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
San Francisco in the Sixties (complete columns and
articles for
the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and
San Francisco Magazine)
Rexroth’s San Francisco (selections from the
above)
Translations (from
Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and 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 (chapter
from Knabb’s autobiography)
Interview with Rexroth (David Meltzer)
Talking About Rexroth (Morgan Gibson & Ken Knabb
interviewed by David Meltzer & James Brook)
See also the “Rexroth” entry in the Site Index.
By Rexroth:
Essays,
Articles 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
Interviewed by
Bradford Morrow
Anthology:
The New
British Poets: An Anthology (complete book, edited with an introduction by
Rexroth)
Poems and Translations:
One poem plus links
and a brief bio
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 another
poem 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)
Four poems translated into Spanish (selections from the above book)
A dozen poems or excerpts translated into Spanish
Five poems translated into
Spanish (from La señal de todas las
cosas, translated by 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
Three poems translated into Russian
(from a collection translated by Kirill Adibekov, Free Marxist Publishing,
Moscow)
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)
Adding to Our
Nature (Doren Robbins review of In the Sierra)
The Best
Book on American Poetry Ever (Michael Lind review of American Poetry in
the Twentieth Century)
Kenneth Rexroth’s Other Worlds: Notes on “On What Planet” (Robert Archambeau)
Kenneth Rexroth, l’anarchiste érotico-mystique
(Adeline Baldacchino)
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)
A painting by Andrée Rexroth (Rexroth’s first wife)
The Uncarved Block (“a blog
devoted to mysticism and anarchism, inspired especially by the works of Kenneth
Rexroth”)
Rexroth paintings for sale (catalog of ten paintings for sale by James Jaffe
Books, nine by Rexroth, one by his first wife Andrée
Rexroth)
(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)
In the Sierra: Mountain
Writings (2012)
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)
(There are also several recent small gift-book selections of his Asian
translations that I have not listed.)
The above books can all 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