Indiana-born in the shadow of Chicago, Rexroth’s childhood took place in a liberal household filled with socialist activity in the years before the First World War. The radical network across the Midwest that he details in his Autobiographical Novel will surprise most Americans, who believe it was confined largely to big East Coast cities. Not so, as he insists.
His family was at a less restrictive edge of the Brethren heritage, today a handful of pacifist denominations where some still resemble the Amish. It was very much a counterculture from its arrival in Colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland and on through the Civil War. While Rexroth himself headed in a much different direction, some of those roots continued to shape his actions and his religious questioning and questing.
Orphaned in his teens, he broke loose at 19, filled with anarchist thought and an IWW (Wobbly) identity, hitchhiked west, and worked odd jobs, including a Forest Service stint at the Marblemount Ranger Station in the North Cascades, where Gary Snyder would later spend several crucial summers in the high fire watch posts, as did others who came under Rexroth’s spell.
With a wife, a painter, he settled in San Francisco in 1927 as what his biographer calls “forerunners of the flower children who flocked to northern California during the fifties and sixties.” All along, he was notably active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist circles, along with jazz and Buddhist influences. His book, Communalism: from Its Origins to the Twentieth Century, remains a fine overview of counterculture communities over the centuries. In some of these circles, he was aligned with Brethren, Quakers, and Mennonites, perhaps without being fully aware of the connection. His personal life, however, had its tangles.
His translations of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry are what first caught my attention, and still do. His own works are strongly crafted, often with an erotic strand.
He’s sometimes called the father or even the heart of the Beat movement, both as a mentor and as the MC at the famed reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six in 1955, but it would be more accurate to call him a godfather of the Bay Area poetry renaissance that began blossoming before that and flourished for several decades after. Weekly readings in his house now sound like a who’s who of literature.
I remember that when he died, about the same time John Cheever did, Cheever got the accolades in the press while Rexroth got brief mention. I still think they had it backward, considering the lasting influence of each.
Jnana's Red Barn 