Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Satyricon, these are the world's major works of prose fiction.

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.

Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth, or indeed of any other century. I have great sympathy for her, but sympathy is not necessarily congeniality. It would be easier to write of her if I liked what she had to say, which I strongly do not. …I think Simone Weil had both over- and under-equipped herself for the crisis which overwhelmed her — along, we forget, immersed in her tragedy, with all the rest of us. She was almost the perfectly typical passionate, revolutionary, intellectual woman — a frailer, even more highly strung Rosa Luxemburg. … She made up her own revolution out of her vitals, like a spider or silkworm. She could introject all the ill of the world into her own heart, but she could not project herself in sympathy to others. Her letters read like the more distraught signals of John of the Cross in the dark night.

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.

We have slept together in
A lonely bed. Now my heart
Turns towards you, awake at last,
Penitent, lost in the last
Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk
To me. Break the black silence.
Speak of a tree full of leaves,
Of a flying bird, the new
Moon in the sunset, a poem,
A book, a person - all the
Casual healing speech
Of your resonant, quiet voice. — Kenneth Rexroth, from “Loneliness,” The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, (New Directions January 17, 1966)

"Oaxaca 1925

You were a beautiful child
With a troubled face, green eyelids
And black lace stockings
We met in a filthy bar
You said
"My name is Nada
I don't want anything from you
I will not take from you
I will give you nothing"
I took you home down alleys
Splattered with moonlight and garbage and cats
To your desolate disheveled room
Your feet were dirty
The lacquer was chipped on your fingernails
We spent a week hand in hand
Wandering entranced together
Through a sweltering summer
Of guitars and gunfire and tropical leaves
And black shadows in the moonlight
A lifetime ago"

Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.

from “When We with Sappho,

Deep in the silent inner room
Every fiber of my soft heart
Turns to a thousand strands of sorrow.
I loved the Spring,
But the Spring is gone
As rain hastens the falling petals.
I lean on the balustrade,
Moving from one end to the other.
My emotions are still disordered.
Where is he?
Withered grass stretches to the horizon
And hides from sight
Any road by which he might return. — Li Ch'ing-Chao, from “Remorse,” Songs of Love, Moon, Wind: Poems from the Chinese (New Directions , 2009)

We have slept together in
A lonely bed. Now my heart
Turns towards you, awake at last,
Penitent, lost in the last
Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk
To me. Break the black silence.
Speak of a tree full of leaves,
Of a flying bird, the new
Moon in the sunset, a poem,
A book, a person - all the
Casual hfrankealing speech
Of your resonant, quiet voice. — Kenneth Rexroth, from “Loneliness,” The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, (New Directions January 17, 1966)

"The stars pass.
The moon passes.
Blue clouds pass above the mountains to the north.
The years go by." Empress Jito

Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing.
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world — Kenneth Rexroth, from “ When We with Sappho,” The Phoenix and the Tortoise (New Directions, 1944)

Love slays what we have been,
That we may be what we were not.

from “The Dragon and the Unicorn

O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by us like water. — Kenneth Rexroth, from “Another Spring,” One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. (New Directions January 17, 1971) Originally published 1956.