*This thing is all over the map, but it's hilarious. The funniest thing is that poets really are like this. People think that poets lie around caressing their foreheads with a peacock plume when they're in a Wordsworthian swoon, but they don't. Poets gossip and backstab like sixty.
*I'd bet Wordsworth was just like this, only more so. He probably spent a lot of his time dismissing Shelley for whining in a high-pitched voice and eating cabbages.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/562
A Report from the Poetry Trenches: Rexroth, Bukowski & the Politics of
Literature
Thu, 04/14/2011 - 22:56
by Ben Pleasants
Bukowski loved the idea of poetry wars. Even at the lowest level of
mimeo magazines, when he was co-editing Laugh Literary & Man the Humping
Guns with Neeli Cherry, he jumped in guns blazing ready to take on the
world.
“Poetry,” he always said, “is a poor country without any
boundaries. It’s open to all kinds of fools. All the poet has is his
shitty little poem and his point of view. It’s like being on a bar
stool, but with a piece of paper in your hand instead of a drink. You
shout and scream and you hope someone will notice you.”
He thought poets were the spoiled children of literature: they had to do
very little work to get published. They could write whatever they felt.
Poetry was about feeling. It was not the complex work of a novelist or a
journalist or a historian.
“Poets dazzle,” he said, “but often their best stuff is written in
bitchy essays about what art is! When people call me a poet, it makes me
want to vomit. I’m a writer!”
That was in 1976, when I was Arts editor of the L.A. Vanguard. I was
doing a piece about Bukowski for the newspaper. Photographer Lory Robbin
and I had showed up at Bukowski’s place on Carlton Way when he was first
entertaining the woman who would later become Linda Bukowski. Lory got a
great series of shots of the three of us drinking, while Bukowski was
his usual outrageous self on tape.
The Vanguard had a policy about major pieces; they had to be approved by
consensus among the editorial collective. When I handed in my piece on
Bukowski, it was turned down by a three-to-two positive vote. Dorothy
Thompson and Ron Ridenour turned it down because they viewed Bukowski as
reactionary and anti-feminist.
I’d had this problem before. When we tried to send our male rock critic
to a Holly Near concert, Near’s PR people threatened to withdraw their
ad if we didn’t send a woman to review it. I sent Diana Saenz, who was a
close friend, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and
secretary to Howard Jarvis of Proposition 13 fame. She wrote a great
review, added a few lines of a song from an RCP group called Prairie
Fire, and managed to piss off everyone but me, but it ran, because we
had a paid advertisement. Diana was a delightfully talented poet,
propagandist, and radical organizer and she could never be thought of as
politically correct!
As editor, I’d had enough of the PC bullshit! “If not Charles Bukowski,”
I asked, “who would you have in mind?”
The name Kenneth Rexroth came up. I called Lawrence Lipton, author of
The Holy Barbarians, and a friend of Rexroth’s from childhood. He gave
me an address and telephone number: 1401 Pepper Lane, Montecito,
California, 805 969 2722. I called Rexroth and he immediately agreed.
“Come at noon next Tuesday. We live in the country just off the freeway.
Carol (Tinker), my wife, will make you lunch.”
When I told Bukowski the Vanguard wasn’t running my piece on him and
he’d been replaced by Kenneth Rexroth, he was amazed.
“But you’re the Arts editor.”
“People’s Arts Editor.” I told him about consensus. “Yeah, right,” he
said. “I could see Mencken doing that. And Rexroth is a faker. Ask him
what he thinks about Jeffers.” (((You gotta love the way they drag in
this third party, Robinson Jeffers – as if he'd ever done anything to
anybody. Jeffers was the kind of loon who built his own house out
of stray rocks. You could probably do a coffee-table book about
Californian writers who hand-built their own homes out of rocks.)))
I could see Bukowski’s feelings were hurt. Lory Robbin had done all
those great shots of Bukowski, Linda and myself drinking in front of the
TV. They never saw the light of day till the publication of Visceral
Bukowski in 2005.
In all honesty, it was a pleasure to get away from Bukowski in 1976. I
had always liked Rexroth. Lipton told me what to expect. “There are
times he calls up everybody he knows and he’ll be on the phone with them
for hours. Then you won’t hear from him for a year.” (((You gotta like
it that the author of this piece is clearly even more disagreeable than
the poets he interviews.)))
When I met Rexroth at his lovely house in the hilly vineyard country of
Montecito, one of the wealthiest communities in the US, and thanked
Larry Lipton for giving me a chance to interview him, Rexroth said, “You
know, Larry is one of my oldest friends, but he has this habit of
calling up everyone he knows when he’s depressed and keeping them on the
phone forever.”
We had a lovely lunch in the garden, and Rexroth began talking about his
latest project: women poets of Japan. I’d read ALL his poetry books to
date. I enjoyed most his splendid books of translations: 100 Poems from
the Chinese and 100 Poems from the Japanese. I’d also read and enjoyed
his Collected Shorter Poems, his Collected Longer Poems, and The Phoenix
and the Tortoise, a first edition of which I brought with me.
Carol Tinker served us a wonderful noodle dish with plums and Chinese
vegetables and a cool beer out in the front garden in the warm sun as
the fields of vines spread out up onto the hillside. She told me about
her own poetry wars with Robert Bly, who turned down every poem she ever
sent him for publication in The Seventies.
“Bly hates women,” Rexroth said.
I told Rexroth I loved Bly’s first book of poetry, Silence in the Snowy
Fields.
“Very Chinese.” Rexroth disdained it.
I’d sent Rexroth a copy of long Chinese poems published in Wormwood
titled “Tao in the Winter Mountains.” He spoke warmly about what I’d
written. He asked if I’d ever studied Chinese. I told him a semester at
UCLA. “To get the sound of it,” I said.
I asked him how well he knew Chinese. “Well enough from the book,” he
said. Lipton had told me his first translations of Chinese in San
Francisco were done with the help of a Chinese waiter. Bukowski was
right; it was all very bitchy. (((Like poets are never waiters? Oh come on.)))
“I know Chinese better than Ezra, if that’s what you’re asking.” Ezra Pound.
Rexroth and Pound were both published by New Directions. They had the
same editor, James Laughlin. “Poor Ezra always thought I was Jewish
because of the roth at the end of my name.” Rexroth mentioned he had
visited Pound after the war, when Pound was at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,
a mental institution in the DC area. He thought that was the right place
for Pound. “Ezra was seriously nuts,” said Rexroth. I made a note on his
Pound quote. I wanted it on tape, especially for Bukowski!
As we finished our lunch, I asked if Laughlin shared his view about
Pound. “I’ll let you ask him yourself,” said Rexroth. He took me into
the house and then into another building filled with books, paintings
and a large piano. That was his study. He wrote out James Laughlin’s
telephone number in Canaan, Connecticut. “This is his private number.
You can call him at home. Now what do you want to talk about, Li Po and
Tu Fu?”
I told him that that was actually a subject I greatly enjoyed discussing.
I mentioned my friend Charles Tidler. How Tidler was doing work on Basho
and Buson. Rexroth smiled.
“But you haven’t come a hundred miles to talk about poets dead for
centuries, have you?”
He knew I was an anarchist, a member of the IWW and an editor of a paper
that had recently published a policy paper from the outlawed Weatherman
Faction of SDS. Rexroth claimed he was an anarchist, too. “If I got you
right from your phone call, you want to talk about radical writing,
revolutionary writing, isn’t that so?”
I told him that was part of it. I mentioned Charles Bukowski. His face
hardened. He turned red. “You know what Bukowski wrote about Patchen? He
was so incredibly cruel and insensitive. How Kennth and Miriam are
always begging for money. How Patchen was a cry baby. Do you know what
it means to have arthritis of the spine? How much pain he was in! To
laugh at that. Bukowski wrote the most vicious lying satire on Patchen
and it arrived in Patchen’s home the week Patchen died of a heart
attack. That disgusting man. And all the fems go and listen to Bukowski.
They have a wonderful time creaming and moaning. I wish there was some
way, when a person does something like that, that he could really be
brought to task. I’m seventy years old and I’ve watched a long line of
vicious in-fighting amongst writers. (((Well, yeah.))) I have never seen anything like
that and I think it killed Patchen. So did Miriam.” All this I got on
tape! “So,” I asked, “Patchen evidently read it.”
“Yeah,” said Rexroth....
