Kenneth Rexroth (1905 – 1982)
American poet, essayist, translator and anarchist.
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. My poems are acts of force and violence directed against the evil which murders us all. If you like, they are designed not just to overthrow the present State, economic system, and Church, but all prevailing systems of human collectivity altogether... I wish to speak to and for all those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.
Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.
In the star-filled dark we cook
Our macaroni and eat
By lantern light. Stars cluster
Around our table like fireflies.
It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.
With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.
Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later.
As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.
The characteristic paranoias of youth — the attribution of intention and duplicity to almost all human behavior. The young suffer terribly from the belief that the people they encounter are most of them up to something and that something has some relation to themselves. Actually, of course, most people just bobble along like apples in a stream. Usually it takes many years of experience to realize this.