Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Entrevista Com Rexroth
Entrevista Com Rexroth
The memory of Kenneth Rexroth goes back into my distant past. I had been aware of him since the
1940s but with renewed interest during the 1950s and the emergence of the San Francisco Renaissance
and that early Beat Generation for which he was an older spokesman. With David Antin and others, circa
1958, I was coming into contact with poets outside of our immediate neighborhood and, as with
Kenneth, outside of our own generation.
I think our first meeting with him was under the pretext of doing an interview for Chelsea Review,
during its early period, when Robert Kelly and George Economou were among the cofounders and
editors. I have a memory too of having caught up with Rexroth at the CBS Studios in New York, to
watch him being interviewed by Mike Wallace, but David seems not to have been a part of that.
Afterwards, we agreed to meet and do our own interview at the Five Spot, a popular jazz club in what
would later be called the East Village, where Kenneth was performing nightly with Pepper Adams’s
quintet.
In that ambience the interview we did was secondary, but the chance to watch Kenneth was something I
felt as memorable from the outset. By that I mean Kenneth talking and Kenneth doing jazz and poetry,
all of it with an outrageous zest and for the moment at least with a belief in his own presence and power
as a public person and a man who had the real goods and could well display them.
Our interview was never published, but I retained a copy of the manuscript and have recently dug it out
of my papers and manuscripts at the New Poetry Archives of the University of California, San Diego. In
1958, it’s clear, there was no tape recording to fall back on, but I was busily writing down notes in a
weird kind of shorthand that I had picked up while working for a sometimes questionable New York
outfit called Writers Service. I can still hear his voice as I read through it, and I’m aware now, as I was
then, of how much he was trying to dazzle us. We took it all in stride, including the irritability and
impatience he displayed toward other poets, and learned later that it was a part of any encounter with
Kenneth.
As Rexroth sat down, a well-dressed woman over at the side pointed him out to a group of friends,
speaking in an audible, almost passionate tone: “That’s him, that’s the poet, the PO-ET!”