name that polemicist

came across these last night and thought them too choice to keep to myself. they are from a master polemicist who shall be identified at the conclusion of this post.

So much of our dispute about what poetry does, about what happens between poet and hearer or reader is due to old unsolved questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of communication....The epistemological problme arose as in Europe and America human relationships became increasingly abstract, and the relation of ment to their work became more remote. Six men who have worked together to build a boat or a house with their hands do not doubt its existence.

***

Jazz returns social music to the role that it has played in all human societies from time immemorial and which was only forgotten for a brief period in Western civilization. This is why it is of such tremendous importance to twentieth-century culture, and, if not the only serious music we have, our only music which anybody outside the country takes seriously. After all, a revolution in basic human relationships is a very important revolution indeed.

***

Rimbaud did not lose himself in Africa; he found himself....He "ran" the vowels like he later ran guns to the Abyssinians, with dubious results....He did things to literature that had never been done to it before, and they were things which literature badly needed done to it...just like the world needed the railroads the Robber Barons did manage to provide.

***

Poe is always frivolous. Baudelaire is always in deadly, terrifying earnest.

***

In the final showdown, all our revolutions have turned out to be careers for some and programs for others. The stuff of life, of art, is not only vaster far than all programs and careers, it is the material of a different qualitative world altogether.

***

Beckett refused to run off to Africa and die of gangrene, or write childish poems to prostitutes, or even see angels in a tree. If you can drive your prophets mad, you don't have to bother to crucify them. When a prophet refuses to go crazy, he becomes quite a problem, crucifixion being as complicated as it is in humanitarian America.

***

Man thrives where angels die of ecstasy and pigs doe of disgust. The contemporary situation is like a long-standing, fatal disease. It is impossible to recall what life was like without it. We seem always to have had cancer of the heart.

***

Writing this, sitting at my typewriter, looking out the window, I find it hard to comprehend why every human being doesn't run screaming into the streets of all the cities of the world this instant. How can they let it go on?

***

There is no place for a poet in American society. No place at all for any kind of poet at all.... The majority of American poets have acquiesced in the judgment of the rpedatory society. They do not exist as it is concerned. They make their living in a land of make-believe, as servants of a hoax for children. They are employees of the fog-factories--the universities. They help make the fog. Behind their screen the universities fulfill their social purposes. They turn out bureaucrats, perpetuate the juridical lie, emborider the costumes of the delusion of participation, and of late, in departments never penetrated by the humanities staff, turn out atom, hydrogen, and cobalt bombers--genocidists of the world.

any takers?.....









it's kenneth rexroth, from Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays (new york: new directions, 1959).