Kenneth Rexroth & the San Francisco Libertarian Circle

The most lively literary salon in the Bay Area in those days was a circle that met on Friday nights in poet Kenneth Rexroth's apartment over Jack's Record Cellar, at Page and Divisadero.

Rexroth grew up in Chicago, where he owned a tearoom called the Green Mask, featuring jazz and poetry, with a whorehouse on the floor above. Moving to San Francisco in the '30s, the young Rexroth exhorted dockworkers to unionize in a mimeo sheet called The Waterfront Worker, and applied his efforts in the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, ladling out pea soup to young Catholics held in detention camps as Conscientious Objectors to the Second World War.

Rexroth loved jazz and knew the guys who played it, and translated poetry and drama from several languages, including classical Greek, Provençal French, and Japanese. He prided himself on reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica cover to cover each year, and published more than a dozen books in his lifetime, including an autobiographical novel, and books of criticism on subjects ranging from contemporary poetry, to Hasidism, to Anarchism, to Zen.

Rexroth's earliest poems sound remarkably like the work of the '80s "Language Poetry" school, abandoning photographic realism in an attempt to shed cliché and sentimentality. His mature poems, however, speak in language that is colloquial, sensual without being sentimental, calling forth the High Sierra granitescapes that Rexroth liked to make love in, with a crispness of image, a classical sense of balance, and elegiac gravity.

Rexroth's apartment on Page Street was a library, its shelves lined with the heartwood of the classical literatures of East and West; and Rexroth had a caustic wit, and an ego, to match his erudition.

One of the young poets who attended these salons was Philip Whalen, who would appear in Kerouac's novels as Warren Coughlin and Ben Fagin -- "a quiet, bespectacled booboo, smiling over books." Whalen had been invited down from his job as a firewatch on Sourdough Mountain in the North Cascades by Gary Snyder, with whom Whalen had shared rooms at Reed College. For over a decade, Rexroth's weekly "at-homes" brought together geniuses in diverse forms -- from Helen Adam's contemporary ballads, to James Broughton's bawdy nursery rhymes and experimental films. Whalen (who now teaches Zen at the Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro) recalled the atmosphere at these Friday night conclaves:

"It was always very interesting, because there were young poets there, and older ones, visiting luminaries from different professions and arts. People said it was boring because Kenneth talked all the time. But Kenneth was a marvelous talker, so I didn't mind if there was anybody else famous there or not."

You,
The hyena with polished face and bow tie,
In the office of a billion dollar
Corporation devoted to service;
The vulture dripping with carrion,
Carefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,
Lecturing on the Age of Abundance;
The jackal in the double-breasted gabardine,
Barking by remote control,
In the United Nations...
The Superego in a thousand uniforms,
You, the finger man of the behemoth,
The murderer of the young men...

Through Rexroth, Ginsberg met Robert Duncan, whose essay "The Homosexual in Society" brought dialogue about homosexuality in America into the open. Duncan was a master poet and teacher in his own right, and a generative influence on many contemporary Bay Area poets, like Thom Gunn and Aaron Shurin.

Though one prevalent myth is that the Beats were a lone wake-up call in '50s America, that summons did not come from nowhere. Laying the intellectual foundation for the Beat breakthrough, the Rexroth circle was a ground of opposition: well-read and international, homosexual and heterosexual, poets and artists from several generations of revolt.

This reference excerpted from How Beat Happened by Steve Silberman; in full see:
http://ezone.org/ez/e2/articles/digaman.html