Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Kenneth Rexroth
You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.

Kenneth Rexroth
Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.

Kenneth Rexroth
The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It's been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can't diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.

Kenneth Rexroth
Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.

Kenneth Rexroth
Now I know surely and forever,
However much I have blotted our
Waking love, its memory is still
there. And I know the web, the net,
The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
One brief instant it was not blind, nor
Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the
Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.
But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
My heart beat one free beat and sent
Through all my flesh the blood of truth.

Kenneth Rexroth
You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.

Kenneth Rexroth
Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness."

Kenneth Rexroth
As concentration and depersonalization increase in the dominant society, as the concentration of capital increases with the takeover of ever larger businesses by conglomerates and international corporations, as more and more local initiative is abandoned to the rule of the central State, and as computerization and automation narrow the role of human initiative in both labor and administration, life becomes ever more unreal, aimless, and empty of meaning for all but a tiny elite who still cling to the illusion they possess initiative. Action and reaction — thesis and antithesis — this state of affairs produces its opposite. All over the world we are witnessing an instinctive revolt against dehumanization.

Kenneth Rexroth
The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.

Kenneth Rexroth
Harvey, Galileo, Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.

Kenneth Rexroth
Man thrives where angels die of ecstasy and pigs die of disgust. The contemporary situation is like a longstanding, fatal disease. It is impossible to recall what life was like without it. We seem always to have had cancer of the heart.

Kenneth Rexroth
The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring — as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."

Kenneth Rexroth
There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.

Kenneth Rexroth
In America we have nothing that takes the place of the gods and goddesses and heroes and demigods of the ancient world. There is nothing to connect us with the soil. We have no mythology. It has never been possible to construct one.

Kenneth Rexroth
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.

Kenneth Rexroth
Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.

Kenneth Rexroth
The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.

Kenneth Rexroth
Crooked cards and straight whiskey, Slow horses and fast women.

Kenneth Rexroth
Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture — but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.

Kenneth Rexroth
In the star-filled dark we cook
Our macaroni and eat
By lantern light. Stars cluster
Around our table like fireflies.

Kenneth Rexroth
As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.

Kenneth Rexroth
We have forgotten love, and Sat lonely beside each other. We have eaten together, Lonely behind our plates, we Have hidden behind children, We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns toward you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence.

Kenneth Rexroth
The space of night is infinite, The blackness and emptiness Crossed only by thin bright fences Of logic.

Kenneth Rexroth
Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.

Kenneth Rexroth
Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.

Kenneth Rexroth
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.

Kenneth Rexroth
Each of us is a specific individual, that one and no other, out of billions. I think each of us knows his own mystery with a knowing that precedes the origins of all knowledge. None of us ever gives it away. No one can. We envelop it with talk and hide it with deeds.
Yet we always hope that somehow the others will know it is there, that a mystery in the other we cannot know will respond to a mystery in the self we cannot understand. The only full satisfaction life offers us is this sense of communion. We seek it constantly. Sometimes we find it. As we grow older we learn that it is never complete and sometimes it is entirely illusory.

Kenneth Rexroth
Inside, the hideous British
Necrophilia and the rancid
Stink of the Church of England.

Kenneth Rexroth
When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.

Kenneth Rexroth