Rexroth on Twain, Patchen & D.H. Lawrence

[Anna Balint]

From: "Bureau of Public Secrets" <knabb at slip.net>

"There is a lot of bullshit in Lawrence, Miller, or Patchen --
but their enemies are my enemies." (Rexroth)
Three new Rexroth essays are now online at the BPS website --
MARK TWAIN
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/twain.htm
"It was the official culture which was schizophrenic, not Mark Twain. The
whole meaning of Mark Twain is that he 'saw life steadily and saw it
whole'... If Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the capitalist epoch...
Mark Twain wrote its saga, its prose Iliad and Odyssey."
POETRY, REGENERATION, AND D.H. LAWRENCE
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/lawrence.htm
"Lawrence did not try to mislead himself with false promises, imaginary
guarantees... Communion and oblivion, sex and death, the mystery can be
revealed -- but it can be revealed only as totally inexplicable. Lawrence
never succumbed to the temptation to try to do more. He succeeded in what he
did do."
KENNETH PATCHEN, NATURALIST OF THE PUBLIC NIGHTMARE
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/patchen.htm
"Patchen has gone back to the world of Edward Lear and interpreted it in
terms of the modern sensibility of the disengaged, the modern comic horrors
of le monde concentrationnaire. It is as if, not a slick New Yorker
correspondent, but the Owl and the Pussycat were writing up Hiroshima."
* * *
The Bureau of Public Secrets website features "The Joy of Revolution" and
other writings by Ken Knabb (recently collected in the book "Public
Secrets"); Knabb's translations from the Situationist International (the
notorious avant-garde group that helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in
France); and the Rexroth Archive (texts by and about the great writer and
social critic Kenneth Rexroth).
BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701http://www.bopsecrets.org