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"The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth" assembles all of his
published longer and shorter poems, and includes a
never-before-published selection of his earliest work. Rexroth's
poems of nature and protest are remarkable for their erudition and
biting social and political commentary; his love poems justly
celebrated for their eroticism and depth of feeling.
The cloth edition was one of the most widely reviewed poetry
titles in 2003:
"Scholars and critics who endeavor to discuss mid-20th century
American poetry responsibly ignore Rexroth at their peril."-"Los
Angeles Times Book Review," cover feature and selected as a Book of
the Year
"Rexroth is probably best known as the 'Father of the Beat
Generation.' These poems reveal that great beauty lies beyond that
clichA(c)."-NPR's "All Things Considered"
"Rexroth's prodigious breadth of learning, his hungry attention
to the natural world, his contempt for warmongering and his
profound, occasionally overlapping love of women are all on
flourishing display."-"The San Francisco Chronicle"
"Rexroth never mistook his poetry for a product, and he could
present ideas and images in an urgent, memorable and eloquent
way."-"The Nation"
"Rexroth is one of the most readable and rewarding 20th-century
American poets."-"Booklist"
Kenneth Rexroth (19051982) was one of the world's great literary
minds. In addition to being a poet, translator, essayist and
teacher, he helped found the San Francisco Poetry Center and
influenced generations of readers with his "Classics Revisited"
series.
Frankly H. Miller was defended by me only because he spoke against
the War, and I think that was the main reason for his fame. Now I
do not believe, what with Palmistry, Chirography, Phrenology, and
the Great Cryptogram, he will survive the retooling period. I
honestly think he is the most insufferable snob I have ever met but
all reformed pandhandlers are like that. in a letter from Kenneth
Rexroth to James Laughlin"
The poems are drawn chiefly from the traditional Manyoshu, Kokinshu
and Hyakunin Isshu collections, but there are also examplaes of
haiku and other later forms. The sound of the Japanese texts i
reproduced in Romaji script and the names of the poets in the
calligraphy of Ukai Uchiyama. The translator's introduction gives
us basic background on the history and nature of Japanese poetry,
which is supplemented by notes on the individual poets and an
extensive bibliography.
The lyric poetry of Tu Fu ranks with the greatest in all world
literature. Across the centuries Tu Fu lived in the T'ang Dynasty
(731-770) his poems come through to us with an immediacy that is
breathtaking in Kenneth Rexroth's English versions. They are as
simple as they are profound, as delicate as they are beautiful.
Thirty-five poems by Tu Fu make up the first part of this volume.
The translator then moves on to the Sung Dynasty (10th-12th
centuries) to give us a number of poets of that period, much of
whose work was not previously available in English. Mei Yao Ch'en,
Su Tung P'o, Lu Yu, Chu Hsi, Hsu Chao, and the poetesses Li Ch'iang
Chao and Chu Shu Chen. There is a general introduction,
biographical and explanatory notes on the poets and poems, and a
bibliography of other translations of Chinese poetry."
He is also one of the most sophisticated. Like William Carlos
Williams, he honed his writing to a controlled and direct language.
His intellectual complexity matches Wallace Stevens, his polymath
erudition Ezra Pound. He is first among our nature poets. His love
poems and erotic lyrics are unsurpassed. Rexroth's Selected Poems
brings together in a single volume a representative sampling of
sixty years' work. Here are substantial passages from his longer
poems: The Homestead Called Damascus(1920-1925), begun while the
poet was in his teens; the cubist Prolegomenon to a Theodicy
(1925-1927); the philosophical masterpiece The Phoenix and the
Tortoise (1940-1944) and The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944-1950);
and the meditative The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967).
The shorter poems were originally gathered in In What Hour (1940),
The Art of Wordly Wisdom (1949),The Signature of All Things (1950),
In Defense of the Earth (1956), Natural Numbers(1964), New Poems
(1974), and The Morning Star (1979).
Includes Notes Toward An Understanding Of Kenneth Rexroth With
Special Attention To The Homestead Called Damascus.
Additional Authors Include Nicolas Guillen, Pablo Neruda, Arturo
Serrano Plaja, Federico Garcia Lorca And Antonio Machado.
Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious reader--Kenneth Rexroth
was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant
essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for
Rexroth, "basic documents in the history of the imagination."
Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these
pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the
Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth's plain, wide-awake
style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple
language, energized by the author's air of talking eye-to-eye with
his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not
bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The
Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we
pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for
Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical
Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces
of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. "Life may not be
optimistic," Rexroth maintains in his introduction, "but it
certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man
wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping
faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind
the mask? Just a human face--yours or mine. That is the irony of it
all--the irony that distinguishes great literature--it is all so
ordinary."
Modern American poets translate classical Chinese poetry. The New
Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry is a rich
compendium of translations like no other. It is the first to look
at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American
poetry, starting with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), and including
translations by three other major U.S. poets (William Carlos
Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder) and an important
poet-translator-scholar (David Hinton), all of whom have long been
associated with New Directions. Moreover, it is the first general
anthology ever to consider the process of translation by presenting
different versions of the same poem by various translators, as well
as examples of the translators rewriting themselves. The
collection, at once playful and instructive, serves as an excellent
introduction to the art and tradition of Chinese poetry, gathering
some 250 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry
through the great masters of the Tang and Sung dynasties. The
anthology also includes previously uncollected translations by
Pound, a selection of essays on Chinese poetry by all five
translators, some never published before in book form, and
biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both
the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves.
Translator, and essayist, Eliot Weinberger's first study of
multiple Chinese translations was the perennially popular 19 Ways
of Looking at Wang Wei. New Directions publishes three collections
of his inventive essays and among his many translations are works
by Octavio Paz, Bei Dao, and Jorge Luis Borges
This book (originally published in 1972 by The Seabury Press as The
Orchid Boat) is the first representative collection of the poetry
of Chinese women to appear in English. Unlike Japan with its long
tradition of women writers, poetry by women did not become
fashionable in China until the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), although
poems from earlier centuries that do in fact survive will quickly
dispel any stereotyped views. Included here are samplings from the
legendary earliest poetry of courtesans, palace women, and Tao
priestesses to works by contemporary Chinese women living in both
the East and West. Appendixes include notes on the poems, an
introductory essay on Chinese women and literature, a table of
historical periods, and a bibliography.
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