Kenneth Rexroth

1906-1982

At the beginning of June, Kenneth Rexroth, poet, painter, writer, critic, died in California. He had been a committed and knowledgeable anarchist from his youth despite occasional leanings toward the Catholic Church and one abortive attempt to join the Communist Party during the Great Depression. (The CP, always with a sensitive nose in matters of authority, rejected Rexroth because, in its opinion, he was not a good follower, tending too much towards anarchism.)

Rexroth leaves a significant and varied body of work, poems, translations, essays, an autobiographical novel ?notable not onl> for its clarity, beauty, and intelligence, but also for its vital balance of the personal and the political. Among other things, it documents vividly a sizeable and defiant radical America that sadly has now disappeared almost completely from sight.

Art outlasts the specific issues of its day and later generations often adapt it willfully to their own urgencies, but Rexroth's work will continue to show us that politics no less than love, war, or nature stimulates the imagination that creates art.

~rd

3Life with us goes on fast the same. Bora and raised in what they used to call *%? Radical Movement" I always look hack with amused pride on those old timers who didn't ?moke or drink and lived long and troubled lives absolutely devoted to one unmarried spouse?to keep themselves fit and ready for the barricades. The World, The Flesh, and The Devil are far subtler personages than those innocent Jewish mechanics and Italian peasant* thought, hut they still go about in die night as a roaring Hon seeking whom they may. devour. It behoves the artist to recognize and avoid than, especially when they wave red, or black, flags, as well as roar. Because art if a weapon. After millions of well-aimed blows, someday perhaps it will break fat stone heart of the mindless cacodemon called Things As They Are. Everything else has failed.

KENNETH REXBOTH

Everybody has a lot of fakery in Ms make-up. When it is personal it is all right. A man can be forgiven for being a anarf, a vegetarian, or a frequenter of astrologists. He cannot be forgiven for being a parson or a social worker or a professor. No truck with the Social Lie. Why not? Not because it makes you a partner in mass murder, which it does, but because it reduces all action to frivolity.

Once moral authority is delegated all action becomes meaningless. The institutionalization of creativity which is almost all-prevaiHng today is met with reluctance, secret recalcitrance, tedium vitae, however gaudy the rewards, or even however noble the ends. Reluctant engineers can build Dnieprestroy, reluctant intellectuals can implement Mr. Dulles* lethal priggery in Taiwan, Spain, or Santo Domingo. You cannot write a reluctant poem or paint a reluctant picture. Those who pretend to are, on the face of it, institutionalized imbeciles.

WHEN WE WITH SAPPHO

"... about the cool water

the wind sounds through sprays

of apple, and from the quivering leaves

slumber pours down ..."

Sec. The sun has fallen away.

Now there are amber

Long lights on the shattered

Boles of the ancient apple trees.

Our bodies move to each other

As bodies move in sleep;

At once filled and exhausted.

As the summer moves to autumn,

As we, with Sappho, move towards death.

My eyelids sink toward sleep in the hot

Autumn of your uncoiled hair.

Your body moves in my arms

On the verge of sleep;

And it is as though I held

In my arms the bird filled

Evening sky of summer.

FISH PEDDLER AND COBBLER

Always for thirty years now

I am in the mountains in

August. For thirty Augusts

Your ghosts have stood up over

The mountains. 1 tat was nineteen

Twenty seven. Now it is

Nineteen fifty seven. Once

More after thirty years 1

Am hack in the mountains of

Youth, bark in the Gros Ventres,

The broad pari-like valleys and

The tremendous cubical

Peaks of the Rockies. I learned

To shave hereabouts, working

As cookee and night wrangler.

Nineteen twenty two, the years

Of revolutionary

Hope that came to an end as

The iron fist began to close.

No one electrocuted me.

Nothing happened. Time passed.

Something invisible was gone.

We though! then that we wese the men

Of the years of the great change,

That wc were the forerunners

Of the normal life of mankind.

Wc thought that soon all things would

Be changed, not just economic

And social relationships, hut

Painting, poetry, music, dance.

Architecture, even the food

We ate and the clothes wc wore

Wonhl be ennobled. It will take

Longer than wc expected.

These mountains are unchanged since

I was a boy wandering

Over the West, picking up

Odd jobs. If anything they are

Wilder. A moose cow blunders

Into camp. Beavers slap their tails

On their sedgy pond as wc fish

Prom on top of their lodge in the

Twilight. The horses feed on bright grass

In meadows full of purple gentian,

And stumble through siher dew

In the full moonlight.

The fish histc.of meadow water.

In the morning on far grass ridges

Above the red rim rock wild sheep

Bound like rubber balls over the

Horizon as the noise of camp

Begins. 1 catch and saddle

Mary's little golden horse.

And pack the first Decker saddles

I've seen in thirty vcars. Even

The horse bells have a different sound

From the ones in California.

Canada jays fight over

The last scraps of our pancakes.

On the long sandy pass wc ride

Through fields of lavender primrose

While lightning explodes around us.

For lunch Mary catches a two pound

Grayling in the whispering river.

No fourteen thousand foot peaks

Arc named Saeco and Vanzetti.

Not yet. The clothes I wear

Arc as unchanged as the Decker

Saddles on the pack horses.

America grows rich on the threat of death.

Nobody bothers anarchists anymore.

Coming back wc lay over

In Ogden for ten hours.

The courthouse square was full

Of miners and lumberjacks and

Harvest hands and gandy dancers

With broken hands and broken

Faces sleeping off cheap wine drunks

In the scorching heat, while tired

Savage eyed whores paraded the street.

I had long discussions about that Revolution which then seemed so sear and about Anarchism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism versus Socialism, Federalist Anarchism versus Syndicalism, Alexander Berkman versus Lenin and Trotsky, and Herman Corter versus all of them. It may seem acadumic now and very far away, but It was not then; it was life and death to us In those days.

Bertrand Bussell had visited Bussia prepared to accept Bolshevism, and had written, "The present holders of power, Lenin and Trotsky, are evil men. and there Is no depth of cruelty, perfidy, and brutality from which they will shrink when they feel themselves threatened." These words, printed in red block letters, still survive tn one of my notebooks for the year 1924.

All day long the bookshop was a hotbed of argument I think that it was there, in discussions with Geraldine and others, that I straightened out my attitudes toward the pressing problems of the revolutionary movement. I don't think the straightening out was due to Geraldine's brains, I think it was due to her calm. Nothing was said that was decisive but the atmosphere was decisive. I look back on the period and place and discussions as a determinative moment I remember standing there and arguing with Charlie Ashleigh, Jim Larkin's lawyer (whose name I've forgotten), Caleb Harrison, and Geraldine. Geraldine spoke little but to the point We were discussing the Sropotkin letter.

I realize now the Xropotkin letter was a fake, but we were body debating it then in good faiti. In a letter circulated by the Bolsheviks, Kropotkin had said, This is not our revolution. We were unable to make a revolution. The Bolsheviks did. We should never take part with the bourgeoisie, let along the Czarists, against them. We should cooperate with them in trade unions and mass organizations and defense and let tiem take care of their own politics.* This is the definition of fellow traveling. I think it's highly unlikely Kropotkin ever wrote this letter. He was deliberately starved to death hy the Bolsheviks in a little cottage in the country and he died about this time, and this was supposed to be his testament It bit America along with Alexander Berkman's revelations, Trotsky's apology for terror, and news of the suppression of the Xronstadt rebellion, and the betrayal of Makhno by Trotsky.

I made, pretty deliberately, the decision that I would avoid tie political issues. I had no use for the Socialist Party or any of its works. It was obvious that the IWW had reached the end of its tether; something had gone wrong with it. I decided that die thing to work with rather than the IWW was the ordinary trade-union movement, which, of course, we all despised- Lenin was mild in his criticism of lieutenants and agents of the bosses In the ranks of labor in comparison with us. But I was coming to the conclusion that my job was to find what the Bolshevik* called "the masses* and to avoid tho factional fighting which surrounded any Bolshevik Incursion Into the labor movement The most effective tactic seemed to be to bow before the storm and keep out of the way, to try to work on a mass level and avoid pie cards of any kind, to try to work with the rank and file, to constantly increase rank-and-file initiative and democratization; and to assist any measure that led to greater control on the part of the workers, but to keep quiet about my personal program and never get myself drawn into a factional position. By and large, I was able to stick to this decision.