Kenneth Rexroth: Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern ma...

Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act.

Kenneth Rexroth

defense creative world

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Kenneth Rexroth

poetry book son

I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. I 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

heart writing lying

Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.

Kenneth Rexroth

categorization ability maturity

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.

Kenneth Rexroth

outcomes tragedy judging

The meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.

Kenneth Rexroth

meaning-of-life

Now I know surely and forever,

Kenneth Rexroth

sweet life art

We have forgotten love, and Sat lonely beside each other. We have eaten together, Lonely behind our plates, we Have hidden behind children, We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns toward you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence.

Kenneth Rexroth

lonely loneliness children

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.

Kenneth Rexroth

organization perfect lying

It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.

Kenneth Rexroth

simple doe heart

Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.

Kenneth Rexroth

pain loneliness thinking-of-you

The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.

Kenneth Rexroth

responsibility doe men

The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It's been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can't diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.

Kenneth Rexroth

drug new-york giving

When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.

Kenneth Rexroth

news youth cutting

Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.

Kenneth Rexroth

angel pigs men

Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.

Kenneth Rexroth

parliament wells paraphrase

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.

Kenneth Rexroth

coffee memories life

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.

Kenneth Rexroth

lonely men book

Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness.

Kenneth Rexroth

doe men art

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.

Kenneth Rexroth

good-man men people

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.