New! Don't miss it!

Recently Viewed and Reviewed Flicks

The Da Vinci Code         grade:  B-
a bit dense and tedious and confusing, but may improve on rewatching, since I kept falling asleep. Only partly my fault, though

Poseidon                           grade C+
one impossible climax follows another, until we soon wish for all on this ship to drown, and some of them pleasingly do just that. The virtual effects are stunning, though, especially if you like to see people get smashed up by fire and water

Tristan and Isolde           grade C-
every year film producers dig into the the bag and come up with legends which can be recast with the handsomest young stars around. Nothing bad about this one, but not much especially good, either. We come to expect good productions, and this one has great Irish scenery to enhance it. Ah, if it could only all be scenery

Swann in Love                 grade B+
Jeremy Irons as the smitten M. Swann adds class and looks to this period piece from Marcel Proust, with Ornella Muti as the luscious Odette de Crecy. (Irons seen here with Fanny Ardent.) And you have to like Proust to begin with and appreciate the gender translations and hothouse atmosphere of early Twentieth Century Paris.

Time Regained (Proust again) grade A
More of Marcel's fine work translated to screen in a highly confusing summary of his multi-volume Remembrance of Things Past, as we have come to know it by. Excellently cast, with John Malcovich and Catherine Deneuve playing small but nicely stylized parts. (She is Odette grown to maturity (such Maturity!) and he is Baron Charlus. Marcello Mazzarella is Proust as a grown man. Everyone is excellent. (See hyperlink below to our earlier detailed review, with more photos.)

Nathalie                             grade B+
Emmanuelle Beart is excellent in this intentionally ambiguous love story, with Gerard Depardieu in a  rather understate role, which proves he really can act when given a good part and wants to do it well. And she is, well, beautiful and a pretty good actress, too. Bonus is Fanny Ardent again.

 
An Inconvenient Truth   grade A-
Al Gore's production, starring Al Gore, our popularly elected President, who would not have led us into two wars and resulting chaos. A documentary, to be sure, and unless you are in love with the classroom, a bit tedious with environmental overkill, but nonetheless essential to see and to know, and quite praiseworthy. None of us can do much about global warming except sigh and endure it and, if young enough, suffer its disastrous future consequences. Which will be inevitable, given continued Executive and Congressional malaise.

How do we evaluate and rank movies?

Good question. We start with Goethe's three-star criteria for literary criticism:

What was done, how well was it done, and was it worth doing?

In the instance of movies, we add a few criteria of our own:

How quickly does the film capture our attention and involve us in an imaginary world that is complex, realistic, and important?

Memorable movies that quickly  achieve this vital, initial feat  include Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Once Upon a Time in America, Cries and Whispers, and Gangs of New York. There are of course many, many others that do this well.

Then we try to evaluate the  characterization.  How well do the actors portray their characters and how rich, complex, and realistic are they?

Finally, there is the highly subjective evaluation of the movie in comparison with all the other movies we've seen--hundreds by the time we have become reflective adults. But above all is the question, How quickly and strongly does it grab you?

This is the ultimate test in a day of easily forgettable video movies.

What are the
greatest movies of all time?
How many are there, after nearly 100 years of film making? Many, but only a few have achieved this wonderful status.

Tell us your favorite movies and maybe we will publish them. Or add some to our list. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any specific order:

1. Citizen Kane

2. Apocalypse Now Redux

3. The Godfather, part 1

4. Once Upon a Time in America
(See http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/o/onceamerica.htm for an outstanding analysis and review)

5. The Third Man

6. All That Jazz

7. Casablanca

8. Gandhi

9. Reds

10. Chinatown

11. House of Sand and Fog

12. Ordinary People

13. Gangs of New York

14. Mr. Hulot's Holiday

15. Cries and Whispers

16. The White Countess

The Second Tier

1. Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2002)

2. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofski 2000)

3. The Usual Suspects (1995)

4. Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino 1980)

5. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

to which we now add:

6. Deliverance (John Boorman, script by James Dickey 1972)

FURTHER POETRY REVIEWS

Palestinian Poet Taha Muhammad Ali

So What

Taha Mulhammad Ali,
 New and Selected Poems,
1971-2005

No, that's not a personal comment, but the name of Ali's new collection of poems, from 1971 to 2005. It is also the title of a highly autobiographical short story, which ends the book. And the absence of concluding punctuation in the title suggests either a question mark or an exclamation point might be added, or both, but the poet chooses not to do so. The reader may, according to his response to the book.

It is a kind of "in your face" statement. It may tend ironically to minimize the poet's considerable effort, or else to ironically indicate a profound following, "This is What!"

The book is another in a long series of bi-lingual publications by Copper Canyon Press of contemporary world poets. It is in quality paperbound format, but is sometimes discounted for less than its list price of $18.

Ali is important for many reasons, a chief one of which is that he bridges the Israeli and Palestinian (Hebrew/Muslim) cultures that angrily co-exist and circumscribe the Middle East crisises today. So this is serious stuff. As his poems and the story indicate, these worlds are capable of living alongside each other peaceably—if only politics didn't intrude so rudely. But they do—violently and repeatedly and often.

The village Ali lived in was destroyed in 1948 during Arab-Israeli war, while he was a boy. He fled to Lebanon, later, to Nazareth, only a mile away from his birthplace. His home village of Saffuriyya still plays a large role in his life and, thus, in his poetry.

His is a beautiful, complex poetry, full of rich allusion and metaphor. It is strongly place-oriented. He has lived in dangerous times and seen many deaths and much destruction, but his poetry remains optimistic, complex, and lyrical. And of course Nazareth is a city of three religions and a long history.

Ali ran an import shop for many years; he is now in his 70s and an internationally recognized poet. He had many friends and acquaintances from his long life in Nazareth. His poetry rings with common allusion but can be universally read and understood. And since  his imagery is so strong, perhaps it is best to introduce him to readers by quoting at random from a few of  his usually short poems.

In an ancient Gypsy
dictionary of dreams
are explanations of my name
and numerous
interpretations of all I'll write.

What horror comes across me
when I come across myself
in such a dictionary!
But there I am
a camel feeling the slaughterhouses. . . .[pg.9]

The Fourth Qasida is a long poem in which the poet addresses Amir, a lost love, full of lingering nostalgic images of the olive grove and the voices of doves. He says:

My blood will rush in my veins
to meet her then and welcome her.

 *     *     *
And she will know us and cry,
remember us and weep,
gather the greens and grain
and sob,
tremble from the force of the cold
and the depth of strangeness,
and weep.
We'll tell her of the fields of thorn,
the colocynth fruit
and crimes of the wind,
the fangs of dispersal,
the mill of night and its cruelty,
the ardor of evening;
we'll speak to her of defeat,
of bitterness and the loss—
[pages 26-27]

and from the poem, Exodus, these arresting images:

The street is empty
as a monk's memory,
and faces explode in the flames
like acorns—
and the dead crowd the horizon
and doorways.
[p.32]

from Ambergris:

Our traces have all been erased,
our impressions swept away—
and all the remains
have been effaced. . .

This land is a traitor
and can't be trusted.
This land doesn't remember love,
This land is a whore
holding out a hand to the years,
as it manages a ballroom
on the harbor pier—
it laughs in every language
and bit by bit, with its hip,
feeds all who come to it.
[pp.42-3]

Ali may not be for everyone, but when he is at the top of his form (which is often) he certainly is for me.

The Micro Paintings of
 Wesley Wehr 

"Sullivan Slough," about 2" x 2"

"Willipa," about 1.5 X 3.5"

"Pacific," about 2.5" square
(Paintings reproduced courtesy of Ann Dewart, who owns them.)

About Wehr's paintings Morris Graves is reported to have said,  "When I die, I want to go to Wes Wehr heaven."  I doubted this, so I asked Graves's old friend and mine, Charlie Krafft, if it was so. He sent me the following email:

["Robert, You'll have to ask Hans Nelsen. He's the one who heard and reported that utterance. Graves obviously liked Wes' little encaustic landscapes. Good Luck! Charlie K." Hansen kindly authenticated the statement. Ed]

WESLEY WEHR, MINIMALIST, RENAISSANCE MAN

Wehr, probably in his fifties

It was (but mainly in retrospect) a wonderful time to be alive, and living in Seattle--the early 50s.

I mean, one could daily see Painter Mark Tobey on University Avenue; we shopped at the same hole-in-the-wall meat market. He bought his chop, I bought mine. I drank beer nightly in the Century Tavern, and Tobey lived right next door, up a steep flight of stairs. He was unmistakable, what with his beret and trenchcoat (I think it was) and his unAmerican way of walking up and down the street, often with his buddy Pehr or with that crazy lady, Helmi Jovenen. Wes called her "the pearl of the North," and showed his extreme generosity by looking after her, when other subjected her to ridicule and scorn.

See http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=3831

We could also see Morris Graves occasionally, who, along with Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson were famous beyond the local scene as the result of a Life Magazine article in 1953 featuring them and their work.

One stormy night a year later, I had a cup of coffee in Cherberg's Restaurant on the Ave, just down from the UW Bookstore, and had a short, friendly chat with the man on the next stool. The subject was beards. I was growing my first one, and he had had one for years. He was Morris Graves, who I recognized by several salient features. Perhaps he was out cruising, but if so I never knew it. He was polite, friendly, and nicely self-contained.

I mention this mainly to indicate what a narrow, accessible place The Ave was back then; of course there were not so many people to occupy it and not so many intense social changes had yet taken place:  wars, drugs, student demonstrations, the hippy culture--you name it. There were many.

The University itself housed an excellent art department  famous itself in a narrow world, and in its English Department (where Wehr and I were enrolled) there was the Monumental Theodore Roethke. Wehr and I had gone to the same high school, but ran with a quite different crowd. In the English Department we had both studied with Ted (as we all called this massive, brooding man, who influenced all he came in contact with, as though emitting a powerful electro-magnetic field.

I was on the editorial board of the student lit magazine, Assay, and read the quarterly submissions. Many were awful. When I became its editor, there was a submission by Wehr. It was typically minimalist poem, but a good one. Faculty Adviser Dick Eberhart urged me to publish it, when I hesitated. More than fifty years later, I remember a line or two from its four- or five-line totality: "the words came back to fit like a terrible glove."

I don't know whose words or the context, but the image was striking. I couldn't rid it from my mind, nor explain it, either. It is like a splinter under the skin that neither infects nor quite heals over. Wes's words are now mine.

*   *   *

If there is such a thing as a Minimalist Renaissance Man, it is Wehr. He became a friend of Tobey's and gave him music lessons--piano, I think, for Tobey has a piano in his upstairs loft. It was largely rumored that Tobey paid in drawings and tempera paintings, and that Wehr kept them stored under his bed. They were soon worth a fortune.

I never heard about  him selling them, but I'm sure he did--the lesser ones--and this might explain how he was employed only sporadically over many years and managed to exist on the edge of the warm, poverty-stricken environment that surrounds this and so many universities. It was this University that gave both Wes and me employment, when we were both not highly employable types.

Graves too was a friend of Wehr's and so was Guy Anderson, as were Richard Gilkey (see painting above), Jan Thompson, Ward Corley, plus a lot of lesser-knowns who never became truly famous. Wes was recognized in local art circles, partly because of his friendship with the famous, but also in part because of his remarkable talents in his various fields.

He had an ability to make strong, enduring friendships. Alas, ours was not one of those, but because our acquaintanceship lasted so many years it constituted a friendship of a kind.  Let us simply say that we came out of the same time and place, and shared a world of values.

The same names might mean much the same thing to either of us: Robert Sund, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Richard Selig, Mel LaFollette, Carolyn Kizer, and that newly arrived Poet/Novelist/Teacher, David Wagoner.

Tobey owned the Pike Place Market, where he sketched the quaint inhabitants, perhaps outquainting them in the process. I had a friend, Rick Hegland, who drew on napkins in cafes, a la, Tobey, but used the ruse more as a means to meet and bed pretty girls. There was Leon Applebaum, who painted well; scores more, so many that one could not know them all, and of course there were the dilettantes and pretenders, the dedicated and the phonies, the academics and the bohemians. (Beatniks were in the process of aborning then, and Hippies were still a long while off, evolving through a kind of process of reverse evolution, as we saw it.

Wehr handled it all well. He excelled in certain minimalist activities. I recall some stick figure cartoons at Foster's Gallery that were a notch or two above the common, and always made me laugh appreciatively. His paintings, though--had they shrunk in the wash? (They had no business being laundered.) Sometimes he utilized the encaustic method, in which pigments were mixed into beeswax and applied directly to the painting surface. This was unusual, but he did it well. It was not a method used by amateurs.

We were all regularly viewing the ongoing work of the principals, work not seem before in the annals of world painting, let alone the Pacific Northwest. These painters moved among us  sheep and we marveled at what they produced. Wehr was not in that league and knew it, but he was valued as a friend among them. He gave them something that they needed, and it was more than adulation.

What precisely that was remains unknown. It was a world closed to outsiders, the world of artists and these particular individual personalities. They were gay. Of the four most famous, only one, Kenneth Callahan was clearly heterosexual married, and with children. The others, well, they were not and sometimes played secretive jokes on the easy-going Callahan. The jokes were both put-ons and put-downs. Some were a bit cruel. Most of these were kept within the closed circle. But a few have circulated. (See Deloris Tarzan Ament's book, Iridescent Light, 2002.)

*    *    *

Humanist as Humanitarian

The difference between a Renaissance Man and a dilettante, one might say, is the degree to which he pursues his interests, becomes knowledgeable in  his fields, and contributes to them. Wehr was an anthropologist as well as artist, poet, and musician;  he worked for years at the Burke Museum of the University of Washington, where he was well known and respected. But his old friends in the arts remained primary to him, and he was devoted to them and their interests. One of these was Helmi Jovenen, pictured below by Photographer Mary Randlett.

Helmi and one of her many cats

Helmi was also a painter, one whom most art critics ignored because the light cast  around her by famous painter friends was so strong. Below is her "Goat."

Time has proved her a powerful painter in her own right, though influences of her great love, Mark Tobey, can usually be found in her work. This does not minimize it.

Wehr benefactored Hemi beyond the point most people would have, for she was a difficult and often demanding person, one in need of close attention and attendance. Wehr  never flinched, according to friends. He followed her from sanitarium to sanitarium, and saw to it that she was well taken care, when her care could have quite easily been relegated to health-care professionals. She was old, feeble, and in need. Wehr championed her.

*   *   *

I suppose a case could be made for Wehr being an important painter, on a small scale, but that is not true. The world today is full of very fine painters who will go ignored during their lifetimes and into the future. This is the situation. Wehr (see paintings above) was modest in his aspirations, at least from the standpoint of size. Much can be said in favor of a minimalist expression of art by less than a major talent. And, don't forget, he was closely surrounded by important artists, hard at work on great stuff. But all artists, all art, is regional and in a sense limited in scale and subject.

Take Provence away from Cezanne and what do you have? A great talent with no landscape to paint. Or people with such arresting faces. If you take the Pike Place Market away from Mark Tobey, you still have a man of the world and a lifetime production of unique paintings.

About Wehr and his painting,--I would like to quote my old teacher, Irving Howe, when I spoke condescendingly after class about a minor novel of Nathaniel Hawthorn. I was a young graduate student in English then. He said: "Keep room in your mind for work less than great." Or words to that effect. I got the point.

So, Wes, your paintings are admirable, and special for what you  were able to accomplish in so small a space and so long a time. They show keen aesthetic judgment. They are, ahem, quite beautiful. (I say this a begrudgingly, old near-friend.) And as time passes, I appreciate them more and more.

Robert C. Arnold
Editor

BOOKS

Kingfisher Journal Salutes:
Kenneth Rexroth

The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, Copper Canyon Press, 2003, cloth $40, paper $24.

The poet, apparently in his vigorous fifties

 We have Publisher Sam Hamill to thank for bringing back to public scrutiny Poet Kenneth Rexroth, in the form of publishing his Complete Poems.  Not his "collected," but his complete. Not an easy chore because Rexroth was prolific and has a long writing career, but his books were copyrighted by New Directions' James Laughlin over more than 50 years and a number of them kept in print. But Hamill's effort was huge, comprehesive, and respectful. He said, in effect, that time and fashion had combined to create a void in interest in this important poet, and now (then it was 2003) the time had come to bring him back to the literary public. I for one am most grateful.

Rexroth is not for everyone, though. He may be an acquired taste. Often, in his long poems, some written over four or five years, and many while traveling in Europe or, during his later years, in the Orient, his poems have a didactic turn that is not so enjoyable; they go on and on, as reflections on places where he is staying, food he is eating, political considerations of the day and place he is staying, almost as though they were compulsive diary entries, or free verse travel notes.

But Rexroth is too good a poet to bore for long, and even at his most tedious and erudite he remains engaging and entertaining. He was hugely knowledgeable and widely read. To be expansive was part of the man and the man's personality, and  his thoughts on life over much of the century just past should still be of interest to many of us.

Self-educated for the most part, he was an avid reader and taught himself numerous languages. He grew up in Chicago, Indiana, San Francisco, with little formal education. He was an auto-didact. It proved an advantage to be able to read the classics in Latin, Greek, French, and German. This shows up in many of his poems. In his later years, he traveled to Asia and learned Chinese and Japanese; was one of the early translators of Asian poetry. They taught him the fine art of brevity. He needed this. It is wonderful to read the early and middle-years poems, which go on and on, then come to the succinct poems of his maturity.

It is a big book, a thick one. It is often a hard but still pleasurable read. Still, some of the poems go on and on, seemingly endless. At his best,  he is deeply moving. The book weighs in at 751 pages. And while some of the poems are impressive just because of their sustainable length, it is some of the shorter poems of his later years that remain after reading all of the others that are more powerful and unforgettable. This may be largely the result of the influence of Buddhism and the works of its poet/monks, -Li Po and Tu Fu. But some of it is the result of Rexroth's growing maturity.

I remember back in the mid-Fifties, as a graduate student at Berkeley Cal, listening to KPFA and KPFB to poetry readings identified as being by Kenneth Rexroth and marveling at how fine they were, not learning until lately that they were probably by his contemporary Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, famous at that time and ever since for bringing out Allen Ginsberg's infamous Howl. (It is where I bought my copy in 1956, having just met Allen, after long having heard of him, his outlandish poetry, and his nefarious ways.

(Radio? Well, there wasn't much on TV, in  those days, and good radio in the Bay Area often was at a premium and of high literary content. A lot was happening there then.)

Rexroth's short poems from The Heart's Garden and the Garden's Heart; Earth Sky Trees Birds House Beasts Flowers (1967) and The Morning Star (1979) are among my favorites and I would like quote from a few of them. They show a marvelous brevity and emotional punch. This is rare in an American poet, and there are few more American than Rexroth was. I think it is was his wide travels, especially to China and Japan, that matured him both personally and as a poet.

Now to the poems:

from HAPAX

*    *    *

A heron lifts from a pool
As I come near, as it has done
For forty years and flies off
Through the same gap in the trees.
The same rush of flapping wings,
The same cry, how many
Generations of herons?
The same red tailed hawks court each other
High on the same rising air
Above a grassy steep. Squirrels leap
In the same oaks. Back at my cabin
In the twilight an owl on the same
Limb moans in his ancient language. . . .

What does it mean. This is not a question, but
     an exclamation.

from CONFUSION OF THE SENSES

Moonlight fills the laurels
Like music . . . .

A bat flies through the moonlight.
The moonlight fills your eyes
They have neither iris nor pupil
They are only globes of cold fire
Like the deer's eyes that go by us
Through the empty forest.
Your slender body quivers
And smells of seaweed.
We lie together listening
To each other breathing in the moonlight,
Do you hear? We are breathing. We are alive.

and from BLUE SUNDAY

Chestnut flowers are falling
In the empty street that smells
Of hospitals and cooking.
The radio is breaking
Somebody's heart somewhere
In a dirty bedroom. Nobody

Is listening. For ten miles
In either direction.
The houses are all empty. . . .

And from
 EARTH SKY SEA
 TREES BIRDS
 HOUSE
BEASTS FLOWERS

"Cold Before Dawn"

Cold before dawn,
Off in the misty night,
Under the gibbous moon,
The peacocks cry to each other
As if in pain.

"A Cottage in the Midst"

A cottage in the midst
Of a miniature forest.
The only events are distant
Cries of peacocks, the barking
Of more distance dogs
And  high over head
The flight of cawing crows.

"Past and Future Fall Away"

Past and future fall away.
There is only the rose and blue
Shimmer of the illimitable
Sea surface.
No place.
No time.

and, most succinct:

"A DAWN IN A TREE OF  BIRDS"

A dawn in a tree of birds
Another.
And then another.

Admittedly, these poems take some getting used to and may not be for everyone. But  to me they are choice. What I like most about them is their economy, their absence of unnecessary words or voiced sounds. You can't take away a single word, a syllable, not even an indefinite article, from most of them without lessening their impact in some significant way.

Try it.

And now look at this bit of prose/poem from the long THE HEART'S GARDEN, THE GARDEN'S HEART (p. 659). In many ways it is a return to the old prosy poems of the past and their inherent didacticism. But this one is a bit different. It contains a heartfelt message indicating his deep respect and personal acceptance of the tenants of Zen Buddhism. And this lifts the poems to a higher level, or so it seems to me.

(from page 674)

*  *  *

Except for the ancient masterpiece
That hangs in the Kakemono
The best calligraphy in this
Monastery is a white strip
Of plain typing paper, on it
In straightforward clerk's hand:
"These examples of cloud writing
By our saintly Zen  Master
Are for sale for fifteen thousand yen each."

(Ha, ha!
from page 697, another poem that is closely tied to the poem above)

X

The sound of gongs, the songs of birds,
The chanting of men, floating wisps
Of incense, drifting pine smoke,
Perfume of the death of Spring--
The warm spring clouds the mirror
With the pollen of the pines,
And thrums the strings of the lute.
Higher in the mountains the
Wild cherry is still blooming.
The driving mist tears away
And scatters the last petals,
And  tears the human heart. . . .

(from pages 680-681)

*  *  *

The great hawk went down the river
In the twilight. The belling owl
Went up the river in the
Moonlight. He returns to
Penelope, the wanderer
Of many devices, to
The final woman who weaves,
And unweaves and weaves again.
In the moon drenched night the floating
Bridge of dreams breaks off. The clouds
Banked against the mountain peak
Dissipate in the clear sky.

Kyoto, 1967

and, finally, this poem when he returnd to America and his final destination, Santa Barbara, where he taught at the university and is buried, as Hamill points out pointedly, facing the ocean and the Orient, the only person in the cemetery so specially and respectfully interred.

A SONG AT THE WINEPRESSES

for Gary Snyder

. . . Five months have passed. Here I am
Another monastery
Garden, another waterfall,
And another religion,
Perched on the mountain's shoulder
Looking out over fogbound
Santa Barbara.  Cactus
And stone make up the garden,
At its heart a heavy cross. . . .

*    *    *

Rexroth, born a Catholic, and in his old age an evolved Buddhist, seems to have been able to unite these disparate religions  in a single, complex unified vision. This is quite a feat.

He is a very American poet, while at the same time a world traveler who exposed himself to what the world had to offer, in all its multifarious forms, and strived to intellectually and spiritually digest it all. He was largely successful.

 I don't think of him as particularly Catholic or Buddhist in outlook, though. Poetry came first in his life, and his writing took many forms over the years, long and short, profound and banal. The poetry is a reflection of the various world that at different times comprised his life. Ah, what a life! He had four wives and, as the poems clearly indicate, truly loved them all, each in turn (and two concurrently).

The poems in this collection comprise his life's work. He has no ultimate answers for us, and perhaps there are none to be had, only different ways of looking a world that is ever changing, yet always remains much the same in it great sadness and confusion.

But that is how life is. Rexroth's response to his own often tortured life is unique and varied, and the poetry  he created out of it is special, too. Buried in the book's long outreach are songs and ideas that may cheer and enlighten many of us.

That is his gift. He was an important man and poet--an individual. There have been none since quite like him, and there are apt to be none to follow. His responses to life in his poems bear an uncanny response to his various times and places. Buried in these hundreds of pages of poems are many that will please and benefit us. We are Rexroth's spiritual heirs. His uniqueness may be contagious, different and distinct as we are as human beings.

There are a some people, a few of them poets, who are special, with a unique vision and the skill to communicate it in a pleasing manner.

Rexroth was one of this small number.
 

For more biographical information on Rexroth, see Hamill's introduction to the Collected Poems. And, online, please visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rexroth
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/

for more biography, poems, plus pictures, go to:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1270

BACK ISSUES of Kingfisher Journal
(Available only online)

<sub>Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 1, Poet Robert Sund Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 2, Iridescent Light Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 3, Sylvia Plath Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 4, James Wright Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.2, No.1, Richard Hugo Issue

Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 1, Theodore Roethke Commemorative Issue</sub>

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S. Merwin/Richard Ford issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 1, Robert Sund and Graham Greene Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 Saul Bellow  and Robert Creeley Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 3 Philip Whalen and Vincent Van Gogh Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 4, Number 4, J. M. Coetzee, W. S. Merwin, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter)}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.5, Number 1, Poet Frank O'Hara and Artist Larry Rivers}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 5, Number 2, Jim Harrison Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 5, Number 3, Carolyn Kizer, David Wagoner, W. S. Merwin}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 5, Number 4, Red Pine and James Salte}