Kenneth Rexroth Quotes
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Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.
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The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.
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The holiness of the realIs always there, accessibleIn total immanence. The nodesOf transcendence coagulateIn you, the experiencer,And in the other, the lover.
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Towards the end of the night, as trucks rumbled In the streets, you stirred, cuddled to me, And spoke my name. Your voice was the voice Of a girl who had never known loss Of love, betrayal, mistrust, or lie.
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Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?
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With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.
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I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.
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Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, 'What man does with his aloneness.'
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You can’t become a saint by taking dope, stealing your friends’ typewriters, giving girls chancres, not supporting your wife and children, and then reading St. John of the Cross. All of that, when it’s happened before, has typified the collapse of civilization … and today the social fabric is falling apart so fast, it makes your head swim.
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Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.
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This isn't the best town for what we're doing. Too many other things to pull the crowds away.
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The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
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Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.
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Ex-cons always say, 'You never know what makes the wheels go round until you’ve done time in the joint.' This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.
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Harvey, Galileo, Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.
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Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.
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You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.
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You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.
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Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.
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What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.
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The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
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Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.
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There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.
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I have no interest in Kerouac whatsoever. I've done my stint for him. As far as I'm concerned, Kerouac is what Madison Avenue wants a rebel to be. That isn't my kind of rebel.