Quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

Sottoportico San Zaccaria" It rains on the roofs As it rains in my poems Under the thunder We fit together like parts Of a magic puzzle Twelve winds beat the gulls from the sky And tear the curtains And lightning glisters On your sweating breasts Your face topples into dark And the wind sounds like an army Breaking through dry reeds We spread our aching bodies in the window And I can smell the odor of hay In the female smell of Venice

Suchness In the theosophy of light, The logical universal Ceases to be anything more Than the dead body of an angel. What is substance? Our substance Is whatever we feed our angel. The perfect incense for worship Is camphor, whose flames leave no ashes. from Love is an Art of Time (1974) in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, 702

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

We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns towards you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence. Speak of a tree full of leaves, Of a flying bird, the new Moon in the sunset, a poem, A book, a person - all the Casual hfrankealing speech Of your resonant, quiet voice. — Kenneth Rexroth, from "Loneliness," The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth , (New Directions January 17, 1966)

Give me your mouth. Your grace is as beautiful as sleep. You move against me like a wave That moves in sleep. Your body spreads across my brain Like a bird filled summer; Not like a body, not like a separate thing. But like a nimbus that hovers Over every other thing in all the world — Kenneth Rexroth, from " When We with Sappho," The Phoenix and the Tortoise (New Directions, 1944)

We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns towards you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence. Speak of a tree full of leaves, Of a flying bird, the new Moon in the sunset, a poem, A book, a person - all the Casual healing speech Of your resonant, quiet voice. — Kenneth Rexroth, from "Loneliness," The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth , (New Directions January 17, 1966)

Your body spreads across my brain Like a bird filled summer; Not like a body, not like a separate thing, But like a nimbus that hovers Over every other thing in all the world. from "When We with Sappho,

O heart, heart, so singularly Intransigent and corruptible, Here we lie entranced by the starlit water, And moments that should each last forever Slide unconsciously by us like water. — Kenneth Rexroth, from "Another Spring," One Hundred Poems from the Chinese . (New Directions January 17, 1971) Originally published 1956.

Love slays what we have been, That we may be what we were not. from "The Dragon and the Unicorn

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

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.