In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

It’s a good thing The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth began with a selection of his later poems or I might have stopped reading before I started because I dislike his early poems, which the promotional copy on the cover describes as written in “the disassociative style — sometimes called ‘literary cubism’— developed by [...]

Reading Rexroth’s poems written from 1920 to 1940, it’s not hard to see why he’s often classified as a Beat poet, though mistakenly so if we are to believe Rexroth himself, but, even if he’s not a Beat poet, it’s easy to see why the later Beat poets saw him as one of them. My [...]

As much as I appreciate Rexroth’s erotic poetry, I might enjoy the ironic poems even more, particularly when the two meet as in the following examples taken from volumes from 1944 and 1949. Hopefully, they suggest a natural progression in his life as he aged. I nearly chose the first one as my favorite poem [...]