Kenneth Rexroth — the poet, by birth alone

1905–1982 · BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 22 DECEMBER 1905

The tie, exactly. Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend and spent an early childhood here; the family moved to Chicago while he was a small child, his formation was Chicago's, and his fame is San Francisco's. Famous People prints the tie at that strength, and this entry does the same: the city claims the birth of a major American poet, not his making.

The books. Rexroth's shelf runs to some forty volumes. The poetry begins with In What Hour? (Macmillan, 1940) and The Phoenix and the Tortoise (New Directions, 1944), the first of the New Directions books that made him that house's poet for life — James Laughlin published most of what followed. The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1949), The Signature of All Things (1950), the verse plays of Beyond the Mountains (1951), and The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952) carried the forties' work into the fifties. The translations changed American reading: One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955) and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1956), both New Directions, carried classical Asian poetry into American English, and the later Women Poets of China and Women Poets of Japan extended the work. The essays stand in Bird in the Bush (1959) and Assays (1961). The prose life is An Autobiographical Novel (Doubleday, 1966), which stops at 1927, the year he settled in California; it was revised and expanded from the tapes he left at his death, by Linda Hamalian, for the New Directions edition of 1991. The summations are the Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions, 1966) and Collected Longer Poems (1968) — the longer volume gathering The Homestead Called Damascus, written in his teens, the Phoenix and the Tortoise, the Dragon and the Unicorn, and The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart — then New Poems (1974), Selected Poems (1984), and, posthumously, the Complete Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow. He appears in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums as Reinhold Cacoethes, wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica article on poetry in 1973, and died at Montecito, California, on 6 June 1982.

Sources:

1. New Directions Publishing, author record — the house's Rexroth list: the plays (Beyond the Mountains, 1951), the essay collections (Bird in the Bush, 1959; Assays, 1961), the translations, the Collected Shorter Poems (1966), Collected Longer Poems (1968), Selected Poems (1984), and the Autobiographical Novel's expanded 1991 edition.
2. Contemporary Authors writings list (Encyclopedia.com) — In What Hour? (Macmillan, 1940), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (New Directions, 1944), The Signature of All Things (1950), An Autobiographical Novel (Doubleday, 1966), New Poems (1974), The Complete Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003).
3. Famous People (this record) — the birth, the childhood removal to Chicago, the honors of record, and the death at Montecito.