BOOKS
483
The result, in one kind of his poems, is an amiable but thin and powerless
realism. The quality of history can never be caught by a rumination on
the past; the artist is most "historical" when he concerns himself with the
"present moment."
In most of the poems a vague solitary self is present, but remains
unrealised because society is missing.
Being is social in its immediacy,
Private in final implications;
Life is built of contact and dies secretly;
So existants live in history and die out
In fulfillment of individuals.
It is "being in its immediacy" that Rexroth fails to catch. When he writes
about human beings he uses an irony as thin as his plainest realism:
Chang Yuen is on the threshold of a remarkable career.
He is a minor official in Nanking;
However he is intimate with the highest circles in the capital, etc.
He writes in this flat manner well, and I suppose he is making a virtue of
his inability to activate words, to involve them in new relations. But this
is a mere relapse into another period (when Pound was most active). It is
an abdication, I think, and solves nothing.
The later pages contain some of Rexroth's rather extended "cosmogo–
nies,'' with the more perverse ones of the little magazine days not printed.
He goes up another thousand feet on his mountain and reports on
~e
dis–
engaged things that go past him. Everything flies, floats or falls, in no
order:
I passed the black fountain
I passed ,the swathed man
I passed the meteorite
I passed the tireles!l mice
and so on, resembling a long humorless face, and no better or worse than
most Surrealist passages. Up Mountain or down Alimentary Canal, such
"freedom" of words defeats itself. Art needs an obstacle, and deteriorates
when it becomes a matter of indifference what word comes where.
There are Rexroth's usual dozens of philosophical vocables, almost
always unrelated and unassimilated. One is sure he has read
Process
and
Reality
and uncertain he has learned from it. And why must a poem be
called "Toward an Organic Philosophy"? Rexroth seems unaware that he
should remove the preliminaries of poetry from the poems themselves.
But Rexroth is an original, and at least makes his own errors. In
the lines
There are no teeth in most orchids
The bas-relief tilts in the wall
the rhythm is like Pound's, and sometimes one is made to think of Eliot's
later elegies (though Rexroth of course lacks the intensity as well as the
suffocation). Still Rexroth creates an unmistakable personal ambience.
GoRDON SYLANDER
