Word: rexroth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL by Kenneth Rexroth. 367 pages. Doubleday...
Just when it has become uncertain what a novel is, everyone seems very sure that what he writes is a novel. There was Truman Capote's jumbo crime documentary, and now there is this "autobiographical novel" by Kenneth Rexroth...
Novel it is not, but it is a novel autobiography. The author is not the victim of an unsatisfactory love affair with his own personality: he takes himself for granted and spends his space telling about other people, places and ideas. And what people! Rexroth's book is a Who's Non-Who of every oddball in the nonEstablishment U.S. of the past generation-feminists, Wobblies, Free Silver men, free-love ladies, anarchists, proto-bolsheviks, pacifists, radicals, populists, vegetarians, ragged Utopians, prophets without portfolio and plain cranks. His record makes the current anti-Establishment of beatnik non-opters...
Today, he is the Last Bohemian, a conformist who chose to cleave to a tradition of dissent. Rexroth has some thing like Chamber of Commerce status in San Francisco, safely beached on the shore where the last wave of American radicalism washed up. He is a legend as poet, horse wrangler, hobo, perpetual avant-gardesman, painter, and finally, at 60, Grand Old Man of what used to be called the Youth Racket...
...poet identified with the San Francisco Renaissance headed by Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Brother of Antoninus published poems for many years under the name William Everson until he became a lay brother in the Dominican Order eleven years ago. As all poetry should, Brother Antoninus' writings have had an organic development which reflects the parallel development of his personal life. While much of his earlier poetry did exhibit some orientation toward God, it largely dealt with his attempt to find meaning in life through sensuality. He explained the cause of a rather sudden shift in orientation: after...