While traveling through Turkey recently, one of the more frequent questions I encountered was about books, both as smalltalk in the "What have you been reading lately?" or the "What are your favorite books?" context, or at times with the much more interesting context of, "What books best describe the essence of your American experience?" Since I love literature I was delighted to think about how to best answer the last question for my new Turkish (and American) friends.
That last question of "What books describe the essence of the American experience?" is both a more personal and revealing question, and at least in my case answers the two previous questions as well. My first thoughts for an answer centered around those Americans that contributed illumination to the American (and my) psyche that it had not known previously: Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Moncure Conway, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Their thoughts on the education of children, the importance of preserving the natural world, non-violence, the suffragette movement, sexuality, the abolitionist movement, and other important emerging social themes forever changed the fabric of American life.
Yet, as important as Thoreau's Walden is to me personally, it turns out that there are two other authors from a more recent period in American literature that best articulated what it 'felt' like to be an American during my lifetime. The first one is the subject line of this post, poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905 to 1982).
My favorite volume of Rexroth is The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, printed by Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Washington. This is what Copper Canyon Press says about this volume:
"Kenneth Rexroth was one of the twentieth century's great literary minds, the author of fifty-four volumes of poetry, essays, and translations from a dozen languages. The Complete Poems collects all the poetry he is known to have written, including early work that appeared in revolutionary magazines and a few later uncollected poems. Rexroth's poems of nature and protest are remarkable for their erudition and biting social and political commentary; his love poems are renowned for their incandescent eroticism and clarity of emotion; and his poems of trancendent wisdom bridge Eastern and Western traditions."
Occasionally Copper Canyon Press offers very limited runs of broadside prints of select poems, and about three years ago they offered Rexroth's Open the Blind as a broadside (one of my all-time favorite bits of verse), and which now hangs in my home's entryway:
Nests in the eaves stir in the dawn
Ephemeral as our peace
Morning prayer
Grace before food
I understand
The endless sky the small earth
The shadow cone
Your shining
Lips and eyes
Your thighs drenched with the sea
A telescope full of fireflies
Innumerable nebulae all departing
Ten billion years before we ever met
If you only have one book that you read this year, want to enrich your life, and to understand the 'real' American experience a little better, you have got to read The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth by Copper Canyon Press. Very highly recommended by yours truly.
A late addition:
I almost forgot, folk musician Greg Brown's poet mother was an ardent Rexroth fan, and Greg's song Rexroth's Daughter on his Coveneant album will also give you a feel for what Rexroth is all about (a song that received critical acclaim on National Public Radio in the States some years ago).
