Is opposed to community.
As Capitalism and the
State become identical,
All existence assumes the
Character of a vast
Conspiracy to quantify
The Individual. . .[? 1950]
Some might weary of the sweeping, ex cathedra
character of passages like this, or feel that it comes close to being prose. However, it
is definitely verse in its subtly crafted syllabic meter. What, moreover, might have
seemed outlandishly left-wing or hysterical as a critique of American society in the late
l940s seems today like powerfully relevant, sanely Anarchist jeremiads against the
concentrated American power structures emerging out of the war. Further, Rexroth
alternates such passages with nature and love lyrics as sensuously compelling and forceful
as his best lyrics elsewhere in his work:
Bright petals of evening
Shatter, fall, drift over Florence,
And flush your cheeks a redder
Rose and gleam like fiery flakes
In your eyes. . .
. . .Your moist, quivering
Lips are like the wet scarlet wings
Of a reborn butterfly who
Trembles on the rose petal as
Life floods his strange body.
Turn to me. Part your
lips. My dear,
Some day we will be
dead.
This counterpointing of abstract, ideological
passages and sensuous lyrics lends Dragon form, as does its travel itinerary and
its consistent tone of worldliness, erudition and heterodoxical authority. Though a few
passages of misogyny and homophobia mar the book, they are more than compensated for by
Rexroth’s intellectual audacity, bright responsiveness to what he sees, and his
ideological anger and compassion. This compassion is exemplified by one of the highlights
of Dragon which Rexroth movingly contrasts an Age of Gold in the medieval culture
of Southern France with one of Iron. The latter was comprised of the Papacy and
imperialist England and Northern France which annihilated the Provence of the olive and
the vine, with its flourishing culture of love and literature, a booming economy and
heretical Catharism.
Opinionated, occasionally arrogant and savage, Dragon
is nevertheless an extraordinary work not only as poetry, wisdom, left-wing jeremiad,
historical reminiscence, ideological inspiration and travel experience, but as a prescient
revelation of the massive nihilism and corruption released in societies by World War II,
the Atom Bomb and the genocidal bent of sheer profit-oriented, large-corporation-driven
economies. Dragon is unquestionably one of Rexroth’s major works, and a
major American poem in its own right.
In poems like "The Signature of All
Things" or "Yugao" or "Lyell’s Hypothesis Again" or the
"Andree-Rexroth" elegies, Rexroth’s work does not even seem like poetry in
the sense of being a "verbal construct" or a convention of artful words and
syntactic and rhythmic strategies–rather, his poems seem like an exalted experience
undergone through words which have been rendered so clear, so "artless" and
"right" as to take on a kind of numinous transparency revealing the heart of the
poem’s essential life itself. This intense limpidity, when it occurs in Rexoth’s
verse, can make his poems distinctly crystalline, a mystical image and quality he himself
frequently invoked.
The words "crystal" and
"crystalline" provide a link to the last aspect of Rexroth’s verse there is
space to discuss: contemplation. Rexroth ends one of his finest poems, "Time Is the
Mercy of Eternity," with these words:
Suspended
In absolutely transparent time, I
Take on a kind of crystalline
Being. In this translucent
Immense here and now, if ever,
The form of the person should be
Visible, its geometry,
Its crystallography, and
Its astronomy. The good
And evil of my history
Go by. I can see them and
Weigh them. They go first, with all
The other personal facts,
And sensations, and desires.
At last there is nothing left
But knowledge, itself a vast
Crystal encompassing the
Limitless crystal of air
And rock and water. And the
Two crystals are perfectly
Silent. There is nothing to
Say about them. Nothing at all. [? 1956]
The word "crystal" is mentioned in one
form or another five times in these last 23 lines. This pivotal word and image relate to a
few of Rexroth’s ideas about contemplation, and inform us too about the purpose of
contemplation in Rexroth’s verse generally. For a poet to urge, as Rexroth does, that
poetry (and thus art) as contemplation constitutes the webbing that keeps society from
disintegrating or from destroying itself is a forceful claim. By dramatizing in "Time
Is the Mercy of Eternity" the contemplative, mystical process through imagery of the
crystal which by its very nature reduces physical reality to its basic structure (thus
accentuating the "mystical" qualities of transparency, clarity, heightened
visibility), one provides a kind of direct, phenomenal authority for words asserting the
primacy of contemplation as vision. Vision is intensified, even exalted, seeing. But
contemplation and vision go beyond that, for, as in "Time" or in a slighter,
monistic poem by Rexroth called "The Heart of Herakles" (from
"The-Lights-in-the-Sky-Are-Stars" series (1956)), one crosses the traditional
and arbitrary line between subject (the "I") and object (the "it,"
Other, World) and, becoming part of one’s surroundings, transcends their and
one’s own partialness towards an exalted clarity ("I take on a kind of
crystalline being"). What follows resembles the Buddhist transcendence of all worldly
ties and associations represented as Nirvana (the good and evil of one’s history
going by, as well as "personal facts, sensations, desires"). One is left in this
mystical denudation in a state of mind–again, crystalline–that Rexroth mentions
frequently and which can be summed up in lines from his long l967 poem The
Heart’s Garden, the Garden’s Heart: "He who lives without
grasping/Lives always in the experience/Of the immediate as the Ultimate."
What Rexroth is doing with his crystal figure, so
symbolically climactic to his entire poem and, considering the definition from Heart’s
Garden, to his work itself, is imagizing or symbolizing the contemplative state.
There is no absolute in the traditional religious sense even in "Time"’s
two crystals of self and world, unless one wishes to say that they are
"absolutely" real or reside at the center of reality. But one need not decide on
this absoluteness, need not even say and thus think anything about them. Perhaps that
constitutes some of the meaning of the last three-and-a-half lines of the poem: "And
the/Two crystals are perfectly/Silent. There is nothing to/Say about them. Nothing at
all." The silence beyond words and thoughts (let alone "facts, sensations, and
desires") is conceivably a mystical aural facet of the crystalline vision climaxing
"Time," and as such offers a summit of tranquillity from which to contemplate
newly how time is the mercy of eternity.
When James Wright wrote in l980 that "Over
the years I have learned that I am far from being alone in being so grateful to Rexroth,
and I believe he has saved many poets from imaginative death," he was in part
alluding to Rexroth’s essays and translations, but even more to Rexroth’s love
verse. But I would guess that what poets like Wright and many others–poets and
non-poets–essentially prized about Rexroth’s work was that he seemed to have a great
knack for clearing away the rant, pretensions and chicanery in society concealing reality.
When he turned his keen sense of the real away from organized society, which he described
as held together by the Social Lie, and focused on love, political/philosophical and
nature subjects, a particular lucidity, vividness and intensity emerged in his verse that
one could call the natural supernatural. Speaking of D. H. Lawrence’s Look! We
Have Come Through!, Rexroth says "Reality is totally valued. . . ..The clarity
of purposively realize objectivity is the most supernatural of all visions."
This applies perfectly to Rexroth’s own poetry as well, and is another way of
indicating that numinous glow on and within the natural and the ordinary that his best
work gives off-the holiness of the real.
Donald K. Gutierrez
Copyright ? 1999