Jonathan P. Baird

It has been a long time since I have featured any favorite poet of mine. I wanted to highlight Kenneth Rexroth.

I cannot remember exactly how I discovered him. I found Kenneth Patchen at the same time – the two Kenneths. Somehow I had gotten the New Directions paperback of Rexroth’s collected shorter poems. All I can still say is “wow”! The range and versatility of his poetry is impressive. I was drawn especially to his love poems and his political poems.

The West Coast anarchist tradition is very reflected in his work as is his love of jazz, his interest in Japanese and Chinese writers, and his engagement with Buddhism. I see him as a precursor to Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

For those unfamiliar with his work (he died in 1982), I wanted to offer a few of his poems.

On a military graveyard

Stranger, when you come to Washington
Tell them that we lie here
Obedient to their orders.

After Simonides

Andree Rexroth

Now once more gray mottled buckeye branches
Explode their emerald stars,
And alders smoulder in a rosy smoke
Of innumerable buds.
I know that spring again is splendid
As ever, the hidden thrush
As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital —
But these are the forest trails we walked together,
These paths, ten years together.
We thought the years would last forever,
They are all gone now, the days
We thought would not come for us are here.
Bright trout poised in the current —
The raccoon’s track at the water’s edge —
A bittern booming in the distance —
Your ashes scattered on this mountain —
Moving seaward on this stream.

Climbing Milestone Mountain, August 22, 1937

For a month now, wandering over the Sierras,
A poem had been gathering in my mind,
Details of significance and rhythm,
The way poems do, but still lacking a focus.
Last night I remembered the date and it all
Began to grow together and take on purpose.
We sat up late while Deneb moved over the zenith
And I told Marie all about Boston, how it looked
That last terrible week, how hundreds stood weeping
Impotent in the streets that last midnight.
I told her how those hours changed the lives of thousands,
How America was forever a different place
Afterwards for many.
In the morning
We swam in the cold transparent lake, the blue
Damsel flies on all the reeds like millions
Of narrow metallic flowers, and I thought
Of you behind the grille in Dedham, Vanzetti,
Saying, “Who would ever have thought we would make this
history”?
Crossing the brilliant mile-square meadow
Illuminated with asters and cyclamen,
The pollen of the lodgepole pines drifting
With the shifting wind over it and the blue
And sulphur butterflies drifting with the wind,
I saw you in the sour prison light, saying,
“Goodbye comrade.”
In the basin under the crest
Where the pines end and the Sierra primrose begins,
A party of lawyers was shooting at a whiskey bottle.
The bottle stayed on its rock, nobody could hit it.
Looking back over the peaks and canyons from the last lake,
The pattern of human beings seemed simpler
Than the diagonals of water and stone.
Climbing the chute, up the melting snow and broken rock,
I remembered what you said about Sacco,
How it slipped your mind and you demanded it be read
into the record.
Traversing below the rugged arete,
One cheek pressed against the rock
The wind slapping the other,
I saw you both marching in an army
You with the red and black flag, Sacco with the rattlesnake
banner.
I kicked steps up the last snow bank and came
To the indescribably blue and fragrant
Polemonium and the dead sky and the sterile
Crystalline granite and final monolith of the summit.
These are the things that will last a long time, Vanzetti,
I am glad that once on your day I have stood among them.
“When these days are but a dim remembering of the time
When man was wolf to man.”
I think men will be remembering you a long time
Standing on the mountains
Many men, a long time, comrade.