Word: rexroth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...poet who goes in for grimmer kicks than limericks is the hero of another Music story-The Cool, Cool Bards. Kenneth Rexroth has started an unshaven love affair between verse and jazz, and it is proliferating like a weird crop of mushrooms throughout San Francisco jazz joints. Mushiest of the mushrooms is a poem entitled Thou Shalt Not Kill, a lengthy dirge for hordes of long-lost poets who somehow strayed from their vocation. In it, among other things, Rexroth asks dolefully: "How many stopped writing at 30? How many went to work for TIME?" By latest count there...
Mumbo, Jumbo & Bumbo. Other local poets-Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Junk Man's Obligate) and Kenneth Patchen (Hurrah for Anything), et al.-have moved into the jazz clubs. "All these Kenneths," comments Kenneth Rexroth, "sound a little like Mumbo, Jumbo and Bumbo, each the biggest elephant in the world...
...longtime jazz buff, Rexroth got together with Saxophonist Bruce Lippincott and worked out a sketchy jazz accompaniment for his new poem, Thou Shalt Not Kill, a lengthy dirge for long-lost friends, mostly poets: "What happened to Robinson who used to stagger down Eighth Street, dizzy with solitary gin? ... Where is Leonard who thought he was a locomotive? . . . What became of Jim Oppenheim? . . . Where is Sol Funaroff? What happened to Potamkin? . . . One sat up all night talking to H. L. Mencken and drowned himself in the morning." Then the Rexroth verse turns to a super Bohemian and aman...
...Sail'N and the Black Hawk-the Taj Mahal of West Coast jazz, where Dave Brubeck blew himself to fame. And at the Tin Angel, on the waterfront, Trumpeter Dick Mills and his combo were playing with the man who started the poetry-and-jazz trend, Poet Kenneth Rexroth. decked out in red shirt, olive green corduroy suit and black string tie. "Lord! Lord! Lord!" cried Rexroth happily. "Look how it packs them...
Yawps & Whimpers. Since the mid-403, Poet Rexroth, now 52, has presided over a circle of San Francisco writers he describes as "mature Bohemians." Their characteristic literary theme is the decline and fall of practically everybody, delivered in a tone that wavers between a yawp and a whimper. At the GHQ of the San Francisco poets, a tiny joint on Grant Avenue known simply as The Place, the non-squares were invited to gather on Sunday afternoons to "snarl at the cosmos, praise the unsung, defy the order." Poet Rexroth first carried the snarls into the jazz clubs last winter...