I’ve spent almost six months in three trips in Italy in the last three years, once in Florence and twice in Rome. We get cheap apartments ($1200/month for two rooms in Rome; $1600 for six weeks for two rooms in Florence.) Each time I brought with me and read Kenneth Rexroth’s travelogue poem, “The Dragon and the Unicorn.” It’s a couple hundred pages long, and describes his travels through Europe, including Italy. It’s tremendously entertaining—full of medium-short-lined reportage and crabby commentary on meals, meetings, scenery and artworks—except where it’s interspersed with passages of metaphysical and mystical speculation which I skip, because they sound too much like pot-fueled post-midnight undergrad party talk. Boring, if you aren’t stoned and 19.

I like his politics (Anarchist/Socialist) and like his fluctuating pleasure, reverence, practicality and ill-humor. Rexroth seems to have been particularly testy all through Italy, sometimes for good reason, railing about the dying babies of Napoli, other times delivering injudicious and under-defended fiats against paintings in the Uffizi (“like dressed meat in/Butcher shops”), calling Michelangelo’s Last Judgment “an arrogant, perverse, pride/Soaked wall…” Fun to pick up the book when you’re in some town and see if Rexroth also got there:
Arezzo, a fine commercial
Hotel, our bedroom ceiling
Covered with Turks and tigers.
Splendid gnocchi and heady wine—
Montepulciano—strong for lunch.
So of course I ordered gnocchi and Montepulciano for lunch after spending a long time with the Piero della Francescas in the cathedral, one of the great frescoed chapels in Italy. Strong for lunch indeed: Fell asleep on the train back to Florence.
Down in Naples, a city I hated the first day we were there, and loved by the time we left four days later, Rexroth gets complex. As I said, his politics are admirable—as long as he doesn’t have to deal with women. He seems to have admired female poets (I like what he has to say about Muriel Rukeyser, for example, in American Poetry in the Twentieth Century), and whores and working class women.
All the way back the train fills
And fills up, and fills again,
With girls from the fish canneries,
And girls from the lace factories,
And girls from the fields, who have been
Working twelve hours for nothing,
Or at the best a few pennies.
They laugh and sing, all the way
Back to Naples, like broad bottomed,
Deep bosomed angels, wet with sweat.
But he seems to have a problematic relationship to other women:
You will find more peace and more
Communion, more love, in an hour
In the arms of a pickup in
Singapore or Reykavik,
Than you will find in a lifetime
Married to a middle class
White American woman.
Actually, I like the vicious force here. I’m always on the lookout for poems which aren’t nice, which don’t take a poemy tone, which jeer, which go on the attack. But this reads like small-minded and unselfconscious resentment, unleavened by any kind of irony.
Sitting there, reading this in your
Psychoanalyst’s waiting room,
Thirty-five years old, faintly
Perfumed, expensively dressed,
Sheer nylons strapped to freezing thighs,
Brain removed at Bennington
Or Sarah Lawrence, dutiful
Reader of the Partisan
Review’s Book of the Month, target
Of my highbrow publisher, you
Think this is all just Art—contrast—
Naples—New York. It is not. Every time
You open your frigidaire
A dead Neapolitan baby
Drops out.
More good writing. But it’s pathetic to blame women for things if you’re not blaming men too.
I find I love books other feminists hate. I think Kate Millet’s a moron about Lawrence. I love Tropic of Cancer and can’t find an ounce of sexism in it. I still like Bukowski, a lot, after all these years. But this sort of stuff from Rexroth goes a very long way to turn me off him. Almost, not quite. Because he does write about life, about the world outside himself, because he can do those medium short lines which are so hard to pull off. Because he can be beautiful and brilliant:
Bright petals of evening
Shatter, fall, drift over Florence,
And flush your cheeks a redder
Rose and gleam like fiery flakes
In your eyes.
For all its impersonal tenderness towards the female “you,” this is lovely, and captures something of the wide awake swoon of being somewhere unfamiliar and ancient and beautiful with someone you’re happily sexually involved with. Elsewhere:
The sea
Breathes like a drowsy woman.
The sun moves like a drowsy hand.
Also because he can be funny: Calls the hideous Vittorio Emanuele monument on Rome’s Piazza Venezia the “World’s largest wedding cake.” (Romans call it “the typewriter”—don’t know which I like better.) Also because I’ve gotten recipes from this poem: Wide flat green beans and potatoes, very garlicky, stirred together with a good extra virgin olive oil, served at room temperature.
And after all, when Rexroth’s not talking about women, his politics remain relevant. On the last night of our 2004 trip, we sit on the Spanish Steps. Sunset turns into nightfall. Sunburnt American and European couples indistinguishable by country, obviously upper middle class and looking to find the magic missing from their marriage since 1987 when they first broke into six figures, settle in with bottles of Sangiovese, Chianti, Valpolicella, cups they’ve stolen from the nearby McDonald’s carried stacked upside down on the neck. They toast each other and the melting blue sky, hug selfconsciously, and sooner or later start up that same old fight: Accusing each other of being bored with each other. American college-agers above us have a guitar and sing the worst awful 80s hits. I am dismayed to discover I know all the words to every song. Exhausted sleepwalking Indians, Pakistanis and Indios from South America stalk up and down the steps shilling belts, bangles, birdcalls, cigarette lighters in the shape of naked boys that squirt fire out of their penises, posters of Che, Bob Marley, Eminem, Beckham, Britney. The handsomest boy, skin like wildflower honey, keeps to crowds of global-teen-giggling-oh-my-god cuties who are only marking time till the clubs open up. He smiles in eight languages, sells junk to all. One star only, visible overhead, doesn’t twinkle, must be a planet. The International Herald Tribune congratulates the Democratic Convention for successfully avoiding Bush Bashing. Kerry will be a pro-choice, pro-environment Bush without the swagger. But he can’t not win, of that we are sure. And the killing goes on. Rexroth in Rome in 1949 says,
At the beginning of the street
Is the American Embassy.
Midway is an ESSO pump.
At the end is the devouring dark.
Many things never change.

02.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

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