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“[Rakosi’s] range and humanity persuade all over again that we can’t much longer talk of a ‘Pound-Williams tradition’ as a sort of accredited counter-culture in this century’s American poetry. European though he is by origin and in his sympathies, Rakosi belongs not in the margin but near to the center of what should be seen internationally as distinctively and invaluably American in twentieth-century culture.”

—Donald Davie, The Threepenny Review

The last of the Objectivist poets to win general critical recognition, Carl Rakosi is increasingly acclaimed as a central figure in American poetry. Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet represents the first full critical overview of Rakosi’s work, from his experimental work of the 1920s and early 1930s, much admired by Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, through the extraordinary flowering of his “second” career as a poet, from the late 1960s to the present. Rakosi says of his writing: “When I sit down to write, I must not forget that one does not strike an attitude in front of a mountain.”

The more than twenty-two poets and critics contributing to this collection include George Evans, Andrew Crozier, Richard Caddell, Donald Davie, Cid Corman, and Eric Mottram.

Published in honor of Rakosi’s 90th birthyear, Carl Rakosi: Man and Poet also includes a sheaf of new poems and several important prose pieces by Rakosi himself, along with an interview with and photographs of the poet.

Contents

I

Carl Rakosi, “Recent Poems”

Carl Rakosi, “Examples of Very Early Prose, from a Piece Called Equations”

Carl Rakosi, “A Note on Music and the Musical”

Jim Cohn, “A Conversation with Carl Rakosi”

Carl Rakosi, “George Oppen, the Last Days”

George Evans and Augustine Kleinzahler, “An Interview with Carl Rakosi”

II

Andrew Crozier, “Carl Rakosi in the ‘Objectivists’ Epoch”

Richard Caddel, “Rakosi and Bunting”

Jeffrey Peterson, “‘The Allotropes of Vision’: Carl Rakosi and the Psychology of Microscopy”

Kent Johnson, “Prosody and the Outside: Some Notes on Rakosi and Stevens”

Henry Weinfield, “Rakosi’s ‘Experiences in Parnassus’: A Note on Objectivist Poetics”

Andrew Crozier, “Remembering Carl Rakosi: A Conjectural Reconstruction of ‘The Beasts’”

III

Donald Davie, “Lapidary Lucidity”

Thomas Lavazzi, “The World, the Other, the Text: Dialogic Method in Rakosi’s Poetry and Prose”

Sharon Dolin, “Carl Rakosi’s Dyadic Strophe”

Lawrence Fixel, “The Mindscape of Carl Rakosi: Towards a Reading of The Collected Poems”

Robert Buckeye, “The Leap of His Poetry, the Intervention of His Life”

Cid Corman, “Caught in the Act: The Comedian as Social Worker in the Work of Carl Rakosi”

Laurie Duggan, “L’Chayim: Carl Rakosi’s Collected Poems and Collected Prose”

David Zucker, “‘A Small Metaphysical Lamp’: Carl Rakosi’s Wit”

Eric Mottram, “‘A Mind Working’: Carl Rakosi”

Ruby Riemer, “Carl Rakosi and the Metaphoric Mode”

David Guest, “Conveyances: Oral History in the Work of Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff”

Tony Baker, “Variations on a Theme of Carl Rakosi”

Linda Barnes, “Urbane Sublimity: Carl Rakosi’s Spiritus, I”

Burt Kimmelman, “George Oppen and the Other: Carl Rakosi’s ‘Old Poet’s Tale’”

IV

Robert Buckeye, “Materials Towards a Study of Carl Rakosi”

Andrew Crozier, “A Handlist of Carl Rakosi’s Early Poems, 1923-1941”