Kenneth Rexroth

As a youth, he supported himself with odd jobs--as a soda jerk, clerk, wrestler, and reporter. He hitchhiked around the country, visited Europe, and backpacked in the wilderness, reading and frequenting literary salons and lecture halls, and teaching himself several languages.
He married the painter Andrée Shafer and moved to San Francisco with her in 1927. It was there he started to get his first poems published in a variety of magazines. His interests at this time included eastern mysticism and leftist politics. He kept company with like-minded left-wing poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky, and with them thought to rescue poetry from its supposed downslide into formalist sentimentality. They organized clubs to support struggling writers and artists.
By the early 1930s, through a correspondence with Ezra Pound, Rexroth gained an introduction to James Laughlin of New Directions, who decided to include Rexroth’s poems in the second volume of Laughlin’s pivotal annual, New Directions in Poetry and Prose in 1937. Rexroth’s first collection, In What Hour was published by Macmillan in 1940. In 1944 he published another collection, The Phoenix and the Tortoise
During the war years his actions were viewed by many as Un-American but by the late 1940s he was laying the groundwork for what would become the San Francisco Renaissance. He supported many writers such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, William Everson, Leroi Jones and many others.
He organised weekly meetings where people could share their philosophical and poetic theories. Attendees included Robert Duncan, Richard Eberhart, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and several other of the “beat poets”.
He ran the legendary Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955, at which Ginsberg introduced the world to "Howl." Rexroth’s own work was composed with attention to musical traditions and he performed his poems with jazz musicians. Rexroth did not wholly support the so-called "Beat Generation," and he was distinctly displeased when he became known as the father of the Beats.
By the 1960s, Rexroth’s appeal reached far beyond San Francisco. Particularly with his "Classics Revisited" column in the Saturday Review.
In 1964 he was given an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He went on to publish collections of his shorter poems and longer poems in 1967 and 1968, respectively.
In 1974, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Japan, and in 1975 he received the Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets in recognition of a lifetime’s work and contribution to poetry as a cultural force.
Kenneth Rexroth died in 1982 and he was buried in Santa Barbara, on a cliff above the sea.
JS