Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana and frequently moved around the Midwest during his childhood. He led a tumultuous life that included being orphaned at 14, constant traveling both in the US and abroad, intense political activism, and four marriages. He was largely self-educated and fluent in a number of languages; his work addressed and incorporated Eastern and Western philosophy, ecology, sexuality, and mysticism. Rexroth was influential to a number of midcentury American poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and was known, in his lifetime, as “Godfather” of the Beats—he organized and emceed the Six Gallery reading in 1955 where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.” Rexroth’s political activity was also notable: he was a conscientious objector during World War II and helped Japanese Americans evade internment policies enacted by the US government. Later in life, he also supported the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s and went to Japan on a Fulbright fellowship in 1974. He was recognized later in life by the literary establishment he had spent decades railing against: he received the Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1975 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1977. Rexroth died in 1982. In a reminiscence written for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Kenneth Rexroth’s friend and former student Thomas Sanchez portrayed him as a “longtime iconoclast, onetime radical, Roman Catholic, Communist fellow traveler, jazz scholar, I.W.W. anarchist, translator, philosopher, playwright, librettist, orientalist, critical essayist, radio personality, newspaper columnist, painter, poet and longtime Buddhist.” Rexroth also made major contributions to modern American poetry. The length and breadth of his career resulted in a body of work that not only chronicles his personal search for visionary transcendence but also reflects the artistic, cultural, and political vicissitudes of more than half a century. In a 1967 New York Times Book Review John Unterecker commented that “reading through all of Kenneth Rexroth’s shorter poems is a little like immersing oneself in the literary history of the last 40 years; for Rexroth experimented with almost all of the poetic techniques of the time, dealt, at least in passing, with all of its favorite themes.”

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