Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

I was giving a reading at some university. Down in the front row of the auditorium was a young lady in a leather microskirt and a leather microbolero, tied with a leather bootlace, and nothing else whatever. I said, "I have an extremely wide repertory. What would you like — sex, revolution, or mysticism?" She looked up and said quietly, "What's the difference?"

Kenneth Rexroth
I remember the first time I ever saw otter play and slide down a slippery bank into the water. Old Billy knew where they were and took me to them. We sat down silently behind some bushes on the bank of an Indiana stream and pretty soon out came a family of otter and climbed up on the bank and slid down the mud slide over and over again like little children. Nothing looks funnier than an otter having a good time, unless it's a sea otter, which looks even more cherubic.

Kenneth Rexroth
All night I lay awake beside you,
Leaning on my elbow, watching your
Sleeping face, that face whose purity
Never ceases to astonish me.

Kenneth Rexroth
A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light. Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Take all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.

Kenneth Rexroth
Towards the end of the night, as trucks rumbled
In the streets, you stirred, cuddled to me,
And spoke my name. Your voice was the voice
Of a girl who had never known loss
Of love, betrayal, mistrust, or lie.

Kenneth Rexroth
All my life I have been attracted by Catholicism. But what attracted me was not its Christianity, but its paganism. The Scholastic Philosophers entertained me not because they were apologists for Jesus but because they were refinements of Aristotle. The liturgical life of the Church moved me because it echoes the most ancient responses to the turning of the year and the changing seasons, and the rhythms of animal and human life. For me the Sacraments transfigured the rites of passage, the physical facts of the human condition — birth, adolescence, sexual intercourse, vocation, sickness and death, communion, penance. Catholicism still provides a structure of acts, individual and at the same time communal, physical responses to life.

Kenneth Rexroth
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.

Kenneth Rexroth
Into the gap between technology and environment, a black and fearsome chasm, man pours himself.

Kenneth Rexroth
Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

Kenneth Rexroth
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.

Kenneth Rexroth
Late at night the horses stumble
Around the camp and I awake.
I lie on my elbow watching
Your beautiful sleeping face
Like a jewel in the moonlight.
If you are lucky and the
Nations let you, you will live
Far into the twenty-first
Century. I pick up the glass
And watch the Great Nebula
Of Andromeda swim like
A phosphorescent amoeba
Slowly around the Pole. Far
Away in distant cities
Fat-hearted men are planning
To murder you while you sleep.

Kenneth Rexroth
The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.

Kenneth Rexroth
You can't become a saint by taking dope, stealing your friends' typewriters, giving girls chancres, not supporting your wife and children, and then reading St. John of the Cross. All of that, when it's happened before, has typified the collapse of civilization … and today the social fabric is falling apart so fast, it makes your head swim.

Kenneth Rexroth
It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

Kenneth Rexroth
What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.

Kenneth Rexroth
Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense—the creative act.

Kenneth Rexroth
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.

Kenneth Rexroth
I have no interest in Kerouac whatsoever. I've done my stint for him. As far as I'm concerned, Kerouac is what Madison Avenue wants a rebel to be. That isn't my kind of rebel.

Kenneth Rexroth