by Sam Hamill, originally published in the Chicago Review, Autumn 2006
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […]! wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the
Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
-Kenneth Rexroth
In 1959, I was hip. On the Road had put me on the road a couple of years earlier, when I was fourteen and caught a freight train bound for who-knows-where. It was leaving Utah, and that was good enough for me. I huddled in an empty cattle car and smoked Lucky Strikes and peeked between the wooden slats as the vast salt desert clanged by. Hours after dark, I got off in Reno, where I scraped most of the skin from one arm and knee and broke my nose by jumping too soon-assover-teakettle into the gravel and railroad ties. A couple of hours later I was in the back seat of a squad car bound for detention, where I sat for several days before being put on a Greyhound bus back to Salt Lake City, to be greeted by irate foster parents. I was cool.
I hot-wired cars, hopped trains, hitchhiked, and visited detention centers or jails in most of the surrounding states over the next year. I picked up a couple of jailhouse tattoos and, thrown into a small-town slammer in Colorado where they were holding a couple of bikers, I got stabbed, raped, and tattooed on my cheek. I lost a few fistfights and won many. I was Jack London. I was Jack Kerouac. I was James Dean. I loved writers and books, especially those who were adventuresome, those who were misfits. I got busted for stealing cars, busted for smoking weed, for drinking, for smoking, busted for “run-away” again and again. I was a battered child in full rebellion.
As if Dickens had authored my childhood, I retreated into and found solace in the pages of Treasure Island or The Red Pony. I wanted to be Steinbeck or Hemingway’s Nick Adams, a wandering poet like Shelley or Whitman, and play my trumpet like Miles or Rafael Mendez or Satchmo. I was the Ulysses in the illustrated children’s edition of Homer I’d read again and again. The Mormon church was the Cyclops, an evil siren.
By the fall of 1959, I’d learned how to get by-thieving, shooting $2 pool or snooker, bumming meals. I discovered the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth in a slightly Bohemian bookstore in Salt Lake City and began memorizing the poems in A Coney Island of the Mind and wrote gaudy imitations. I’d already fallen in love with memorizing poems by listening to recordings of Dylan Thomas and TS. Eliot. I couldn’t imitate “Prufrock,” but I wrote a hundred sappy imitations of Thomas’s “Lament.” Ferlinghetti used language I understood and he had the first great comic sensibility I encountered in poetry. He was cool. I recited his poems and wrote imitations.
In a prefatory note to In Defense of the Earth, Rexroth wrote, “I am still free to speak out against a society which grows daily more depraved and destructive. I am sorry for those who no longer feel able to do so, but I am sure that the poet is always called upon to play his role of prophet, in the Biblical sense, whatever else he may be about.”
Rexroth spoke to my disenfranchisement, to my growing disaffection for my country’s lies. I knew a lot about the genocide of the Indian Wars. I knew about the death of Emmett Till. I had been shaken to the bone by his story. I knew what was going on in The South. It was the Cold War at full madness; it was being taught to get under our desks in case of atomic bombs falling around us; it was the post-McCarthy era and that damned Castro and that damned Mao Tse Tung; it was Elvis’s pelvis and cool jazz and Beatniks…
I didn’t get a lot of Rexroth and needed a dictionary and sometimes an encyclopedia or a library, but he drew me in like no one had before. I knew there was a world in those poems, a vitally expansive world that invited me into it. I loved his anger and his tenderness and weary longing. Some poems reflected on what seemed to me to be an almost eternal life. Who was the “Marthe” for whom he sorrowed so deeply? Lost love? I’d had no love to lose, but I felt, however naively, that I felt his sorrow, his longing. I had never felt loved by anyone and I would live and die in my orphan’s loneliness, I was certain. Rexroth’s poetry often expressed for me what I could not say myself.
Then there was “Thou Shall Not Kill,” his famous elegy for Dylan Thomas with its emphatic closure: “You killed him, / In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit, / You son-of-a-bitch!” That was a rage I understood. The “squares” were rednecks and businessmen, I also understood. And I understood that artists must rebel against the status quo. After all, Keats had called for the revolutionizing of Parliament. But who were all those people-“Essenin! / Robert Desnos! / Saint Pol Roux! / Max Jacob!”? I didn’t have a clue. When Rexroth wrote, “The same disembodied hand / Strikes us down. / Here is a mountain of death,” I knew he spoke for me. I lived in the shadow of The Bomb. I had lost a surrogate elder brother in Korea. The bombs were growing bigger and bigger. And “the suits” were responsible. No one would make it out alive. How I struggled and loved struggling with that poem!
He and Ferlinghetti saw The Big lie, the phoniness and duplicity of American society. While Ferlinghetti most often made fun of it, Rexroth called it boldly and defiantly as he saw it. He articulated passionate love and anger. But sometimes he too was funny, as were his marvelous “Bestiary” poems, written for his daughters. I adored the poems about the horse, the wolf, cat people, and others.
Almost at the end of the book, Japanese poems presented something entirely new to me:
He is so young
He will not find the road.
Angel of death,
I will pay you
To carry him on your shoulders.
-Anonymous
My first pop idol, James Dean, was dead-romantically dead in his Porsche Spyder. Hank was dead in the backseat of his Cadillac. Elvis had already sold out to Tom Parker and the movies. Faron Young sang, “I wanna live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.” Lady Day sang of strange fruit. Ray Charles sang of drowning in his own tears. We all drove fast, cigarettes dangling, dancing with death. I knew I couldn’t possibly live to see thirty.
The Japanese poems were so brief, so clear, and yet… such eternal sorrows, filled with life and death. They treated the brevity of life and moments of fabulous cognition. They gave words and images to what I thought I felt.
The cicada cries out,
Burning with love.
The firefly burns
With silent love.
-Anonymous
I burned. I was lonely and angry and yet enchanted with the world. I burned for Romantic love. I burned for experience. The Japanese poems lingered on in my mind. When I tried to imitate them, even I could see, again and again, that something very important was missing. I knew nothing about the Japanese except that I’d worked one summer in a strawberry field for a very nice Japanese man who’d been at TuIe Lake Relocation Camp during The War, losing his large farm in California. And I’d of course seen movies and heard stories about Those Dirty Japs. Such contradictions!
Rexroth’s translations of Japanese poems opened a vast horizon that grew ever-wider and brighter when I encountered One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.
Another Spring
White birds over the grey river.
Scarlet flowers on the green hills.
I watch the Spring go by and wonder
If I shall ever return home.
-TuFu
Who was this Tu Fu, “the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet ever,” that Rexroth so admired? And the others… Su Tung-p’o/Rexroth wrote: “Good and evil, / joy and sorrow, are in fact / only aspects of the Void.” Dharma Bums had been my introduction to Buddhism, Kerouac’s hip, lyrical “novel” about the search for “awakening.” I read it again and again. Who was this Japhy Ryder? The “Zen thing” intrigued me, as did the romantic dream of being a wanderer. There was the eternal search for the ultimate thrill, and there was a spiritual side to it all-to Coltranes blues and Kerouac’s prose and the deep spirituality of Rexroths poetry.
The media talked about “hipsters” and Zen and “existential cool.” I read an elementary book on existentialism and delighted in the idea that there was actually an alternative to the God-driven Mormon anti-intellectualism that had filled me with anger and alienation all my short years. I had never “believed.” But when I tried to read Camus or Sartre, I was utterly baffled. Nevertheless, “cool and hip” was existential, like Norman Mailer, and that was good enough for a sixteen-year-old boy with a small tote bag (books, socks and underwear, and one change of clothes) hitching a ride to San Francisco to get high, dig jazz, and become a poet.
I was young and lean and tough-half hoodlum thief and half prodigy. Since I’d been told ten thousand times that I’d “never amount to anything,” I would live a heroic life outside the law. I’d write novels and poetry and live fast and high and die young. Or else the world would erupt at any minute in our faces.
I got high. There was a lot of reefer and benzedrine (“white crosses”) in North Beach, and always somebody to go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of wine for me. Then I smoked heroin. I was told it was “Chinese opium,” and believed that at the time, but it was cheap Mexican heroin that, fortunately for me, had been stepped on pretty heavily, I’m sure. It was a dream high. The music sounded sweeter, the poetry seemed infinitely deeper. It was cool. I was cool.
I managed to stay stoned for a couple of months. I was thrown out of jazz clubs repeatedly. I was in Bliss City in the basement of City Lights Bookstore reading Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets, especially Howl. I spent most of my days sleeping in Golden Gate Park and wandered at night between the Tenderloin and North Beach, searching cars for things to pawn or sell or trade. I hung around clubs, listening from near the door, wishing I could go in and be a part of it.
But I was starting to get sick when I couldn’t get high. I needed more money. I grew more and more desperate. There were men who’d take me in for a night or two and give me money in exchange for molesting me, for letting them touch me. I wanted to be high and inside the club where Cannonball played. I wanted to “make the scene” and know the people I was reading- and reading about. I despised myself for being too young and clearly too ignorant. I got high to kill the pain and frustration…and to stay cool, pretending to be detached. But I wasn’t detached. I was alienated, even from the Beat Scene. I was on the brink of self-destruction.
Then one crisp afternoon, I spent my last couple of bucks to buy Thirty Spanish Poems of Love o- Exile. Rexroth’s translations were my first exposure to Garcia Lorca, Neruda, and others. Another world began to open. I was standing outside City Lights when Rexroth came around the corner from Grant Avenue. To me, he looked like a mountain with a broad forehead and large sad eyes. Hands trembling, voice quavering, I asked him to sign my book.
I don’t remember the conversation exactly, but I told him I wanted to be a great poet and a great jazz musician and that Miles, Trane, and Cannonball were my heroes in music and he and Ferlinghetti were my poets. He noted that I looked completely strung out. Next thing I realized, he was leading me through markets in Chinatown, buying vegetables and fruit and fish.
I spent several days at his house, sick from lack of drugs and sick from what was probably a bout of pneumonia. He admonished me, “That shit leads to stupor, and it’ll kill ya.” He told me how Miles had booted Trane from his group when he, Miles, cleaned up. That made Trane realize what he had to do, and he cleaned up. “That shit wrecked Bird,” he said, “and it’ll fuck up your music and fuck up your writing.”
His library was staggering to a wise-ass sixteen-year-old street kid. I’d read the Romantic poets-what I understood from them at least-and lots of Whitman (who freed me from predictable rhyme and the metronome), some Longfellow, Robert Service (whom I’d memorized as a child), Dylan Thomas, some Eliot, Sandburg & Frost. And the Beat poets. Rexroth had read everything. He made me want to read everything: Greek and Latin poets, Russian novelists, Japanese and Chinese classics, Spanish-language poets, the ancient and modern philosophers, even the Bible. He talked about “American Indian poetry.” I grew up on horses with Navajo kids and I’d never heard of such a thing. “The poetry of pre-literate peoples,” he said, “is a purely oral tradition. Nobody writes it down. They memorize it all. There’s a great body of work…” And he had never been to school. He just read all that stuff and remembered everything he ever read with almost perfect recall. I was, of course, agog.
He told me, “Go read it all. Learn the poetry of the world.” He told me to learn how to cook. “There’s no excuse for not eating well in this country, even when you’re poor. And besides,” he laughed, “it’s a good way to get girls.. .and girls are better inspiration than dope is,” he laughed again and said, probably almost truthfully, “I write poetry to seduce women…and to overthrow the capitalist system. In that order.” His laughter roared.
He was a master storyteller, and I was enthralled. Probably for the first time in my life, I began to find myself consciously wanting to live, to be alive long enough to be able to view the world through those tired, knowing eyes, to live as a “true revolutionary,” as he advised. He held the American Democrats and Republicans in the same contempt in which he held “the Stalinists and Francos civil guard.” Who were they? I’d never heard of Franco. Rexroth was honored to have been “booted out of the Communist Party” for being an “anarchist.” I’d never heard that word before, either. He explained, and told me about Bakunin and others, about America’s fear, about Sacco and Vanzetti. He told me about Haymarket Square and about Joe Hill and Japanese internment camps and the farm workers of California that I’d encountered in Steinbeck. He fed my already healthy hunger for learning history, and spoke of “the history of ideas.”
He gave me a copy of Denise Levertov’s With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, a collection of poems that opened with “an ancient Toltec Codex” that said the artist “maintains a dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.” He taught me to love “the authentic joy of Philip Whalen,” and told me about how Alien Ginsberg liked to take off all his clothes at poetry readings.
He told me that if I wanted to learn about Zen, I should read D.T. Suzuki and go to Japan. He told me about how he’d tried to build an underground railway to help Japanese Americans escape the relocation camps. He introduced me to the painting of Morris Graves, whose work brought “elements of classical Japanese painting and sensibility into a new context.” He told me about Noh drama and kabuki while I listened, clinging to every word.
Cleaned up and inspired, it was time for me to leave San Francisco. Those streets were a recipe for my suicide. Rexroth showed me another way.
I hitched out, heading back to Utah, to take a final (unsuccessful) run at attending the lily-white, upwardly mobile, all-Mormon high school in Holladay, Utah, before enlisting in the Marine Corps for a ticket outta there-a ticket to Japan-my ticket into adulthood and into a way of life opened to me by Kenneth Rexroth. He showed me that I had reason to live and reason to write. It’s not an exaggeration to say he not only shaped, but also saved my life.
[Author Affiliation]Sam Hamill’s new essays on poetry and poets, Avocations, will be published by Red Hen Press in April, 2007. Curbstone Press will publish his new book of poetry, Measured by Stone, in September 2007. “Encountering Rexroth” is from a memoir-in -progress.-
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