New poems

by Kenneth Rexroth

Book by Rexroth, Kenneth

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.

He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine.

Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic themes and forms.

Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, California, on June 6, 1982. He had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kenneth Rexroth writes poems that the average Joe considers typical poetry. You know, the kind of poetry a guy would crib in a love letter to his girl, that sort of thing. There's also a lot of Leaves Are Falling-type poems here, too. Actually, there's a lot of leaves in this collection, more leaves than in a forest. Red leaves, green leaves, brown leaves, etc. Every once in awhile Rexroth strays from the script and writes something weird and your interest perks up, but then it's back to those fucking leaves.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

DISCARDED

This book was discarded
It carries the official stamp
To prove it,
Discard. Oklahoma County Libraries.
In all of the capital county
No one likes Rexroth?
Or translations of Chinese poetry?
"On how many bridges
Have I trampled the fallen cherry blossoms?"
Writes on exile centuries ago.
Another praises an artist
In words a thousand years old
In a language still not forgotten.
Rexroth himself remember kisses
From his past and wonders
If a faint synaptic spark ever illuminates
Those shadow caresses in her mind.
I studied poetry in Oklahoma
Has the estuary of verse dried up
Like the harbor of Ephesus
Or it's own great Dustbowl?
Would the librarian be surprised
To discover her book later traveled
The globe almost as much
As the words within?
That Rexroth has since joined
Those extinct Chinese poets
In that dim land of ancestors.
This book was discarded
But not abandoned.

19.OCT.2016
08.APR.2021 - I should have made note that I wrote this poem as my review of Rexroth.

[mwpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rexroth's New Poems should come with a disclaimer: Mostly translations. It is my hope that most readers would be refreshed by the presence of diversity in the form Rexroth's translations of Japanese and Chinese poems. Along with the "New Poems", Rexroth's original content is limited to "Imitations of the Chinese" - a handful of poems written in a style reminiscent of the Chinese translations. Incidentally, dedicated to "Ling" (Ling Chung, with whom Rexroth collaborated on the translations of the Chinese poems)...

from "Love Is an Art of Time / New Poems"...

Now the starlit moonless Spring

Now the starlit moonless Spring
Night stands over the Fontaine
De Medicis, and the gold
Fish swim in the cold, starlit
Waters. Yesterday, in the
New sunshine, lovers sat by
The water, and talked, and fed
The goldfish, and kissed each other.
I am in California
And evening is coming on.
Now it is morning in Paris
By the Fontaine de Medicis.
And the lovers will come today,
And talk and kiss, and feed the fish,
After they have had their coffee.

*

The Family

Late night
Coming back to Melbourne
From a party on the Kangaroo Plains,
We stop the car by a black pool.
The air is immobile, crystalline.
I get out, light a match,
And study my star map.
I blow out the match,
And overhead and before and below me,
Doubled in the unmoving water,
The million stars come on
That I have never seen before
And will never see again.
And there are the two
Daughter universes of my universe,
The Magellanic Clouds -
Two phosphorescent amoebas overhead,
And two in the bottomless water.

*

No Word

The trees hang silent
In the heat . . . . .

Undo your heart
Tell me your thoughts
What you were
And what you are . . . . .

Like bells no one
Has ever rung.

*

Schatten Kuesse, Schatten Liebe, after Heine

Shadow kisses, shadow love,
There is nothing else left now -
Faint electric traces
In the nerve cells of two brains.

The rain falls in the deep night -
Black streets, a distant city -
Far away, too far away -
Yes? Too far away from where?

Too far from time which passes?
Too far from flesh breaking change?
Too far from happiness
Which would not wait an instant?

Two heads alone in dark rooms,
Far apart in rainy night,
Shelter sparks of memory,
Lamps once blazing with kisses.

*

Hapax, The Same Poem Over and Over

Holy Week. Once more the full moon
Bloom in deep heaven
Like a crystal flower of ice.
The wide winter constellations
Set in fog brimming over
The seaward hills. Out beyond them,
In the endless dark, uncounted
Minute clots of light go by,
Billions of light years away,
Billions of universes,
Full of stars and their planets
With creatures on them swarming
Like all the living cells on the earth.
They have a number, and I hold
Their being and their number
In one suety speck of jelly
Inside my skull. I have seen them
Swimming in the midst of rushing
Infinite space, through a lens of glass
Through a lens of flesh, on a cup of nerves.
The question is not
Does being have meaning,
But does meaning have being.
What is happening?
All day I walk over ridges
And beside cascades and pools
Deep into the Spring hills.
Mushrooms come up in the same spot
In the abandoned clearing.
Trillium and adder's tongue
Are in place by the waterfall.
A heron lifts from a pool
As I come near, as it has done
For forty years, and flies off
Through the same gap in the trees.
The same rush and lift of flapping wings,
The same cry, how many
Generations of herons?
The same red tailed hawks court each other
High on the same rising air
Above a grassy steep. Squirrels leap
In the same oaks. Back at my cabin
In the twilight an owl on the same
Limb moans in his ancient language.
Billions and billions of worlds
Full of beings larger than dinosaurs
And smaller than viruses, each
In its place, the ecology
Of infinity.
I look at the rising Easter moon.
The flowering madrone gleams in the moonlight.
The bees in the cabin wall
Are awake. The night is full
Of flowers and perfume and honey.
I can see the bees in the moonlight
Flying to the hole under the window,
Glowing faintly like the flying universes.
What does it mean. This is not a question, but an exclamation.

*

Confusion of the Senses

Moonlight fills the laurels
Like music. The moonlit
Air does not move. Your white
Face moves towards my face.
Voluptuous sorrow
Hold us like a cobweb
Like a song, a perfume, the moonlight.
Your hair falls and holds our faces.
Your lips curl into mine.
Your tongue enters my mouth.
A bat light through the moonlight.
The moonlight fills your eyes
They have neither iris not pupil
They are only globes of cold fire
Like the deers' eyes that go by us
Through the empty forest.
Your slender body quivers
And smells of seaweed.
We lie together listening
To each other breathing in the moonlight.
Do you hear? We are breathing? We are alive.

*

Blue Sunday

Chestnut flowers are falling
In the empty street that smells
Of hospitals and cooking.
The radio is breaking
Somebody's heart somewhere
In a dirty bedroom. Nobody
Is listening. For ten miles
In either direction
The houses are all empty.
Nobody lives in this city.
Outside the city limits
Are green and white cemeteries.
Nobody is in the graves.
At very long intervals
The broken cast iron fountain
In the courtyard sneezes and spurts.
In the dirty bedroom
Three young whores are shooting dice.
At very long intervals
One of them speaks to the dice.
Otherwise they are silent.
After the chestnut blossoms
Have all fallen the yellow
Sun will set the stars shine
Over the empty city
And papers blow down the street.

*

I Dream of Leslie

You entered my sleep,
Come with your immense,
Luminous eyes,
And light brown hair,
Across fifty years,
To sing for me again that song
Of Campion's we loved so once.
I kissed your quivering throat.
There was no hint in the dream
That you were long, long since
A new arrived guest,
With blithe Helen, white lope and the rest -
Only the peace
Of later afternoon
In a compassionate autumn
In youth.
And I forgot
That I was old and you a shade.

*

Education

Now to the dry hillside,
Terraced with crumbling limestone,
Where there were vineyards long ago,
Evening comes cool and violet
Under the olive trees, and only
The almond blossoms and the first stars
Are alright. Your fine lean hand
Like a spindle of light
Moves as you talk, as if
You were conducting a slow music.
What are you talking about?
You are explaining everything to me -
The abandoned olive grove,
The walls older than the Romans,
The flowering almond trees,
And the twilight darkening
Around the starts and around
You speaking lips and moving hands.

*

Privacy

Dense fog shuts down
Between the hills.
I step out of my cabin.
You'd never know
It was in the midst of a forest.
Fog curls in the lighted doorway like smoke.
I hear the raccoon rustling
In the invisible thicket.
The cool dampness creeps under my clothes.
I thought I heard a car
Come up the road below me.
I walk cautiously through the fog
To the edge of the cutting.
I can see nothing.
Suddenly I hear
Beneath my feet
A man and a woman cry out with love.

*

Parity

My uncle believed he had
A double in another
Universe right here at hand
Whose life was the opposite
Of his in all things - the man
On the other side of zero.
Sometimes they would change places.
Not in dreams, but for a moment
In waking, when my uncle
Would smile a certain sly smile
And pause or stagger slightly
And go about his business.

*

It Is a German Honeymoon

They are stalking humming birds
The jewels of the new world
The rufous hummingbird dives
Along his parabola
Of pure ether. We forget -
An imponderable and
Invisible elastic
Crystal is the womb of space.
They wait with poised cameras
Focused telescopic lens
Beyond the crimson trumpet vine.
He returns squealing against
The sky deeper than six billion
Light years, and plunges through sun
Blaze to the blood red flower womb.
A whirling note in the lens of space.
"Birds are devas," says Morris
Graves, "They live in a world
Without Karma." No grasping,
No consequence, only the
Grace of the vectors that form
The lattices of the unending
Imponderable crystal.
The blond and handsome young man
And woman are happy, they
Love each other, when they have
Gone around the world they will
Sit in the Grunewald and
Look at a picture of a
California hummingbird.
Nobody can sim across
The Great River. Turn your back
And study the spotted wall.
Turn around on the farther shore.
Nine dice roll out, one by one.
The mouse eats them. They never were.
The hundred flowers put their
Heads together, yellow stamens and
Swelling pistils. Between them
In midspace they generate
A single seed. You cannot
Find it in a telescope.
Found, you could not see it in
An electron microscope.

*

Bei Wannsee

Evening twirling
In a thousand thanks
The spindle glows
Pale water
Copper flows
Swans
Sails cluster and part again
Ripples
Mouths kiss and suck and part
The sun breaks in bands of haze
A silent exclamation
A white bird
A naked joy
A thousand thanks
The water becomes imaginary
The swans go
The lights come
Paler than water
The perfume of the bed of stock
Billows down the lawn and out
Over the water
Past the motionless scarves of weeping willows
And up from the glittering boat
A flute spirals and says quietly
Like a waving light

A blond

Come

A thousand thanks
A waving light.

*

Red Maple Leaves

The maple leaves are brilliant
Over the tree lined streets.
The deep shade is filled
With soft ruddy light.
Soon the leaves will all have fallen.
The pale winter sunlight
Will gleam on snow covered lawns.
Here we were young together
And loved each other
Wise beyond our years.
Two lifetimes have gone by.
Only us two are left from those days.
All the others have gone with the years.
We have never seen each other since.
This is the first time I have ever come back.
I drive slowly past your home,
Around the block again and once again.
Beyond the deep pillared porch
Someone is sitting at the window.
I drive down by the river
And watch a boy fishing from the bridge
In the clear water amongst
Falling and floating leaves.
And then I drive west into the smoky sunset.

*

It Turns Over

The lightning does not go out
But stays on in the sky all night
A waterfall of solid white fire
Red hands speak
In deaf and dumb language
Their green shadows
Projected on the orange sky
All the worms come out
All the eggs hatch
All the clouds boil away
Only Orion all alone in the zenith
Of midsummer midnight.

*

Star and Crescent

The air has the late summer
Evening smell of ripe foliage
And dew cooled dust. The last long
Rays of sunset have gone from
The sky. In the greying light
The last birds twitter in the leaves.
Far away through the trees, someone
Is pounding something. The new
Moon is pale and thin as a
Flake of ice. Venus glows warm
Beside it. In the abode
Of peace, a bell calls for
Evening meditation.
As the twilight deepens
A voice speaks in the silence.

*

La vie en rose

Fog fills the little square
Between Avenue du Maine
And the Gaite Montparnasse.
I walk around and around,
Waiting for my girl.
My footsteps echo
From the walls
Of the second storeys.
Deep in the future
My ghost follows me,
Around and around.

*

Void Only

Time like glass
Space like glass
I sit quiet
Anywhere Anything
Happens
Quiet loud still turbulent
The serpent coils
On itself
All things are translucent
Then transparent
Then gone
Only emptiness
No limits
Only the infinitely faint
Song
Of the coiling mind
Only.

*

Suchness

In the theosophy of light,
The logical universal
Ceases to be anything more.
Than the dead body of an angel.
What is substance? Oyt substance
Is whatever we feed our angel.
The perfect incense for worship
Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes.

*

Late half moon

Late half moon
High over head.
Shaka merges with Tara.
The dark bride possesses her lover.
Two moaning owls fly from the
Pine to the cypress.
The largest telescope
Reveals more nebulae
Outside our galaxy
Than stars within it -
There are more cells
In a single brain.
The sands of all the seas
Have a number.
The red shift -
The mortal soul
In its immortal body.
Light tires and wears out,
Travelling through space.
The owls mate
In the moonfilled dawn.

*

You Birthday in the California Mountains

A broken moon on the cold water,
And wild geese crying high overhead,
The smoke of the campfire rises
Toward the geometry of heaven -
Points of light in the infinite blackness.
I watch across the narrow inlet
Your dark figure comes and goes before the fire.
A loon cries out on the night bound lake.
Then all the world is silent with the
Silence of autumn waiting for
The coming of winter. I enter
The ring of firelight, bringing to you
A string of trout for our dinner.
As we eat by the whispering lake,
I say, "Many years from now we will
Remember this night and talk of it."
Many years have gone by since then, and
Many years again. I remember
That night as though it was last night,
But you have been dead for thirty years.

*

The Flower Sutra

Deep drowsy shade under the broad leaves,
The dusty plain far below dim with haze,
Picking flowers - bush clover, fold banded lily,
Bell flower, wild pink, while a mountain cuckoo
Flutters about, watching me and crying,
"Kegonkyo."

*

Earth Sky Sea Trees Birds House Beasts Flowers

Cold before dawn

Cold before dawn,
Off in the misty night,
Under the gibbous moon,
The peacocks cry to each other,
As if in pain.


A cottage in the midst

A cottage in the midst
Of a miniature forest.
The only events are the distant
DCries of peacocks, the barking
Of more distant dogs
And high over head
The flight of cawing crows,


Past and future fall away

Past a future fall away.
There is only the rose and blue
Shimmer of the illimitable
Sea surface.
No place.
No time.


Slowly the moon rises

Slowly the moonrises
Over the quiet sea.
Slowly the face of my beloved
Forms in my mind.


Moonless night

Moonless night.
In the black heavens
The eye goes ten million miles.
Melancholy fills the heart.


Spring puddles give way

Spring puddles give way
To young grass.
In the garden, willow catkins
Change to singing birds.


A dawn in a tree of birds

A dawn in a tree of birds.
Another.
And then another.


Past midnight

Past midnight,
In the dark,
Under the winter stars,
Tendrils of ice
Creep through the duckweed.


As the years pass

As the years pass,
The generations of birds pass too.
But you must watch carefully.
The same towhees and jays
Seem to have been in the same places
To thousands of generations of men.


In the dark forest the whisper

In the dark forest the whisper
Of a million leaves.
On the deep sea the sigh
Of a million waves.


A long lifetime

A long lifetime
Peoples and places
And the crisis of mankind 0
What survives is the crystal -
Infinitely small -
Infinitely large -

*

The City of the Moon, for Kimiko Nakazawa

I

The sun sets as the moon
Rises. The red maple leaves
Fade to the colour
Of an aging heart.


II

In the fine warm rain
Falling over the late turning
Maple leaves, an uguisu
Sings as if in Spring.


III

The East Wind brings clouds
and rain. In the ruffled pond
Happy goldfish play.
But it is the end
Of the eleventh month, warm,
Unseasonably.


IV

Although I am far from home
The red maple leaves
Over the old pond
Of the temple garden
Are falling with the
Plum leaves by my own window.


V

No, I did not say a word.
It is useless to
Pretend that the sound of rain
Is a human voice.

I shall have the banana
Trees by my window destroyed.
The pattering of
The rain sounds like the weeping
Of all the spirits
Of the air, and the
Wind tearing the leaves sounds like
The sound of ripped silk.


VI

In a waking dream,
A princess of the old time
Comes to me over
The twisting foot bridge,
Through the midst of the marsh
Of yellow iris
And lightly touches my lips.
The delicate sensation
Of utter intimacy
Lingers as the light goes out,
And the leaves of the iris
Murmur and rustle
In the twilight wind.


VII

Although the great plane
Flies away toward the sun,
The morning raven
Will still perch on the balcony
Of the Ueno Park of the heart.


VIII. The New Year

Midnight passes -
A new year - Orion strides
Into the warm waves
Westward to Yamashina
Where the red and gold
Of a glorious autumn
Lie under the snow.


IX. Icho

The plane rises through
Snowing clouds. Far beneath two
Autumn ginkos blaze,
Burning gold in the hahrsh
Night lights of Tokyo.


X

Buddha took some Autumn leaves
In his hand and asked
Ananda if these were all
The red leaves there were.
Ananda answered that it
Was Autumn and leaves
Were falling all about them,
More than could ever
Be numbered. So Buddha said,
"I have given you
A handful of truths. Besides
These there are many
Thousands of other truths, more
Than can ever be numbered."


XI

Clouds are the thoughts of
Heaven.. It is difficult
To read the thoughts of
Other people, bu you can
Always read those of heaven.

from "Imitations of the Chinese"...

The Fall of Ch'ou

Jade pendants chime before the dawn audience.
Peach blossoms drown in the swollen stream.
Barbarian fires overwhelm the guards.
Together two skylarks rise towards heaven.
Two hearts singing like chiming jade.

*

Erinnerung

At the door of my thatched hut,
Buried deep in the forested mountains,
The wind in the ancient ginko tree
Sounds like the rustle of brocaded silk.

*

Lost Love

Geese fly from North to South
You are far away in
The East. The West wind will carry
A message to the East, but
Here in the Far West, the East
Wind never blows.

[Gabriel Gadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. It's about half original work, half translations. Well worth reading.

[Shaun · Rating 2 out of 5]

A alright read, although Rexroth's poetry is nothing spectacular in terms of form or content. His translation work is similarly adequate, although some of the choices are weaker than others. Not the greatest collection, but a good read for any one of interested in Rexroth's poetry or nature poetry.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best translators (in poetry, in literature) are poets themselves, and Rexroth's love of nature, the night sky, and the gentle way he treats others in his work is certainly good poetry - although I enjoyed his translation of Chinese and Japanese poets even more.

[Everett · Rating 4 out of 5]

‚Written for Ko Yah Ch‘Ing‘

‚My lord, you live beside the river
In a painted palace
And I live at the corner of the sea.
My tears fall in the sea
And the tide carries them
Before your tower
Where they stop in the flowing water.‘

Written in c. 200 BC.

[Brendan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find it annoying that a book called New Poems is about half translations. I feel strongly that poetry is not meant to be translated into other languages. But I'm aware I'm in the minority on this one.

Rexroth likes to write nature poems: birds, the countryside, the sun, trees, the moon, etc. He also has a habit of engaging in, as I so eloquently referred to it in my notes, pseudo-philosophical crap.

"Blue Sunday" and "Privacy" are worth noting in a positive sense.

Credit to Ling Chang for collaborating on some of the translations with Rexroth.