B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
Introduction
Texts at This Site
Texts at Other Websites
Rexroth Books in Print
Out-of-Print Rexroth Books
This section of the BPS website is devoted to writings by and about the great poet, essayist, social critic and Renaissance man, Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). The emphasis will be on his out-of-print works (especially his numerous essays, articles and reviews), but it will also include selections from some of the in-print works. The primary aim is to introduce readers to a truly wonderful writer and encourage them to seek out whatever books of his are available. If enough interest is generated, perhaps publishers will bring more of his works back into print.
Unlike most of the texts at this website, the Rexroth works are all copyrighted. As indicated after each text, they are reproduced here either by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. (80 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10011) or by permission of Copper Canyon Press (P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368) or by permission of Bradford Morrow, Literary Executor of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust (21 East 10th Street #3E, New York, NY 10003). They may not be reproduced for any commercial purpose, and even any extensive noncommercial reproduction should first be okayed with New Directions, Copper Canyon, or Mr. Morrow.
This is not an “official” Rexroth site. I have no connection, economic or otherwise, with Rexroth’s heirs or publishers. The work on it is a labor of love and the choice of texts is completely my own.
—KK
By Rexroth:
Autobiography (excerpts)
Classics Revisited (selections from two books)
Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
(complete book)
Camping in the Western
Mountains (complete, never-published guidebook)
Essays
Poems
Rexroth’s San Francisco (selected newspaper
& magazine columns)
San Francisco Fifty Years Ago (complete columns for
the San Francisco Examiner) (ongoing project)
Translations (from
Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish & French)
By Rexroth, translated into other languages:
Poems translated into French
(Joël Cornuault)
Le San Francisco de Kenneth Rexroth
(Joël Cornuault)
Les Classiques revisités
(Nadine Bloch & Joël Cornuault)
About Rexroth:
The Relevance of Rexroth (complete book by
Ken Knabb)
Éloge de Kenneth Rexroth (same book in
French)
Erotismo, Misticismo y Revolución
(same book in Spanish)
A Clueless Life of
Kenneth Rexroth (Knabb’s review of Hamalian’s biography)
Discovering Rexroth (Knabb)
Talking about Rexroth (Gibson & Knabb)
See also the “Rexroth” entry in the Site Index.
By Rexroth:
Articles, Essays and Reviews:
The
Kennedy-Nixon Debate
Review of Charles Bukowski, etc.
PDFs of several articles from
The Alternative Society
Letters:
Letters to Morgan Gibson
Interviews:
Interviewed by
Jerome Rothenberg & David Antin
Excerpts from an interview on Buddhism
Interviewed by
Bradford Morrow
Anthology:
The New
British Poets: An Anthology (complete book, edited with an introduction by
Rexroth)
Poems and Translations:
One poem
One poem plus links
and a brief bio
Two poems with musical background,
here and
here
Four poems
Four poems plus numerous Rexroth
links
Seven poems
Fourteen poems
Translations
of six Ho Chi Minh prison poems
Translations of
seven poems by Pierre Reverdy
Introduction to 100 Poems
from the Japanese
Readings of Rexroth’s poetry:
Rexroth reading four poems
with jazz accompaniment
Rexroth reading a poem about Sacco and Vanzetti (YouTube video)
Rexroth
reading seven poems (including “This Night Only” with the original
Erik Satie
accompaniment)
Rexroth
at the San Francisco Poetry Center (1955, 48 minutes, reading his poems and
translations)
Rexroth
at the San Francisco Poetry Center (1959, 47 minutes, reading his own poems,
including one to Lionel Hampton, and also playing records of French songs)
Rexroth,
Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Michael McClure recreate the famous Six
Gallery reading (the original Six Gallery reading — San Francisco, October
1955 — was not recorded; this recording covers part of the March 1956
re-creation in Berkeley)
Rexroth at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference (1974, 65
minutes, including two poems, but mostly answering audience questions re the
counterculture and its cooption, Bob Dylan, the Mafia, the Black Panthers, the
Hearst kidnapping, terrorism and provocateurs, the corruption of American
culture by militarism, etc.)
Garrison Keillor reading a Rexroth poem (When you click the link, a
RealPlayer box should come up which will play 30 minutes of a Prairie Home
Companion New Year’s program. If you want to skip directly to the Rexroth poem,
move the dial to 23:30. Alternatively, you can go the
webpage for that program and check out the whole program. The Rexroth poem
is near the end of Segment 4.)
Garrison
Keillor reading three Rexroth poems with cello accompaniment (click this
link, then click “Segment 2”)
Several
other archived Keillor readings of Rexroth
By Rexroth, translated into other
languages:
Las ventajas de aprender y otros poemas (33 poems translated into
Spanish by Jorge Fondebrider)
Seven poems translated into Spanish (Laura Wittner, Argentina)
Five poems translated into
Spanish (from La señal de todas las
cosas, trans. Marcello Pellegrini & Armando Roa Vial, Chile)
One poem
translated into Spanish (Dasbald)
Several poems and translations translated into Spanish (Carlos Mayhua)
Spanish versions of
six of Rexroth’s
translations from the Greek (Daniel Bellón)
Communalism
(complete book)
translated into Portuguese (Coletivo Periferia, Brazil)
Seven poems
translated into Turkish
One poem translated
into Hungarian
About Rexroth:
Revolutionary Rexroth:
Poet of East-West Wisdom (complete book by Morgan Gibson)
Four essays
(Donald Gutierrez, Linda Hamalian,
Bradford Morrow, Sam Hamill/Elaine
Laura Kleiner)
Essay on Rexroth
and Paul Goodman (Gregory Knapp)
Kenneth
Rexroth: Protest, Rebellion, and Beyond (Karl Young)
Review of Rexroth’s
Complete Poems (Jack Foley)
When We With Rexroth (Jacket
magazine special Rexroth issue, with numerous articles by Kevin
Gallagher, Sam Hamill, Jerome Rothenberg, Eliot Weinberger, etc.)
Third Rail (excerpts from special Rexroth issue)
Rexroth and His Poetry (interview with Sam Hamill)
Introduction to Chicago Review special Rexroth issue (John Beer &
Max Blechman)
Cover
and contents of above Chicago Review issue (including link to Morgan
Gibson’s “I-Thou Poem for KR”)
When We
With Sappho (essay on Rexroth and the classic Greeks by Gregory McNamee)
Review of Rexroth’s
Selected Poems (Chris Faatz)
The King Is Dead, Long
Live the King (essay on Rexroth’s jazz poetry by Uri Hertz)
With a Tabloid
Biographer Who Needs an Oeuvre? (John Solt review of Hamalian’s biography)
Rexroth, Bukowski and the Politics of Literature (Ben Pleasants)
Original/Translation: The Aesthetic Context of Kenneth Rexroth’s Translations of
Du Fu and Li Qingzhao (Lucas Klein)
Communion and Deviation: Kenneth Rexroth's Approach to Classical Chinese Poetry
(Yunzhong Shu)
How
Reading Rexroth Changed My Life (Jim Moore)
Seven Things About
Kenneth Rexroth (Michael McClure)
Miscellaneous:
Daily Bleed Rexroth Page (links to assorted photos plus an anarcho-literary calendar
that includes frequent quotes from Rexroth)
Reading Rat (“Recommended
Reading” pages collate Classics
Revisited with several other lists of recommended books)
Kenneth Rexroth: Poet, Painter, Man
of Letters (photos, book and record covers, and information on 2005
centennial celebrations around the
world)
Rexroth’s Personal Library (Rexroth’s personal library of some 15,000 books was
purchased by the Kanda University of International Studies (Japan). The
collection has now been catalogued so that you can find out what books Rexroth
owned by any given author, etc. Unfortunately, many of his books were separately
sold off before the university acquired the collection, so its holdings in some
areas are very incomplete.)
Program of
an International Rexroth Symposium (Chiba, Japan, October 2007)
Rexroth on Pacifica Radio (catalogue of cassette tapes of a few of his KPFA
book reviews and other radio programs)
(All are published by New Directions unless otherwise indicated.)
Collected Shorter Poems (1966)
Collected Longer Poems (1968)
Selected Poems (1984)
Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems (Copper Canyon, 1997)
Swords That Shall Not Strike: Poems of Protest and Rebellion (Glad Day, 1999)
Complete Poems (Copper
Canyon, 2003)
Beyond the Mountains: Four Plays in Verse (1951)
World Outside the Window: Selected Essays (1987)
Classics Revisited (1964; 1986)
More Classics Revisited (1989)
An Autobiographical Novel (1964; expanded edition, 1991)
Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Norton, 1991)
Kenneth Rexroth: A Centenary Portfolio (Chicago Review special
issue, Autumn 2006)
Translations
100 Poems from the Chinese
100 More Poems from the Chinese
Women Poets of China
Complete Poems of Li Ch’ing-Chao
100 Poems from the Japanese
100 More Poems from the Japanese
Women Poets of Japan
Seasons of Sacred Lust: Selected Poems of Kazuko Shiraishi
Selected Poems of Pierre Reverdy
14 Poems by O. V. de Lubicz-Milosz (Copper Canyon)
Poems from the Greek Anthology (Ann Arbor)
These books can be ordered through bookstores or online distributors. The New Directions books can also be ordered at the New Directions website.
Camping in the Western Mountains
(written 1939 but never published)
Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays (1959)
Assays (1961)
The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World (Herder & Herder, 1970)
With Eye and Ear (Herder & Herder, 1970)
American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Herder & Herder, 1971)
The Elastic Retort: Essays in Literature and Ideas (Seabury, 1973)
Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (Seabury, 1974)
Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems (1991)
Translations
30 Spanish Poems of Love and Exile (City Lights, 1956)
100 Poems from the French (Pym-Randall, 1972)
There is also an immense mass of articles, columns, essays, reviews, introductions,
interviews, letters, radio tapes, etc. that have never been collected.
Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org