. Hasidism instructs that the divine is immanent in all dimensions of reality—including in all human thoughts, human desires, and human actions, in material objects, and in all animate beings. Like Rexroth’s personalism, it denies that we discover God by some flight to the Beyond. God dwells in the here-and-now, and we encounter God by sensing his presence indwelling in every aspect of reality—by feeling the macrocosm’s immanence in microcosm. Every particular draws the vitality that sustains its being from the essence of God that dwells in its kernel. Consequently, most Hasidism rejects the ascetic practices often associated with the mystical quest. Ascetic practices develop out of the assumption that body and soul, matter and spirit are in a constant agon with one another: the repression of bodily urges is required to attain ultimate knowledge. Many Hasidic strains renounced these views, maintaining that it was through opening one’s heart to the theophantic wonder of the material actual that the quotidian presence of God in all that is would be unveiled.

The ascetic stance toward reality often engenders melancholy: expressions of psychological states akin to the dark night of the soul are common in the literature of asceticism. Ascetism often proceeds on the assumption that a depressive experience of the material world— experiencing it as vanity and nothing but vanity—opens the way to experience of an Ultimate Reality. The Hasidic strains that repudiated asceticism also rejected this normative melancholy. They embraced joy as means of opening the heart to the presence of God in all that is. The embrace of joy was often expressed in music and dance—and in erotic encounter with the other. (Parallels with Rexroth’s personalism are evident.) The rejection of any ontological distinction between the material and spiritual led to a blurring of distinctions between the sacred and profane. A consequence of that was the belief that whatever appears in consciousness in devotional practices should be embraced: God manifests himself in human desires and in all thoughts. Carnal desires can be elevated (“uplifted”) by experiencing the divine energy that animates them. Buber adapted these ideas for the modern, technological world in proposing that an attitude of openness to the encounter with the ultimate in everyday reality would re-enchant the world that had lost its wonder in an age dominated by technology and instrumental thinking. For the Hasidim, the possibility of wonder was a central gnosiological reality.

Commenting on Martin Buber’s writings, Rexroth notes,

what comes through most is joy and wonder, love and quiet, in the face of the continuously vanishing world. It is called God’s Will, but the movement of the universe—not from Infinity to Eternity, but just endless—is accepted on very similar terms to those of the Tao Te Ching. Song and dance, the mutual love of the community—these are the values; they are beautiful precisely because they are not absolute. And on this foundation of modesty and love and joy is raised a moral structure which heals and illuminates as hardly any other Western European religious expression does. “Heals and illuminates”—again we come back to the health which can be found only in a true community of true persons.⁵⁶

Community requires that one embrace and be embraced by otherness. A fact coming forth in resplendence is also a presencing of otherness. Throughout his poetry, Rexroth sought to impart the experience of those moments when the presence of a thing emerges as a luminous fact, as it does in the poems in the Greek Anthology (“these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring—as Sappho says, ‘More real than real, more gold than gold’”).⁵⁷ In those moments, the self disappears, so the object seems to come to presence on its own. (Rexroth generally expresses this by saying that one overcomes the ordinary tendency to mentally grasp hold of the object, as the ordinary sort of cognitive apprehension involves a subject-object distinction—in moments when we transcend that distinction, the particular seems to comes into luminous presence on its own). Daoists use for this experience the term ziran 自然 (Wade–Giles: tzu-jan), which could well be translated as “occurrence appearing of itself,” even though it is usually given simply as “nature” or “natural, spontaneous behaviour.” Moments when the self paradoxically dissolves into the object-appearing-within-the-self are moments of quiet, in which experience no longer involves subjective and objective elements: only “shinging forth” exists.⁵⁸ This sense of the wonder of the self-presencing of reality is an experience Rexroth returns to time and again in his poetry. He shared the aspiration of conveying the wonder of those quiet moments with William Carlos Williams, and the two poets together (and Rexroth even more than Williams) exercised enormous influence on the Beat poets and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance.⁵⁹ Together Williams and Rexroth renewed the interests of American poets in what we might call the hierophany of presence celebrated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetics.

In his essay “Tu Fu” in Classics Revisited, Rexroth reflects on his earlier claim, in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, that Du Fu is “the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language,” pointing out that his assessment dodges the issue of what kind of poet Du Fu is. His capsule characterization of Du Fu’s greatness might lead one to imagine that Rexroth thought of the Chinese poet’s verse as lyric. He did not: while acknowledging that Du Fu’s poems are lyric in the sense of being musical (they were written to be sung, and employ rhythms, rhymes, and tonal patterns that are lost in free-verse translations), he remarks that “almost none of Tu Fu’s verse is lyric in the sense in which the songs of Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, Goethe, or Sappho are lyric.” He then specifies of what sort Du Fu’s poetry is and what its relation to the New American Poetry is:

His is a poetry of reverie, comparable to Leopardi’s “L’Infinito,” which might well be a translation from the Chinese, or the better sonnets of Wordsworth. This kind of elegiac reverie has become the principal form of modern poetry, as poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, “What man does with his aloneness.”

It is this convergence of sensibilities across the barriers of time, space, and culture that accounts for the great popularity of Chinese poetry in translation today, and for its profound influence on all major modern American poets. . .  You feel that Tu Fu brings to each poetic situation, each experienced complex of sensations and values, a completely open nervous system. Out of this comes the choice of imagery—so poignant, so startling, and yet seemingly so ordinary.⁶⁰

He extends this reflection into a statement that gives the reason that Chinese philosophy (and some pre-modern European philosophy) holds ontology and epistemology to be essentially moral.

For Tu Fu, the realm of being and value is not bifurcated. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are not an Absolute, set over against an inchoate reality that always struggles, unsuccessfully, to approximate the pure value of the absolute. Reality is dense, all one being. Values are the way we see things. This is the essence of the Chinese world view, and it overrides even the most ethereal Buddhist philosophizing and distinguishes it from its Indian sources. There is nothing that is absolutely omnipotent, but there is nothing that is purely contingent either.

Tu Fu is far from being a philosophical poet in the ordinary sense, yet no Chinese poetry embodies more fully the Chinese sense of the unbreakable wholeness of reality. The quality is the quantity; the value is the fact. The metaphor, the symbols are not conclusions drawn from the images; they are the images themselves in concrete relationships.⁶¹

Here Rexroth states the fundamental beliefs and the basic methods of his own poetry. But he understands that this is a world view that would appeal to a time when institutional religion has lost its hold and humans have been exposed to the perfidy that can follow on the belief that values lack any grounds in a transcendental absolute. The moral imperative, as he understands it, is to avoid adopting coercive beliefs in transcendental absolutes and at the same time to avoid succumbing to the acedia of total relativism. Immediately after the passage I have just cited, he states that “It is this immediacy of utterance that has made Chinese poetry in translation so popular with modern Western poets. The complicated historical and literary references and echoes disappear; the vocal effects cannot be transmitted. What comes through, stripped of all accessories, is the simple glory of the facts—the naked, transfigured poetic situation.⁶²

What is ethically ineluctable is the ultimate value of the particular—and the particular instance of communication. Rexroth strives for an immediacy of utterance that conveys the simple glory of facts (writing of the poems of In Defense of the Earth, Rexroth notes that it is “to snare the fact that is the only answer, the only meaning of present or presence”).⁶³ He goes on to sum up, clearly and concisely, the influence of this world view on recent European and American artists.

The concept of the poetic situation is itself a major factor in almost all Chinese poems of any period. Chinese poets are not rhetorical; they do not talk about the material of poetry or philosophize abstractly about life—they present a scene and an action. “The north wind tears the banana leaves.” It is South China in the autumn . . . “She toys idly with the strings of an inlaid lute.” A concubine…………. This is not the subject matter, but it is

certainly the method, of almost all the poets of the modern, international idiom, whether Pierre Reverdy or Fancis Jammes, Edwin Muir or William Carlos Williams, Quasimodo or the early, and to my taste best, poems of Rilke.⁶⁴

This sense of the ultimate value of all that is—that “what is, is what is holy”—is the only sort of religious experience that would be likely to survive the century of blood that Rexroth understood the twentieth century to be. It conveys what the missionary doctor, Bach interpreter, and philosopher Albert Schweitzer called “reverence for life.” This is what motivates the simplicity of Rexroth’s style:

I’ve never understood why I’m a member of the avant garde. I write more or less like Allen Tate thinks he writes—like the great Greeks and Romans and the Chinese……………………………………………………………………………. I try

to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life, which I think will be of significance to others on a similar level—that is, which will touch them in significant regions of their experience. And, I suppose that my whole attitude toward poetry—toward my own poetry—is to keep always before myself an objective of clarity and depth, and hope that out of this you’ll get exaltation.⁶⁵

The contingent, the fugitive, is all there is. Rexroth concludes “The Sword in a Cloud of Light” with this advice to his five-year-old daughter:

Believe In the night, the moon, the crowded Earth. Believe in Christmas and Birthdays and Easter rabbits.

Believe in all those fugitive Compounds of nature, all doomed To waste away and go out.

Always be true to these things. They are all there is. Never Give up this savage religion

For the blood-drenched civilized Abstractions of the rascals

Who live by killing you and me ⁶⁶

The poem’s paratactical construction is evident—it is a feature of his verse that Rexroth repeatedly highlighted in interviews. Despite his use of this cardinal feature of modernist poetry, Rexroth’s poetic method actually tilts against modernism. It is easy to overlook how radical he was: a total commitment to the contingent, the fugitive, the transient—a desire to stop grasping and to surrender to the flow of things, of drifting above it all—a desire to create verse that accommodates the fleeting compounds of nature—set Rexroth against the mainstream of modernism. That is a principal reason he remains so little known and almost universally underappreciated. Modernist poetics, on the whole, proposed that the poem was a perfected formal structure whose exquisite unity transfigured its contents, lifting them out of the ordinary and elevating them to a higher plane (or that the aesthetic experience engendered by the perfected poem would raise experience to the realm of pure form). Similarly, twentieth-century art theory often proposed that art could engender a higher form of noesis—this is evident from Breton’s writings on Surrealism, for example.⁶⁷ Rexroth’s poetics repudiated those transcendental aspirations.

There’s a difference between an aesthetic and a mystical experience—and this is an argument I’ve carried on with other poets, from André Breton on, for many years. The aesthetic experience is an experience of maximum specificity, whereas the mystical experience is unqualified, even in terms of things like absolutes. What this means is that the aesthetic experience is not the same as the religious experience or the mystical experience. The poetic experience is something completely different.⁶⁸

The belief in abstractions, or in a Transcendent Reality, Rexroth maintains, is the principal source of hatred and mischief. Rexroth outlines the dynamic. “‘I am that I am’—the God of Judaism is the only self-sufficient being. All the reality that we can know is contingent, created out of nothing, and hence of an inferior order of reality. Faced with the ‘utterly other,’ the contingent soul can finally only respond with fear and trembling.”⁶⁹ One who lives in fear of the Ultimate Reality cannot love it.

Chinese poetry traditionally embraced the ideas of change, contingency, transience, and the luminous completeness of the maximally specific fact. Rexroth became a deep reader of Chinese poetry and, through his translations, he brought these ideas into American poetry at a time when the literary establishment (especially the Wallace Stevens enthusiasts and the Southern Agrarians) were dead set against them. Rexroth’s challenge to what then was orthodox cost him a great deal. His work was often dismissed, even ridiculed, in East Coast journals.

Nonetheless, it influenced many younger San Francisco poets and, through them, American poetry in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

A New Unity: Becoming Other, Becoming Woman

Towards the end of his life, Kenneth Rexroth “translated” the work of an avant-garde Japanese woman-poet, Marichiko.⁷⁰ Here is poem 25:

Your tongue thrums and moves

Into me, and I become Hollow and blaze with Whirling light, like the inside Of a vast expanding pearl.

Reading it, one is transported to another world, resonant of the fluxing reality that Fenollosa identified as the Eastern metaphysic of process, but nonetheless novel (hypermodern) in the near- hysterical intensity of the sensations it conveys. In fact, Marichiko was a fictional modern Japanese woman Rexroth invented.⁷¹ He imagined her being so completely that the image entered him and became his self, and in doing so, remade his poetry. So completely and convincingly did he become her that several Japanese scholars went in search of Marichiko. This is the ultimate in identification with the shades of the world. It testifies to the fact that he had acquired a new organic, erotic language, learned in contact with another. He had become feminized, another way of letting the other enter the self’s interior castle, to reshape it. He learned Laozi’s (Lao Tzu’s) ways of the weak, for the ways of the strong, he knew, had spilled blood everywhere. He had at last found a way to realize completely the obligation he assumed when he recognized that language in the age of mass-media and massed-humanity had acquired a terrifying power of deception and vowed to overcome the massified language’s treacherous operation. He had learned over the years that this language is the basis of phallogocentrism, the system of male superiority and the domination of nature (which is almost always understood as feminine).

He had learned the truths that all makers must learn if art is to not to continue to be an instrument that teaches us how to desecrate nature. If language, as it has become, is the phallus, penetration, sex, we must find a way to undo that language. In the West, across the eras of phallogocentrism, the poet was thought to be the creator of theologies (think of Hesiod), the revealer of oracles (consider the “Homeric” hymns), the passionate “Fire Thief” who brings fire to humans to advance civilization (Prometheus)—all, in a certain way, enthusiastic versions of this strange being who deals with words. We must bring forth a new poet, who is the most indecisive of beings. The important thing is to exclude the anxiety of knowing that closes doors to everything. The minimum is to be and to be on the path—that is, to follow the Way, without knowing where it will lead. So, the word that illuminates arises from the small: it does not dazzle; it does not conquer; it does no harm; it does not kill.

In his later years, Rexroth collaborated with Ling Chung on the Collected Poems of Li Ch’ing-chao (1974), who wrote poems of intense inwardness, concerning experiences that one might think that only a woman could truly understand (though Rexroth’s Marichiko persona and the insightfulness of these translations put paid to that misconception), vividly remembered moments (by the time he did these translations, Rexroth was in his sixties) of intensely experienced erotic passion. One result of that feminization was a series of books of translations of women poets of China and Japan, including The Orchid Boat (1972, issued in paperback as paperback as Women Poets of Japan). He also edited Seasons of Sacred Lust, selected poems of Kazuko Shiraishi, which he translated himself.

In translating Li Qingzhao 李清照 (Rexroth uses the Wade–Giles transliteration, Li Ch’ing-chao, 1084–1151), he so completely identifies, across centuries, with the poet as to become a passionate woman, broken-hearted at the state of the world:

Red lotus incense fades on The jeweled carpet. Autumn Comes again. Gently I open My silk dress and float alone On the orchid boat. Who can

Take a letter beyond the clouds? Only the wild geese come back And write their ideograms

On the sky under the full

Moon that floods the West Chamber. Flowers, after their kind, flutter

And scatter. Water after

Its nature, when spilt, at last Gathers again in one place. Creatures of the same species Long for each other. But we Are far apart and I have Grown learned in sorrow.

Nothing can make it dissolve And go away. One moment, It is on my eyebrows.

The next, it weighs on my heart.⁷²

The experience of translating erotic verse by Chinese women connected him in a new way to the energy point that had given birth to his poetics of the sacred marriage. It reaffirmed his belief that there is nothing beyond the reality of concrete particulars, that flesh is what is spiritual, that sexuality is the seat of the soul. For Daoism, the force that moves the universe is Yin and Yang. This movement of exchange is called Dao 道 and the Dao is unattainable, unapproachable. The only way to understand it is to be in synergy with it (to be embraced by it, to flow with it). The “poles” unite and invert. The Dao is always changing. It doesn’t know duality; consequently, it is an unfathomable. It is Enlightenment, the Higher Power, the Source, the Cycle of Being and Existence, the Way. It cannot be taught, for it cannot be conveyed in language. But it does affect the soul.

Daoism teaches that the ego behaves like the “spoiled child” and knows nothing; belief is necessarily unknowning / misunderunderstaning. It talks all the time. Daoism asks: may the way be your Master. The central text of Daoism is the Dao de jing (in traditional characters: 道德經; Power. But Dao de jing 道德经 really means much more than that. De 德 means rightness or virtue, in the sense proper living and righteousness. But the term 德 can also intend that which has a healing power. Dao 道 suggests the way ahead. Jing 經 means doctrine, or a set of guidelines. Thus, Dao de jing 道德經 means something like the Precepts for Moving Ahead towards Healing or The Dao is the Way of Return to Health (or bringing qi in alignment with li). Dao de jing 道德经 integrates philosophy, science and religion. The poetic sense of Dao meaning path or way ahead will be preserved by poet. The metaphor is that of the “road” that will take us to the beginning of everything. To live without grasping is to experience the dynamics of empty space (that is, space not populated by enduring, unchanging objects). The Dao teaches that nothing is assured. We need a poetry that does not assume anything. The new poetry insists on taking new directions, moment-by-moment.

Rexroth died in Dower House, Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California, and is buried on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. His epitaph reads: “The swan sings / In sleep / On the lake of the mind.” They could be three lines from a poem of Su Dung-po, but it is actually from one of Rexroth’s books, one of his last, The Silver Swan (1976). The penultimate sentence in the Academy of American Poetry’s online entry for Kenneth Rexroth states that “his greatest contribution to American poetry may have been in opening it to Asian influences through his mystical, erotically charged poetry and superb translations.” To say that Rexroth had a huge role in opening American poetry to Asian influences is exactly right. But to rank this role as having greater importance than his own original poetry (or his critical writing) is simply arrant nonsense.⁷³ In his fine introduction to Rexroth’s poetry, Sam Hamill comments on the frequency with which Rexroth created imitations of the writers he cherished most deeply, then notes, “Rexroth was our Catullus, our Li Po, shocking his audience with laughter, and his tradition one of celebratory eroticism and social protest and his legacy a devotion to learning.”⁷⁴

That seems considerably more just.

R. Bruce Elder

[1]. Kristeller claimed that ancients interests in arts were primarily moral, religious, and practical (including, notably its cognitive utility) and that the what moderns consider to be the individual arts—the specific arts—(dance, poetry, painting, sculpture, and theatre) were not generically grouped into the overarching category of art, means that aesthetics was not a philosophical discipline in antiquity. (Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951): 496– 527 and 13:17–46; see especially12:506.) It is often said that the first aesthetic theory was propounded early in the eighteenth by Joseph Addison, in “The Pleasures of Imagination,” published in The Spectator, 411–421(1712). The term aesthetic itself, used to refer to a philosophical discipline, was introduced into the lexicon by the Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his Aesthetica of 1750 and was widely embraced by the Leibnizian Enlightenment. (Baumgarten’s primary importance as a philosopher was to extend principles from Leibniz and Christian Wolff to topics they did not consider.). The Leibnizian Enlightenment passed the term on to the philosophical world at large.

            Many useful criticisms of Kristeller’s claims have appeared in the past two decades. I find particularly useful James Porter, “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009): 1–24, with which I am in fundamental agreement, and Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

            It is worth pointing out the section of “The Pleasures of Imagination” that appeared on June 25, 1712 (The Spectator, 414) celebrates Virgil’s Georgics (see http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/addison414.htm) and the section that appeared on Tuesday, June 24, 1712 (413) (http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/addison413.htm) treats the topic of final causes and the imaginative associations. There the notions of making that I discuss below (and to which I advocate returning) are incorporated into a philosophical system that related art and nature. (Final causes give us “greater occasion of admiring the goodness and wisdom of the first contriver.”) 

[2]. Though it was written much later than the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers I have alluded to (as much as seven centuries later, which, surely, is testimony to the hypogeal persistence of a view of making that centuries earlier had lost it prepotency), the second book of Virgil’s Georgics offers an accessible and moving presentation of the conception of making as a collaboration with the circumambient world and its invisible energies. Virgil conceived of making as a collaboration, a fostering, a nurturing bringing-forth, and he believe it required reading visible nature and learning to discern the signs of the invisible, to practice a semiotics (from σημεῖον, semeion, sign) of the invisible, in order to learn to collaborate with what cannot be sensed. (Compare this with Heraclitus Fragment 123, Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ—which is generally translated into English as “Nature loves to hide,” but almost certainly means nature’s generative operations are wont to proceed by concealing themselves).

[3]. For Aristotle, the τέλος (telos, end) of an entity or event was an essentially part of the ensemble of factors that determine what that entity or event is; what a being/event is plays a key role in its coming forth.

[4]. With this development, aesthetics no longer depended on metaphysics. The deleterious effects of the separation of aesthetics from metaphysics can be seen in the dreariness—in the conceptual and spiritual poverty—of verist, positivist, and empiricist strains in the art of the Enlightenment and after. Only technical images (and especially, photographic and cinematic images) escape this criticism, because technical images celebrate how the image comes into being, which is at one with question why it comes into being. (Bazin, L’image photographique “agit sur nous en tant que phénomène « naturel », comme une fleur ou un cristal de neige dont la beauté est inséparable des des origine vegetal ou telluriques,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma, 13; “Sur la photographie, image naturelle d’un monde que nous ne savions ou ne pouvions voir, la nature enfin fait plus que d’imiter l’art : elle imite l’artiste,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma, 16). For other realist traditions, the fact that what is “represented” (supposedly) exists is enough to validate the (supposed) representation.

Consider in this context, the folly of the interpretations of Cesar Pavese that forget that writer was first of all an author whose mode of thinking was self-consciously mythic and that the key influence on him was Herman Melville. It was from Melville and that clamorous Quaker Walt Whitman that Pavese learned the Vichian lesson of the identity of word and the thing, a lesson that the French Romantics had taken. (Pavese’s Turin was deeply influenced by French thought and French culture—Pavese’s poetry is very similar to the poème en prose proposed by Rimbaud in France and practised by Whitman in the U.S.). Or that, consistent with Vico’s view that language makes reality (“verum et factum reciprocantur seu convertuntur,”the true and the made are convertible into each other), that his poetry, by his own description, is “an attempt to express a cluster of fantastic associations, of which one’s own perception of reality consists, with a sufficient wholeness.” He claimed, then that reality is a cluster of ideas whose coherence and consistency give them the weight of the actuality. Of course, the proximity of poetic language (metaphor and metonymy) to primary process thinking and the fact that primary process thinking (like infantile desire) literally knows no exterior explain these ideas about the relation of language to reality. (See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [New York, Basic Books, 1962], 49–50, 99).

Lyotard puts these ideas in a wild poetic form in Économie libidinale when he writes of the body that is opened up and spread out—to which flayed body he adds the qualia corresponding to the sense organs. For Lyotard, the qualia red is literally a zone of the libidinal band: it is not “outside” of the so-called body’s retinas, but a part of them and their pulsional dynamics (Économie libidinale [Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974], 10; Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant [Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1993], 2). For the primary process, there is no inside and no outside, no interior and no exterior. (Hence the analogy to a moebius strip.)

[5]. The Objectivists included the Marxist poet Louis Zukofsky, with whom Rexroth exchanged many letters; the left-leaning social worker and one-time Communist Carl Rakosi; George Oppen, who in 1935 abandoned poetry for decades to work for the Communist Party U.S.A.; Charles Reznikoff, who was forced to resort to self-publishing nearly all the instalments of his long historical materials found-poem Testimony; and Basil Bunting, likely the closest to Rexroth in outlook, who enumerated the shaping forces on his poetry as “Jails and the sea, Quaker mysticism and socialist politics, a lasting unlucky passion, the slums of Lambeth and Hoxton”—Rexroth shared Bunting’s high regard for Quaker mysticism and socialist politics.

            Regarding the appeal of this approach to Marxist theorists, readers of film theory might note the comment that Eisenstein off in his 1934 piece “Through Theatre to Cinema”:

The apparent arbitrariness of matter, in its relation to the status quo of nature, is much less arbitrary than it seems. The final order is inevitably determined, consciously or unconsciously, by the social premises of the maker of the film-composition. His class-determined tendency is the basis of what seems to be an arbitrary cinematographic relation to the placed, or found, before the camera. (Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema,” 3-17 in Film Form, trans Jay Leyda [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949], 4)

[6]. Eda Lou Walton, “The Poems of Kenneth Rexroth: In What Hour” [sic], New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1941, p. 2.

[7]. This is not commonly acknowledged to be the leadig motivation for the Analytical Cubists’ use of faceting and braces. Nor is this difference between the Italian Futurists and the Cubists commonly recognized. I set out these ideas and argue for them in my book Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018).

[8]. My characterization of the New Critics’ position draws especially on John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1108–18. A delight one can take in commenting on New Criticism is that one only need quote from the New Critics to parody their views (and Rexroth knew this).

[9]. Stan Brakhage embraced this view.

[10]. 易经 is sometimes translated as The Book of Changes and sometimes as The Classic of Changes. The Chinese concept of qi 气 is close to the Greek concept of ἐνέργεια (energeia, in the sense of what sustains beings in being (which I generally refer to as be-ing); it is related to the idea of the Dao (道; Wade-Giles: Tao, the way).

[11]. Pound’s Imagist poetry operated similarly. He notes that his attempt “to record the precise instant when the thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (“Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 96 [1914]: 461–71, esp. 467; or Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir [New York: New Directions, 1970], 81–94, esp. 89; reprinted199–209 in Pound, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes [New York: New Directions, 1960], esp. 205). Note that Pound’s formulation is idealistic, while Rexroth avoids those idealist resonances.

[12]. Rexroth is one of the few twentieth-century English-language poets who could successfully carry off a book-length poem.

[13]. Rexroth, “About the Poems,” preface to The Phoenix and the Tortoise (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1944), 9–10, here 10. He continues, in the next paragraph, “I have tried to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of the creative process. I hope I have made it clear that I do not believe the Self [sic] does this by an act of Will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his life must lose it.” (ibid.)

Rexroth also writes that “For the Kabbalist the ultimate sacrament is the sexual act, carefully organized and sustained as the most perfect mystic trance” (“The Holy Kabbalah,” in Rexroth, Assays, 41–51, here 44). Rexroth’s essay, originally published as an introduction to a new edition of A. E. Waite’s The Holy Kabbalah: A Study of the Secret Tradition in Israel (New Hyde Park, NJ: University Books, 1960), vii–xvi, is one of the most clear-eyed affirmations that erotic mysticism is a fundamental human response to the mysteries and profundity of relationships. (Rexroth’s respect for the Cabala as “the great poem of Judaism, a tree of symbolic jewels showing forth the doctrine of the universe as the vesture of Deity, of the community as the embodiment of Deity, and of love as the acting of God in man” exerted a huge influence on the antinomian, syncretic religious movements that proliferated in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, including that of the Semina group. [Rexroth, “The Holy Kabbalah,” 51])

In “The Holy Kabbalah,” Rexroth also writes,

The sacred prostitutes and sodomites of the Goddess appear again and again in the [Judaic] Scriptures . . . and as has been pointed out time and again, the Book of Esther (simply another English transliteration of the Ishtar) is an elaborate euphemerization of the spring New Year fertility rites and the heirosgamos, the sacred marriage—as the folk rites of Purim are paralleled all over the world at the season.

The most likely interpretation of the Song of Songs is that it is a collection of songs for group marriage rites, focused in the heirosgamos of priest-king and priestess, which accompanied the opening of the irrigation channels from the main ditches into the dry fields. In fact, a book which casts great light on the Song of Songs is Granet’s Festivals and Songs of Ancient China, an interpretation of the erotic songs of the ancient Chinese collection, the Shi Ching [诗经, trad. 詩經, newer romanization, Shijing, one of the five classic Confucian collections, of poems and songs dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC; the title is often translated as The Classic of Poetry, The Book of Songs, or The Book of Odes]. Do not misunderstand, this parallelism does not “prove” diffusion from some imagined prehistoric religious center. It shows the fundamental identity of man’s response to the great rhythms of life. (Rexroth, “The Holy Kabbalah,” 46.)

Here Rexroth states the basis for transcultural sympathetic identification, which forms the groundwork of his ideas on translation, and suggests that hierosgamos offers an image of the sacred identification of the cyclical recurrences of human passion with the cyclical patterns of the cosmos, the most fundamental mechanism of identification.

[14]. The term appears in The Dragon and the Unicorn, in Kenneth Rexroth, The Collected Longer Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1968), 141. In the 1968 interview with Cyrena Pondrom mentioned above, Rexroth expanded on its meaning:

Sexual love, of course, is one sacramental, one outward, vesture of an inward spiritual reality, and I suppose this is extrapersonalization. That is not a term that I would use anymore, but what I meant by extrapersonalization was that the person is realized in his reflection in other persons, and there is no end to this process. You see, back of this lies a kind of vision, a universe made up of an infinite number of contemplatives, a picture which opens the Avatamsaka Sutra of Kegon Kyo. Of course, the dynamics of this process is endless; realization of the one in the other constitutes the flow of reality. (Cyrena N. Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth,” Contemporary Literature 10, no. 3 (1969): 313–31, here 330.)

[15]. The Dragon and the Unicorn, 140; Complete Poems, 376.

[16]. Rexroth, The Dragon and the Unicorn, 74; Complete Poems, 334.

[17]. In his interview with Cyrena N. Pondrom from 1968, Rexroth remarks, “Man kills himself by defining the indefinable, grasping the inapprehensible. We do not apprehend reality, since this implies an outreaching effort; rather it apprehends us. We are simply in reality. We are in being like fish in water, who do not know water exists” (Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth”: 321).

[18]. Kenneth Rexroth, “The Silver Swan, XVII,” in Complete Poems, 737–39. Note that by this point in his career (around 1978), the distinction between Rexroth’s original verse and his translations has almost disappeared, so completely has Rexroth become a Chinese poet writing in English. By this point, Rexroth’s original poems offer the same concentrated imagery and the same direct presentation of the thing in its epiphanic reality, the same sense of the intimate correspondence between the recurrent rhythms of the cosmos and those of the enlivened heart that is the ground for utter trust in the wisdom of bodily sensations/feelings and the testimony of the senses manifest in the impressively specific descriptions/presentations as his translations from Chinese offer. Furthermore, they evince the same remarkable composure one attains as one undergoes the process of emptying the self to allow it to be filled anew with the Other that one finds in Chinese Buddhist poetry.

[19]. Rexroth, Part VII of “On Flower Wreath Hill,” Complete Poetry, 747.

[20]. The formal name for Avatamsaka Sutra in Chinese is Dafangguang Fohuayan Jing 大方廣佛華嚴經; the Sanskrit name is “The Great Vaipulya Sutra of the Buddha’s Flower Garland”; here Vaipulya (which literally means “extensive”) is translated into Chinse as fāngguǎng 方廣—used thus, the term intends an expansive corrective; Huá 華 means at once “flower” (archaic) and “magnificence.” Yán 嚴, short for zhuàngyán 莊嚴, means “to decorate something, so it is solemn, dignified.” Dafangguang Fohuayan Jing is commonly shortened to Huayan Jing 華嚴經, meaning the “Flower-adorned (Splendid and Solemn) Sutra.”

[21]. The Buddhist idea of dharma resembles somewhat the Classical Greek idea of λόγος (logos), which often took on the character of a law-like principle that, informed by a τέλος (telos, goal), brings beings into harmony.

[22]. Reginald Ray, Secret of the Vajra World (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), 13.

[23]. Possibly my very favourite of Rexroth’s poems begins with a simple, straight-forward, and nearly unbearably beautiful statement of this conception. Its title is “The Spark in the Tinder of Knowing”:

Profound stillness in the greystone

Romanesque chapel, the rush

Of wheels beyond the door only

Underlines the silence. The wheels

Of life turn ceaselessly.

Their hiss and clank is

The noiseless turning of the Wheel

Of the Law, that turns without

Moving, from zenith to nadir,

From plus to minus, from black to white.

Love turns the uncountable,

Interlocking wheels of the stars.

The earth turns. The sun sets.

A bolt of iron all on fire

Falls into the turning city.

Love turns the heart to an unknown

Substance, fire of its fire.

 (The Complete Poems, 684–85)

The poem was written at the Cowley Fathers retreat, associated with the Cowley Fathers’ Episcopal monastery (in Cambridge, MA, just off Harvard Square, and facing the Charles River), in 1968. The monastery chapel, dedicated to Saint Mary and Saint John, in the French Romanesque style, suggests an early Christian basilica. The transitions here—from Romanesque chapel to the Buddhist conception of the dharmakāya to the Christian idea of love as the turning of the stars in their courses—all suggest the non-differentiation (the interchangeability) of the One and the Other. Thus, the poem conveys Rexroth’s ecumenism.

[24]. Beatrice Lane Suzuki, “Extracts from the Mahayana Sutras,” in Mahayana Buddhism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 117.

[25]. Some Buddhist scholars argue that Tathāgatagarbha thinkers (along with their close relatives, thinkers from the Yogācāran school) in effect repudiated the Buddha’s doctrine of an-atman and implicitly brought Vedantic conceptions of atman, Brahman, and their identity in through the back door.

[26]. As translated in Leon Hurvitz et. al., “Schools of Buddhist Doctrine,” in W. T. De Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 433–80, esp. 473.

[27]. Cited in Yu-lan Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 353.

[28]. Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 353.

[29]. Both Daoism and the Flower Garland School stress at once the diversity of the world and the interdependence of all that is; both offer non-dual views of reality, and both express reservations about language’s ability to grasp ultimate reality.

[30]. Here Rexroth writes of his own interest in Confucianism, and challenges Pound’s idea that Confucianism is primarily a series of edicts on keeping order in society.

[31]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Sung Culture” in Assays, 6–7.

Rexroth’s comment, that “For Lu, man’s mind had strayed from the realm of world of li, pure form, to which it had originally belonged, and the aim of the wise and good man was to find his lost mind or true nature again by quiet meditation and begin to understand its relation to the whole” explains the central theme and the overriding purpose of Rexroth’s writing. From that purpose, we can educe the elements of his style. We see, then, that Rexroth’s objectives for his poetry reflect his deep learning in Chinese philosophy and Chinese culture. That said, it is interesting to note that the next-to-last sentence in this passage also conforms to Rexroth’s understanding of the goal of Western gnostic practices (a topic his prose writings returned to frequently). Rexroth believed that ways through which humans seek to know the higher truths are similar across cultures and historical epochs, and the truths disclosed are represented similarly across cultures.

[32]. Kenneth Rexroth, In the Sierras: Mountain Writings, ed. Kim Stanley Robinson [New York: New Directions, 2012], 165–66.

[33]. Ibid., 168–69.

[34]. Cyrena N. Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth,” Contemporary Literature 10.3:323–24. Readers who are familiar with Michael McClure’s commentaries on poetry and experience that draw on ideas from ecology (and on nature’s tendency to right imbalances, though human excess sometimes thwarts nature’s efforts to bring things back into balance) will recognize the similarity between his basic themes and the ideas Rexroth propounds here.

[35]. The San Franciscan from this milieu who most completely identified with Surrealism was Philip Lamantia; but he was something of an exception, in having closely affiliated himself with André Breton.

To stress the influence of Chinese thought on the writers just mentioned, I should note that Gary Snyder himself is an accomplished interpreter of Chinese, and he introduced the Chan (simplified禅, traditional, 禪) poetry of Han Shan 寒山 to the writers of the Berkeley Renaissance (and so to the world at large). He is fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese and reads classical Chinese easily. He began his work on Han Shan as a student of East Asian languages at University of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of his professor Ch’en Shih-Hsiang (who in fact brought Han Shan to his student’s attention, after Snyder expressed an interest in studying the influence on Chinese poetry of Chan, a Mayahana Buddhist sect that gave rise to Zen Buddhism in Japan). Like Rexroth, Snyder is an expert (and devoted) mountaineer, which would have bolstered his affinity (his identification, to recur to that theme) with Han Shan (the name means Cold Mountain). Further, his worldview is deeply ecological (he was one of the first poets to take up the abuse of the environment as a cause), reflecting Rexroth’s idea that identification results in a sense of responsibility.

[36]. Cyrena Pondrom asked Rexroth about images that he used and that also appear in Gary Snyder’s poetry. Rexroth noted that Snyder was a disciple. This occasioned a deliberation on his influence:

You see, all scattered around amongst younger poets are people who have read my longer poems with a great deal of attention. And the poems have meant a great deal to them, so to speak, philosophically, although they have been dismissed with contempt by the Trotskyite Ku Klux Klan literary establishment that ran the quarterlies in the “thirties” [1930s] and “forties.” But this was all sort of underground in the years after the war; we were not‑people. I still am a not‑person; to the best of my knowledge, for instance, I have never been mentioned in The New York Review of Books. I hope not.

[37]. Compare this with Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, which is really a declaration of faith that when each member of a group engaged in collective improvisation follows his or her own path the result will be a non-hierarchical, feminine coming-together—that faith is for the basis for the nude work I have done, discussed in the extended passage below, that presents a sort of phenomenological justification for a practice central to these collaborations.

[38]. Wu wei 无为 is generally translated as doing nothing, though its intent is that actions that are in conformity with the Dao occur effortlessly, and so are experienced as spontaneous and self-originating (the opposite of being pushed into being by some external cause).

[39]. Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” first published in Evergreen Review 1957 and collected 57–64 in Kenneth Rexroth, The World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Bradford Morrow (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1987), here 58–59.

[40]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Leaves of Grass” in Classics Revisited (New York: Avon Books, 1969, 250–253.

[41]. Rexroth, “Disengagement and the Art of the Beat Generation,” 41–56 in World Outside the Window, 43.

[42]. Rexroth, “Disengagement,” 54, 44.

[43]. Rexroth, “Disengagement,” 54.

[44]. Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, 335.

[45]. Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1962 [Rexroth’s selection of Lawrence’s verse first appeared in 1947]), 11. Rexroth’s introduction is reprinted, with minor changes, as “Poetry, Regeneration, and D. H. Lawrence,” 177–203 in Bird in the Bush, here 189; and 8–25 in World Outside the Window, here 16. This piece is especially important for the way it lays out Rexroth’s holistic-personalist ethics (and, ultimately, his ontology). It is also reprinted as Kenneth Rexroth, “The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Leo Hamalian (New York: McGraw‑Hill Book Company, 1973), 118–32, here 124.

            Note that the final sentence in the passage cited is pure Cabalism.

[46]. Kenneth Rexroth, The Phoenix and the Tortoise. The phoenix in Western culture is a symbol of renewal, the tortoise of steadiness; in Chinese culture the phoenix represents the yang 阳 (trad. 陽), or the heavenly, the tortoise, the yin 阴 (trad. 陰) or the earthly—and there the sacred marriage becomes a way of bringing the two into alignment.

            The title contains another allusion, which none can miss—and that is to Shakespeare’s most esoteric and metaphysical—not to say weird—poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” To be sure, Rexroth’s title both alludes to and distances itself from that great Shakespearean model—the similarities between the titles of the works link them, but a knowing reader also remembers that the turtle in Shakespeare’s mysterious poem is a turtledove, not a reptile of the order Chelonii. But consider these lines:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov’d, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight:
Either was the other’s mine.

Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.

Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded

That it cried how true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.

The esoteric idea that love is a paradox—that it fuses two beings, but the fused beings are then neither one nor two (“Property was thus appall’d, / That the self was not the same; / Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was call’d. / . . . Saw division grow together; / To themselves yet either-neither, / Simple were so well compounded / That it cried how true a twain / Seemeth this concordant one!”) is pure Rexroth. So, too is the use of the spiritual marriage as the symbol of the identity of truth and beauty and, as well, of the Greek Orthodox Christological thesis that from two natures (human and divine) comes one Christ.

But consider the similarity of these ideas with the inscrutable unity in duality of the Dao.

[47]. They discuss, among other things, ideas from key influences on Rexroth up to that time, including John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308, whose idea of the univocity of being became a cardinal principle of Rexroth’s metaphysics), T. S. Eliot, Du Fu, the Symbolist influenced writer (and longtime friend of Eliot) Conrad Aiken, and the formidable writer and progressivist social critic H. G. Wells, all of whom influenced Rexroth.

[48]. Kenneth Rexroth, afterword to his prefaces in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Santa Barbara: Morrow and Covici, 1980); online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/poems/prefaces.htm#Worldly

[49]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Suchness,” originally published in Love Is an Art of Time, part of New Poems (New York: New Directions, 1974), 23; also in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 702.

Note the evidence of the poetic function in operation here: “The logical universal / Ceases to be anything more / Than the dead body of an angel.” “Our substance / Is whatever we feed our angel.” “The perfect incense for worship / Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes.” They are highly gnomic, almost riddling, so evacuated of ordinary meaning are they. Like the contents of all great poems, they are statements in an achieved new language, whose words have a higher meaning.

Yet, for all this, there is a prose antecedent for the poetic content of this passage. Rexroth’s deep meditation on reality draws on Oriental Platonism (a body of thought that Rexroth clearly admired, even though he was wary of its transcendental commitments). Here is a passage on the imagination from a great Parisian scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, writing on Suhrawardī (1154–91, a Persian philosopher, founder of the Iranian school of Illuminism): in Suhrawardī’s “Theosophy of Light the entire Platonic theory of Ideas is interpreted in terms of Zoroastrian angelology. What Aristotelianism considers as the concept of the species, the logical universal, ceases to be anything more than the dead body of an Angel” (Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn Arabī [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], 22). Corbin’s prose text concerns a thinker who challenged the Aristotelian immanentism of Islam’s Golden Age with transcendentalist ideas drawn from a mixture of Platonism and Zoroastrianism. Rexroth selects passages from the text and by deploying the poetic function of selection and arrangement evacuates the language of its transcendental implications, thus endowing the source material with utterly new meanings. (I should admit that Rexroth’s metaphysical speculations sometimes seem riven by tension between transcendental light metaphysics and the radical immanentism of his Huayan Buddhism.)

[50]. The term suchness is commonly used to translate tathātā तथता, or, in Chinese Zhenru 真如 (Wade–Giles: chen-ju, or, sometimes, chenju). Chen-ju 真如 (in the newer transliteration, zhenru) conveys the idea of true insight into reality. Wing-Tsit Chan glosses the term thus: “True Thusness or Suchness (tathatā [तथता]. . .) means truth and it-is-so. As truth, it is antithesis to illusion and falsehood, and ‘being so’ it is eternal, unchangeable, indestructible, without character or nature, and is not produced by causes. It is the Absolute, Ultimate Reality, or True Reality, the Storehouse of the Thus-come, the Realm of Dharmas, Dharma-nature, and Perfect Reality” (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. Wing-Tsit Chan [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963], 399). Chen-ju/zhenru suggests the perfection of the immediate moment, the hic-et-nunc, which is entirely unique and cannot be compared to any other moment. According to the Tiantai school, chen-ju/zhenrurepresents the moment when the phenomenal merges with the noumenal, when “every colour or fragrance is none other than the Ultimate Truth” (Rexroth expounds similar ideas). Tiantai followers were sometimes described as “the three thousand worlds immanent in an instance of thought.”

Another name for the Tiantai School is the Lotus School, because of the central importance to it of the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra (Sanskrit), or, in Chinese, Miaofa lianhua jing 妙法莲华经(trad. 妙法蓮華經; Wade–Giles: Miao-fa lien-hua ching, literally Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law), often shortened to fahua jing法華經(Wade–Giles: Fa-hua Ching), The Lotus Sutra. The Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra was originally translated into Chinese (probably from a Pakrit language) in 286 CE (during the Western Jin Period). The Tiantai School rose to importance during the Tang Dynasty, becoming one of the leading Chinese schools. It attracted wealthy patrons and the support of the emperor, had thousands of monks and millions of followers, and its supporters built many splendid temples. There were efforts to merge the Tiantai and Huayan Schools, since their teachings are similar.

[51]. From Rexroth “The Heart’s Garden, the Garden’s Heart,” in The Collected Longer Poems, 283–303, here 294–95; reprinted in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 659–80, here 671. The poem was composed in 1966 or 1967.

            One might ask why this is poetic. The answer is simple: because the delicate structure of rhythms and cadences is intrinsic to the passage’s meaning.

[52]. Rexroth several times extolled Eastern Orthodoxy as being closer to true Christianity than the Roman version. One example is this: “Thomism is not really a Christian philosophy as such. It is only in Eastern Orthodoxy that the Church, building on the foundation of the patristic period, has tried to develop a philosophy which would be Christian in its essence. So even today Russian philosophers and theologians like [Seymon] Frank and [Nikolai] Berdyaev, once we discover them, seem more relevant than even the most progressive in the West.” (Kenneth Rexroth, “Faith in an Age of Faithlessness,” 84–92 in With Eye and Ear, here 89.)

[53]. Kenneth Rexroth, “The Surprising Journey of Father Lonergan,” in The Elastic Retort (New York: Seabury, 1973), 269–80, here 272.

[54]. Ibid.

[55]. Ibid., 273. I have corrected his citation of Harper’s work, changing “Schools” to the singular form.

[56]. Rexroth, “The Hasidism of Martin Buber,” in Bird in the Bush, 106–42, here 141–42. Rexorth comments on Tales of the Hasidim (1947), Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1956, a translation of Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, 1906), The Legend of Ball-Shem (1955, a translation of Die Legende des Baalschem, 1908), and For the Sake of Heaven: A Hasidic Chronicle-Novel (also published under the title Gog and Magog: A Novel, 1943).

[57]. Rexroth, “The Greek Anthology,” 80–84 in Classics Revisited, here 84. If Rexroth draws our attention insistently to these cross-cultural commonalities, it is to tell us that the quiet (non-hallucinatory) vision, within which the luminous fact comes to presence, is the essence of poeticness, appreciated everywhere. Of course, his annoyance with the reductive methods of the new critics (with their particular emphasis on the qualities that make a poem poetic) would lead him to avoid putting the matter in just that way.

[58]. I use the unfortunate multi-hyphenated expression to convey the experience set out in such passages as the following:

My body is asleep. Only

My eyes and brain are awake.

The stars stand around me

Like gold eyes. I can no longer

Tell where I begin and leave off.

The faint breeze in the dark pines,

And the invisible grass,

The tipping earth, the swarming stars

Have an eye that sees itself.

(“The Lights in the Sky are Stars,” in Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems, 238.)

[59]. Rexroth helped forge a link between the younger poets and Pound and Williams, and through them to the international movements at the birth of Modernism—for example, Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) and Spring and All (1923) were deeply rooted in Surrealist poetics.

            Rexroth’s influence on the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance was greater, but Williams exerted a greater lure on the Black Mountain School poets.

[60]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Tu Fu,” in Classics Revisited, 126–31, here 127–28.

[61]. Ibid., 129–30.

[62]. Ibid., 130.

[63]. Kenneth Rexroth, preface to In Defense of the Earth, x.

[64]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Tu Fu,” 30.

[65]. Rexroth, quoted in Lynn M. Zott, The Beat Generation: A Gale Critical Companion (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 289.

[66]. Kenneth Rexroth, “A Sword in a Cloud of Light,” originally published in In Defense of the Earth; and reprinted in The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 239–41, esp. 240–41; and reprinted again in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 536–38, esp. 538

[67]. I have dealt with this theme at some length in DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect.

[68]. Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth,” 325.

[69]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit,” 43–60 in Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), here 44. Brakhage proposes the same idea, that there can be no ultimate love where there is fear on the opening page of Metaphors on Vision. I have noted that Brakhage took part in Rexroth’s salons in the 1950s.

[70]. Rexroth modelled the name on Marichi (the name means “ray of light”), an Indian Boddhisatva who is revered in both the Buddhist and Daoist traditions of China. In China, she is known as Molizhitian Pusa and is the goddess of light (and, consequently, of the dawn). In Japan she is known as Marishi‑ten, where she helps warriors overcome their fear of surrendering their lives. The Mahayana tradition does not offer any female Boddhisatvas, and even with the Mantrayana (Vajrayana) tradition it is generally a masculine Boddhisatva that manifests itself. Marichi is an exception, for she makes manifest the female pole of the Boddhisatva. In the Daoist tradition, she represents alchemical learning (which offers instruction in sex magic)—this is why, in “The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart,” she appears as “Patroness of geisha and whores, / And goddess of the dawn” (Rexroth, The Collected Longer Poems, 292; The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 669).

[71]. Though, as Morgan Gibson points out in his monograph Revolutionary Rexroth, the Marichiko inventions were, among other things, an homage to Yosano Akiko [1878–1948], a Japanese woman poet—perhaps the greatest female poet of modern Japan—whose works are erotically forthright.

[72]. Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 1979), 27. The translation also appears in Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese (New York: New Directions, 1981), 95. Rexroth compares Li Qingzhao 李清照 with the great Renaissance lyric poet Gaspara Stampa, who had a similar exquisitely intense sensibility.

[73]. At http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1270.

[74]. Sam Hamill, “The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth,” in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, xxix.

[1]. Kristeller claimed that ancients’ interests in arts were primarily moral, religious, and practical (including, notably its cognitive utility) and that the what moderns consider to be the individual arts—the specific arts—(dance, poetry, painting, sculpture, and theatre) were not generically grouped into the overarching category of art, means that aesthetics was not a philosophical discipline in antiquity. (Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951): 496– 527 and 13:17–46; see especially12:506.) It is often said that the first aesthetic theory was propounded early in the eighteenth by Joseph Addison, in “The Pleasures of Imagination,” published in The Spectator, 411–421(1712). The term aesthetic itself, used to refer to a philosophical discipline, was introduced into the lexicon by the Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his Aesthetica of 1750 and was widely embraced by the Leibnizian Enlightenment. (Baumgarten’s primary importance as a philosopher was to extend principles from Leibniz and Christian Wolff to topics they did not consider.). The Leibnizian Enlightenment passed the term on to the philosophical world at large.

            Many useful criticisms of Kristeller’s claims have appeared in the past two decades. I find particularly useful James Porter, “Is Art Modern? Kristeller’s ‘Modern System of the Arts’ Reconsidered.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009): 1–24, with which I am in fundamental agreement, and Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

            It is worth pointing out the section of “The Pleasures of Imagination” that appeared on June 25, 1712 (The Spectator, 414) celebrates Virgil’s Georgics (see http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/addison414.htm) and the section that appeared on Tuesday, June 24, 1712 (413) (http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/addison413.htm) treats the topic of final causes and the imaginative associations. There the notions of making that I discuss below (and to which I advocate returning) are incorporated into a philosophical system that related art and nature. (Final causes give us “greater occasion of admiring the goodness and wisdom of the first contriver.”) 

[1]. Though it was written much later than the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers I have alluded to (as much as seven centuries later, which, surely, is testimony to the hypogeal persistence of a view of making that centuries earlier had lost it prepotency), the second book of Virgil’s Georgics offers an accessible and moving presentation of the conception of making as a collaboration with the circumambient world and its invisible energies. Virgil conceived of making as a collaboration, a fostering, a nurturing bringing-forth, and he believe it required reading visible nature and learning to discern the signs of the invisible, to practice a semiotics (from σημεῖον, semeion, sign) of the invisible, in order to learn to collaborate with what cannot be sensed. (Compare this with Heraclitus Fragment 123, Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ—which is generally translated into English as “Nature loves to hide,” but almost certainly means nature’s generative operations are wont to proceed by concealing themselves).

[1]. For Aristotle, the τέλος (telos, end) of an entity or event was an essentially part of the ensemble of factors that determine what that entity or event is; what a being/event is plays a key role in its coming forth.

[1]. With this development, aesthetics no longer depended on metaphysics. The deleterious effects of the separation of aesthetics from metaphysics can be seen in the dreariness—in the conceptual and spiritual poverty—of verist, positivist, and empiricist strains in the art of the Enlightenment and after. Only technical images (and especially, photographic and cinematic images) escape this criticism, because technical images celebrate how the image comes into being, which is at one with question why it comes into being. (Bazin, L’image photographique “agit sur nous en tant que phénomène « naturel », comme une fleur ou un cristal de neige dont la beauté est inséparable des des origine vegetal ou telluriques,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma, 13; “Sur la photographie, image naturelle d’un monde que nous ne savions ou ne pouvions voir, la nature enfin fait plus que d’imiter l’art : elle imite l’artiste,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma, 16). For other realist traditions, the fact that what is “represented” (supposedly) exists is enough to validate the (supposed) representation.

Consider in this context, the folly of the interpretations of Cesar Pavese that forget that writer was first of all an author whose mode of thinking was self-consciously mythic and that the key influence on him was Herman Melville. It was from Melville and that clamorous Quaker Walt Whitman that Pavese learned the Vichian lesson of the identity of word and the thing, a lesson that the French Romantics had taken. (Pavese’s Turin was deeply influenced by French thought and French culture—Pavese’s poetry is very similar to the poème en prose proposed by Rimbaud in France and practised by Whitman in the U.S.). Or that, consistent with Vico’s view that language makes reality (“verum et factum reciprocantur seu convertuntur,”the true and the made are convertible into each other), that his poetry, by his own description, is “an attempt to express a cluster of fantastic associations, of which one’s own perception of reality consists, with a sufficient wholeness.” He claimed, then that reality is a cluster of ideas whose coherence and consistency give them the weight of the actuality. Of course, the proximity of poetic language (metaphor and metonymy) to primary process thinking and the fact that primary process thinking (like infantile desire) literally knows no exterior explain these ideas about the relation of language to reality. (See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [New York, Basic Books, 1962], 49–50, 99).

Lyotard puts these ideas in a wild poetic form in Économie libidinale when he writes of the body that is opened up and spread out—to which flayed body he adds the qualia corresponding to the sense organs. For Lyotard, the qualia red is literally a zone of the libidinal band: it is not “outside” of the so-called body’s retinas, but a part of them and their pulsional dynamics (Économie libidinale [Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974], 10; Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant [Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1993], 2). For the primary process, there is no inside and no outside, no interior and no exterior. (Hence the analogy to a moebius strip.)

[1]. The Objectivists included the Marxist poet Louis Zukofsky, with whom Rexroth exchanged many letters; the left-leaning social worker and one-time Communist Carl Rakosi; George Oppen, who in 1935 abandoned poetry for decades to work for the Communist Party U.S.A.; Charles Reznikoff, who was forced to resort to self-publishing nearly all the instalments of his long historical materials found-poem Testimony; and Basil Bunting, likely the closest to Rexroth in outlook, who enumerated the shaping forces on his poetry as “Jails and the sea, Quaker mysticism and socialist politics, a lasting unlucky passion, the slums of Lambeth and Hoxton”—Rexroth shared Bunting’s high regard for Quaker mysticism and socialist politics.

            Regarding the appeal of this approach to Marxist theorists, readers of film theory might note the comment that Eisenstein off in his 1934 piece “Through Theatre to Cinema”:

The apparent arbitrariness of matter, in its relation to the status quo of nature, is much less arbitrary than it seems. The final order is inevitably determined, consciously or unconsciously, by the social premises of the maker of the film-composition. His class-determined tendency is the basis of what seems to be an arbitrary cinematographic relation to the placed, or found, before the camera. (Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema,” 3-17 in Film Form, trans Jay Leyda [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949], 4)

[1]. Eda Lou Walton, “The Poems of Kenneth Rexroth: In What Hour” [sic], New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1941, p. 2.

[1]. This is not commonly acknowledged to be the leadig motivation for the Analytical Cubists’ use of faceting and braces. Nor is this difference between the Italian Futurists and the Cubists commonly recognized. I set out these ideas and argue for them in my book Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018).

[1]. My characterization of the New Critics’ position draws especially on John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1108–18. A delight one can take in commenting on New Criticism is that one only need quote from the New Critics to parody their views (and Rexroth knew this).

[1]. Stan Brakhage embraced this view.

[1]. 易经 is sometimes translated as The Book of Changes and sometimes as The Classic of Changes. The Chinese concept of qi 气 is close to the Greek concept of ἐνέργεια (energeia, in the sense of what sustains beings in being (which I generally refer to as be-ing); it is related to the idea of the Dao (道; Wade-Giles: Tao, the way).

[1]. Pound’s Imagist poetry operated similarly. He notes that his attempt “to record the precise instant when the thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (“Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 96 [1914]: 461–71, esp. 467; or Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir [New York: New Directions, 1970], 81–94, esp. 89; reprinted199–209 in Pound, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes [New York: New Directions, 1960], esp. 205). Note that Pound’s formulation is idealistic, while Rexroth avoids those idealist resonances.

[1]. Rexroth is one of the few twentieth-century English-language poets who could successfully carry off a book-length poem.

[1]. Rexroth, “About the Poems,” preface to The Phoenix and the Tortoise (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1944), 9–10, here 10. He continues, in the next paragraph, “I have tried to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of the creative process. I hope I have made it clear that I do not believe the Self [sic] does this by an act of Will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his life must lose it.” (ibid.)

Rexroth also writes that “For the Kabbalist the ultimate sacrament is the sexual act, carefully organized and sustained as the most perfect mystic trance” (“The Holy Kabbalah,” in Rexroth, Assays, 41–51, here 44). Rexroth’s essay, originally published as an introduction to a new edition of A. E. Waite’s The Holy Kabbalah: A Study of the Secret Tradition in Israel (New Hyde Park, NJ: University Books, 1960),vii–xvi, is one of the most clear-eyed affirmations that erotic mysticism is a fundamental human response to the mysteries and profundity of relationships. (Rexroth’s respect for the Cabala as “the great poem of Judaism, a tree of symbolic jewels showing forth the doctrine of the universe as the vesture of Deity, of the community as the embodiment of Deity, and of love as the acting of God in man” exerted a huge influence on the antinomian, syncretic religious movements that proliferated in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, including that of the Semina group. [Rexroth, “The Holy Kabbalah,” 51])

In “The Holy Kabbalah,” Rexroth also writes,

The sacred prostitutes and sodomites of the Goddess appear again and again in the [Judaic] Scriptures . . . and as has been pointed out time and again, the Book of Esther (simply another English transliteration of the Ishtar) is an elaborate euphemerization of the spring New Year fertility rites and the heirosgamos, the sacred marriage—as the folk rites of Purim are paralleled all over the world at the season.

The most likely interpretation of the Song of Songs is that it is a collection of songs for group marriage rites, focused in the heirosgamos of priest-king and priestess, which accompanied the opening of the irrigation channels from the main ditches into the dry fields. In fact, a book which casts great light on the Song of Songs is Granet’s Festivals and Songs of Ancient China, an interpretation of the erotic songs of the ancient Chinese collection, the Shi Ching [诗经, trad. 詩經,newer romanization, Shijing, one of the five classic Confucian collections, of poems and songs dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BC; the title is often translated as The Classic of Poetry, The Book of Songs, or The Book of Odes]. Do not misunderstand, this parallelism does not “prove” diffusion from some imagined prehistoric religious center. It shows the fundamental identity of man’s response to the great rhythms of life. (Rexroth, “The Holy Kabbalah,” 46.)

Here Rexroth states the basis for transcultural sympathetic identification, which forms the groundwork of his ideas on translation, and suggests that hierosgamos offers an image of the sacred identification of the cyclical recurrences of human passion with the cyclical patterns of the cosmos, the most fundamental mechanism of identification.

[1]. The term appears in The Dragon and the Unicorn, in Kenneth Rexroth, The Collected Longer Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1968), 141. In the 1968 interview with Cyrena Pondrom mentioned above, Rexroth expanded on its meaning:

Sexual love, of course, is one sacramental, one outward, vesture of an inward spiritual reality, and I suppose this is extrapersonalization. That is not a term that I would use anymore, but what I meant by extrapersonalization was that the person is realized in his reflection in other persons, and there is no end to this process. You see, back of this lies a kind of vision, a universe made up of an infinite number of contemplatives, a picture which opens the Avatamsaka Sutra of Kegon Kyo. Of course, the dynamics of this process is endless; realization of the one in the other constitutes the flow of reality. (Cyrena N. Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth,” Contemporary Literature 10, no. 3 (1969): 313–31, here 330.)

[1]. The Dragon and the Unicorn, 140; Complete Poems, 376.

[1]. Rexroth, The Dragon and the Unicorn, 74; Complete Poems, 334.

[1]. In his interview with Cyrena N. Pondrom from 1968, Rexroth remarks, “Man kills himself by defining the indefinable, grasping the inapprehensible. We do not apprehend reality, since this implies an outreaching effort; rather it apprehends us. We are simply in reality. We are in being like fish in water, who do not know water exists” (Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth”: 321).

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “The Silver Swan, XVII,” in Complete Poems, 737–39. Note that by this point in his career (around 1978), the distinction between Rexroth’s original verse and his translations has almost disappeared, so completely has Rexroth become a Chinese poet writing in English. By this point, Rexroth’s original poems offer the same concentrated imagery and the same direct presentation of the thing in its epiphanic reality, the same sense of the intimate correspondence between the recurrent rhythms of the cosmos and those of the enlivened heart that is the ground for utter trust in the wisdom of bodily sensations/feelings and the testimony of the senses manifest in the impressively specific descriptions/presentations as his translations from Chinese offer. Furthermore, they evince the same remarkable composure one attains as one undergoes the process of emptying the self to allow it to be filled anew with the Other that one finds in Chinese Buddhist poetry.

[1]. Rexroth, Part VII of “On Flower Wreath Hill,” Complete Poetry, 747.

[1]. The formal name for Avatamsaka Sutra in Chinese is Dafangguang Fohuayan Jing 大方廣佛華嚴經; the Sanskrit name is “The Great Vaipulya Sutra of the Buddha’s Flower Garland”; here Vaipulya (which literally means “extensive”) is translated into Chinse as fāngguǎng 方廣—used thus, the term intends an expansive corrective;Huá 華 means at once “flower” (archaic) and “magnificence.” Yán 嚴, short for zhuàngyán 莊嚴, means “to decorate something, so it is solemn, dignified.” Dafangguang Fohuayan Jing is commonly shortened to Huayan Jing 華嚴經, meaning the “Flower-adorned (Splendid and Solemn) Sutra.”

[1]. The Buddhist idea of dharma resembles somewhat the Classical Greek idea of λόγος (logos), which often took on the character of a law-like principle that, informed by a τέλος (telos, goal), brings beings into harmony.

[1]. Reginald Ray, Secret of the Vajra World (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), 13.

[1]. Possibly my very favourite of Rexroth’s poems begins with a simple, straight-forward, and nearly unbearably beautiful statement of this conception. Its title is “The Spark in the Tinder of Knowing”:

Profound stillness in the greystone

Romanesque chapel, the rush

Of wheels beyond the door only

Underlines the silence. The wheels

Of life turn ceaselessly.

Their hiss and clank is

The noiseless turning of the Wheel

Of the Law, that turns without

Moving, from zenith to nadir,

From plus to minus, from black to white.

Love turns the uncountable,

Interlocking wheels of the stars.

The earth turns. The sun sets.

A bolt of iron all on fire

Falls into the turning city.

Love turns the heart to an unknown

Substance, fire of its fire.

 (The Complete Poems, 684–85)

The poem was written at the Cowley Fathers retreat, associated with the Cowley Fathers’ Episcopal monastery (in Cambridge, MA, just off Harvard Square, and facing the Charles River), in 1968. The monastery chapel, dedicated to Saint Mary and Saint John, in the French Romanesque style, suggests an early Christian basilica. The transitions here—from Romanesque chapel to the Buddhist conception of the dharmakāya to the Christian idea of love as the turning of the stars in their courses—all suggest the non-differentiation (the interchangeability) of the One and the Other. Thus, the poem conveys Rexroth’s ecumenism.

[1]. Beatrice Lane Suzuki, “Extracts from the Mahayana Sutras,” in Mahayana Buddhism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 117.

[1]. Some Buddhist scholars argue that Tathāgatagarbha thinkers (along with their close relatives, thinkers from the Yogācāran school) in effect repudiated the Buddha’s doctrine of an-atman and implicitly brought Vedantic conceptions of atman, Brahman, and their identity in through the back door.

[1]. As translated in Leon Hurvitz et. al., “Schools of Buddhist Doctrine,” in W. T. De Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 433–80, esp. 473.

[1]. Cited in Yu-lan Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 353.

[1]. Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, 353.

[1]. Both Daoism and the Flower Garland School stress at once the diversity of the world and the interdependence of all that is; both offer non-dual views of reality, and both express reservations about language’s ability to grasp ultimate reality.

[1].Here Rexroth writes of his own interest in Confucianism, and challenges Pound’s idea that Confucianism is primarily a series of edicts on keeping order in society.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Sung Culture” in Assays, 6–7.

Rexroth’s comment, that “For Lu, man’s mind had strayed from the realm of world of li, pure form, to which it had originally belonged, and the aim of the wise and good man was to find his lost mind or true nature again by quiet meditation and begin to understand its relation to the whole” explains the central theme and the overriding purpose of Rexroth’s writing. From that purpose, we can educe the elements of his style. We see, then, that Rexroth’s objectives for his poetry reflect his deep learning in Chinese philosophy and Chinese culture. That said, it is interesting to note that the next-to-last sentence in this passage also conforms to Rexroth’s understanding of the goal of Western gnostic practices (a topic his prose writings returned to frequently). Rexroth believed that ways through which humans seek to know the higher truths are similar across cultures and historical epochs, and the truths disclosed are represented similarly across cultures.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, In the Sierras: Mountain Writings, ed. Kim Stanley Robinson [New York: New Directions, 2012], 165–66.

[1]. Ibid., 168–69.

[1]. Cyrena N. Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth,” Contemporary Literature 10.3:323–24. Readers who are familiar with Michael McClure’s commentaries on poetry and experience that draw on ideas from ecology (and on nature’s tendency to right imbalances, though human excess sometimes thwarts nature’s efforts to bring things back into balance) will recognize the similarity between his basic themes and the ideas Rexroth propounds here.

[1]. The San Franciscan from this milieu who most completely identified with Surrealism was Philip Lamantia; but he was something of an exception, in having closely affiliated himself with André Breton.

To stress the influence of Chinese thought on the writers just mentioned, I should note that Gary Snyder himself is an accomplished interpreter of Chinese, and he introduced the Chan (simplified禅, traditional,禪) poetry of Han Shan 寒山to the writers of the Berkeley Renaissance (and so to the world at large). He is fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese and reads classical Chinese easily. He began his work on Han Shan as a student of East Asian languages at University of California at Berkeley, under the guidance of his professor Ch’en Shih-Hsiang (who in fact brought Han Shan to his student’s attention, after Snyder expressed an interest in studying the influence on Chinese poetry of Chan, a Mayahana Buddhist sect that gave rise to Zen Buddhism in Japan). Like Rexroth, Snyder is an expert (and devoted) mountaineer, which would have bolstered his affinity (his identification, to recur to that theme) with Han Shan (the name means Cold Mountain). Further, his worldview is deeply ecological (he was one of the first poets to take up the abuse of the environment as a cause), reflecting Rexroth’s idea that identification results in a sense of responsibility.

[1]. Cyrena Pondrom asked Rexroth about images that he used and that also appear in Gary Snyder’s poetry. Rexroth noted that Snyder was a disciple. This occasioned a deliberation on his influence:

You see, all scattered around amongst younger poets are people who have read my longer poems with a great deal of attention. And the poems have meant a great deal to them, so to speak, philosophically, although they have been dismissed with contempt by the Trotskyite Ku Klux Klan literary establishment that ran the quarterlies in the “thirties” [1930s] and “forties.” But this was all sort of underground in the years after the war; we were not‑people. I still am a not‑person; to the best of my knowledge, for instance, I have never been mentioned in The New York Review of Books. I hope not.

[1].Compare this with Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, which is really a declaration of faith that when each member of a group engaged in collective improvisation follows his or her own path the result will be a non-hierarchical, feminine coming-together—that faith is for the basis for the nude work I have done, discussed in the extended passage below, that presents a sort of phenomenological justification for a practice central to these collaborations.

[1]. Wu wei 无为 is generally translated as doing nothing, though its intent is that actions that are in conformity with the Dao occur effortlessly, and so are experienced as spontaneous and self-originating (the opposite of being pushed into being by some external cause).

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” first published in Evergreen Review 1957 and collected 57–64 in Kenneth Rexroth,The World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Bradford Morrow (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1987), here 58–59.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Leaves of Grass” in Classics Revisited (New York: Avon Books, 1969, 250–253.

[1]. Rexroth, “Disengagement and the Art of the Beat Generation,” 41–56 in World Outside the Window, 43.

[1]. Rexroth, “Disengagement,” 54, 44.

[1]. Rexroth, “Disengagement,” 54.

[1]. Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, 335.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, introduction to D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1962 [Rexroth’s selection of Lawrence’s verse first appeared in 1947]), 11. Rexroth’s introduction is reprinted, with minor changes, as“Poetry, Regeneration, and D. H. Lawrence,” 177–203 in Bird in the Bush, here 189; and 8–25 in World Outside the Window, here 16. This piece is especially important for the way it lays out Rexroth’s holistic-personalist ethics (and, ultimately, his ontology). It is also reprinted as Kenneth Rexroth, “The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Leo Hamalian (New York: McGraw‑Hill Book Company, 1973), 118–32, here 124.

            Note that the final sentence in the passage cited is pure Cabalism.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, The Phoenix and the Tortoise. The phoenix in Western culture is a symbol of renewal, the tortoise of steadiness; in Chinese culture the phoenix represents the yang 阳 (trad. 陽), or the heavenly, the tortoise, the yin 阴 (trad. 陰) or the earthly—and there the sacred marriage becomes a way of bringing the two into alignment.

            The title contains another allusion, which none can miss—and that is to Shakespeare’s most esoteric and metaphysical—not to say weird—poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” To be sure, Rexroth’s title both alludes to and distances itself from that great Shakespearean model—the similarities between the titles of the works link them, but a knowing reader also remembers that the turtle in Shakespeare’s mysterious poem is a turtledove, not a reptile of the order Chelonii. But consider these lines:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov’d, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight:
Either was the other’s mine.

Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.

Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded

That it cried how true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.

The esoteric idea that love is a paradox—that it fuses two beings, but the fused beings are then neither one nor two (“Property was thus appall’d, / That the self was not the same; / Single nature’s double name / Neither two nor one was call’d. / . . . Saw division grow together; / To themselves yet either-neither, / Simple were so well compounded / That it cried how true a twain / Seemeth this concordant one!”) is pure Rexroth. So, too is the use of the spiritual marriage as the symbol of the identity of truth and beauty and, as well, of the Greek Orthodox Christological thesis that from two natures (human and divine) comes one Christ.

But consider the similarity of these ideas with the inscrutable unity in duality of the Dao.

[1]. They discuss,among other things, ideas from key influences on Rexroth up to that time, including John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308, whose idea of the univocity of being became a cardinal principle of Rexroth’s metaphysics), T. S. Eliot, Du Fu, the Symbolist influenced writer (and longtime friend of Eliot) Conrad Aiken, and the formidable writer and progressivist social critic H. G. Wells, all of whom influenced Rexroth.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, afterword to his prefaces in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Santa Barbara: Morrow and Covici, 1980); online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/poems/prefaces.htm#Worldly

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Suchness,” originally published in Love Is an Art of Time, part of New Poems (New York: New Directions, 1974), 23; also in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 702.

Note the evidence of the poetic function in operation here: “The logical universal / Ceases to be anything more / Than the dead body of an angel.” “Our substance / Is whatever we feed our angel.” “The perfect incense for worship / Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes.” They are highly gnomic, almost riddling, so evacuated of ordinary meaning are they. Like the contents of all great poems, they are statements in an achieved new language, whose words have a higher meaning.

Yet, for all this, there is a prose antecedent for the poetic content of this passage. Rexroth’s deep meditation on reality draws on Oriental Platonism (a body of thought that Rexroth clearly admired, even though he was wary of its transcendental commitments). Here is a passage on the imagination from a great Parisian scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, writing on Suhrawardī (1154–91, a Persian philosopher, founder of the Iranian school of Illuminism): in Suhrawardī’s “Theosophy of Light the entire Platonic theory of Ideas is interpreted in terms of Zoroastrian angelology. What Aristotelianism considers as the concept of the species, the logical universal, ceases to be anything more than the dead body of an Angel” (Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn Arabī [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969], 22). Corbin’s prose text concerns a thinker who challenged the Aristotelian immanentism of Islam’s Golden Age with transcendentalist ideas drawn from a mixture of Platonism and Zoroastrianism. Rexroth selects passages from the text and by deploying the poetic function of selection and arrangement evacuates the language of its transcendental implications, thus endowing the source material with utterly new meanings. (I should admit that Rexroth’s metaphysical speculations sometimes seem riven by tension between transcendental light metaphysics and the radical immanentism of his Huayan Buddhism.)

[1]. The term suchness is commonly used to translate tathātā तथता, or, in Chinese Zhenru 真如(Wade–Giles: chen-ju, or, sometimes, chenju). Chen-ju 真如 (in the newer transliteration, zhenru) conveys the idea of true insight into reality. Wing-Tsit Chan glosses the term thus: “True Thusness or Suchness (tathatā [तथता]. . .) means truth and it-is-so. As truth, it is antithesis to illusion and falsehood, and ‘being so’ it is eternal, unchangeable, indestructible, without character or nature, and is not produced by causes. It is the Absolute, Ultimate Reality, or True Reality, the Storehouse of the Thus-come, the Realm of Dharmas, Dharma-nature, and Perfect Reality” (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. Wing-Tsit Chan [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963], 399).Chen-ju/zhenru suggests the perfection of the immediate moment, the hic-et-nunc, which is entirely unique and cannot be compared to any other moment. According to the Tiantai school, chen-ju/zhenrurepresents the moment when the phenomenal merges with the noumenal, when “every colour or fragrance is none other than the Ultimate Truth” (Rexroth expounds similar ideas). Tiantai followers were sometimes described as “the three thousand worlds immanent in an instance of thought.”

Another name for the Tiantai School is the Lotus School, because of the central importance to it of the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra (Sanskrit), or, in Chinese, Miaofa lianhua jing妙法莲华经(trad.妙法蓮華經; Wade–Giles: Miao-fa lien-hua ching, literally Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law), often shortened to fahua jing法華經(Wade–Giles: Fa-hua Ching), The Lotus Sutra. The Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra was originally translated into Chinese (probably from a Pakrit language) in 286 CE (during the Western Jin Period). The Tiantai School rose to importance during the Tang Dynasty, becoming one of the leading Chinese schools. It attracted wealthy patrons and the support of the emperor, had thousands of monks and millions of followers, and its supporters built many splendid temples. There were efforts to merge the Tiantai and Huayan Schools, since their teachings are similar.

[1]. From Rexroth “The Heart’s Garden, the Garden’s Heart,” in The Collected Longer Poems, 283–303, here 294–95; reprinted in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 659–80, here 671. The poem was composed in 1966 or 1967.

            One might ask why this is poetic. The answer is simple: because the delicate structure of rhythms and cadences is intrinsic to the passage’s meaning.

[1]. Rexroth several times extolled Eastern Orthodoxy as being closer to true Christianity than the Roman version. One example is this: “Thomism is not really a Christian philosophy as such. It is only in Eastern Orthodoxy that the Church, building on the foundation of the patristic period, has tried to develop a philosophy which would be Christian in its essence. So even today Russian philosophers and theologians like [Seymon] Frank and [Nikolai] Berdyaev, once we discover them, seem more relevant than even the most progressive in the West.” (Kenneth Rexroth, “Faith in an Age of Faithlessness,” 84–92 in With Eye and Ear, here 89.)

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “The Surprising Journey of Father Lonergan,” in The Elastic Retort (New York: Seabury, 1973), 269–80, here 272.

[1]. Ibid.

[1]. Ibid., 273. I have corrected his citation of Harper’s work, changing “Schools” to the singular form.

[1]. Rexroth, “The Hasidism of Martin Buber,” in Bird in the Bush, 106–42, here 141–42. Rexorth comments on Tales of the Hasidim(1947), Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1956, a translation of Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, 1906), The Legend of Ball-Shem (1955, a translation of Die Legende des Baalschem, 1908), and For the Sake of Heaven: A Hasidic Chronicle-Novel (also published under the title Gog and Magog: A Novel, 1943).

[1]. Rexroth, “The Greek Anthology,” 80–84 in Classics Revisited, here 84. If Rexroth draws our attention insistently to these cross-cultural commonalities, it is to tell us that the quiet (non-hallucinatory) vision, within which the luminous fact comes to presence, is the essence of poeticness, appreciated everywhere. Of course, his annoyance with the reductive methods of the new critics (with their particular emphasis on the qualities that make a poem poetic) would lead him to avoid putting the matter in just that way.

[1]. I use the unfortunate multi-hyphenated expression to convey the experience set out in such passages as the following:

My body is asleep. Only

My eyes and brain are awake.

The stars stand around me

Like gold eyes. I can no longer

Tell where I begin and leave off.

The faint breeze in the dark pines,

And the invisible grass,

The tipping earth, the swarming stars

Have an eye that sees itself.

(“The Lights in the Sky are Stars,” in Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems, 238.)

[1]. Rexroth helped forge a link between the younger poets and Pound and Williams, and through them to the international movements at the birth of Modernism—for example, Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) and Spring and All (1923) were deeply rooted in Surrealist poetics.

            Rexroth’s influence on the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance was greater, but Williams exerted a greater lure on the Black Mountain School poets.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Tu Fu,” in Classics Revisited, 126–31, here 127–28.

[1]. Ibid., 129–30.

[1]. Ibid., 130.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, preface to In Defense of the Earth, x.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Tu Fu,” 30.

[1]. Rexroth, quoted in Lynn M. Zott, The Beat Generation: A Gale Critical Companion (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 289.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “A Sword in a Cloud of Light,” originally published in In Defense of the Earth; and reprinted in The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 239–41, esp. 240–41; and reprinted again in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 536–38, esp. 538

[1]. I have dealt with this theme at some length in DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect.

[1]. Pondrom, “Interview with Kenneth Rexroth,” 325.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth, “Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit,” 43–60 in Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), here 44. Brakhage proposes the same idea, that there can be no ultimate love where there is fear on the opening page of Metaphors on Vision. I have noted that Brakhage took part in Rexroth’s salons in the 1950s.

[1]. Rexroth modelled the name on Marichi (the name means “ray of light”), an Indian Boddhisatva who is revered in both the Buddhist and Daoist traditions of China. In China, she is known as Molizhitian Pusa and is the goddess of light (and, consequently, of the dawn). In Japan she is known as Marishi‑ten, where she helps warriors overcome their fear of surrendering their lives. The Mahayana tradition does not offer any female Boddhisatvas, and even with the Mantrayana (Vajrayana) tradition it is generally a masculine Boddhisatva that manifests itself. Marichi is an exception, for she makes manifest the female pole of the Boddhisatva. In the Daoist tradition, she represents alchemical learning (which offers instruction in sex magic)—this is why, in “The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart,” she appears as “Patroness of geisha and whores, / And goddess of the dawn” (Rexroth, The Collected Longer Poems, 292; The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 669).

[1]. Though, as Morgan Gibson points out in his monograph Revolutionary Rexroth, the Marichiko inventions were, among other things, an homage to Yosano Akiko [1878–1948], a Japanese woman poet—perhaps the greatest female poet of modern Japan—whose works are erotically forthright.

[1]. Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 1979), 27. The translation also appears in Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese (New York: New Directions, 1981), 95. Rexroth compares Li Qingzhao 李清照with the great Renaissance lyric poet Gaspara Stampa, who had a similar exquisitely intense sensibility.

[1]. At http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1270.

[1]. Sam Hamill, “The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth,” in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, xxix.