Kenneth Rexroth Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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