Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1988
Abstract
In his introduction to a festschrift for Kenneth Rexroth, Geoffrey Gardner points out that “one of the great paradoxes of Rexroth’s enormously paradoxical career is that his widest reputation is for being the promoter of some vaguely defined avant garde of which he is also a member.” This is both true and unfortunate: true because Rexroth has done much to aid younger writers through the years (he was a presiding figure over at least two important “movements” in contemporary writing—the first San Francisco Renaissance of the forties, which brought attention to writers like Robert Duncan, William Everson, Philip Lamantia, and Thomas Parkinson, and the later Beat Generation, which proved a breakthrough for Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and others); unfortunate because Rexroth’s efforts in this area, and his finely-honed polemical skill which he put at the service of those writers and causes he believed in, have tended to overshadow (and he is not unlike Ezra Pound in this regard) his achievement as a poet.
Recommended Citation
Bartlett, Lee. Kenneth Rexroth. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1988. Digital. Western Writers Series, 84.