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Rexroth’s San FranciscoSelected columns from the San Francisco
Examiner (1960-1967) January-July 1960 August-December 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 January-September 1966 September 1966-June 1967 (trip
around the world) 1968-1969 1970-1972 1973-1974 1975
Introduction
The association was an odd one. Although Rexroth was by that time a well-known figure in the Bay Area, he was known primarily as a political and cultural radical, and even (somewhat misleadingly) as “the godfather of the Beat Generation.” But he was willing to work for the Examiner as long as they gave him complete freedom to write whatever he wanted. They did so until mid-1967, when they fired him after he wrote a particularly scathing article on the American police. He then shifted to the San Francisco Bay Guardian (1967-1972) and San Francisco Magazine (1967-1975). Altogether he wrote over 800 columns for those three publications. I’ve read them all with interest and often with astonishment at his detailed practical knowledge of so many facets of life. But many of them are inevitably ephemeral and would be of limited interest to present-day readers. For this online selection I have chosen about a tenth of them which I think retain some contemporary relevance or offer intriguing glimpses of earlier days. His Examiner columns often appeared on the same page with reactionary columns by people such as Barry Goldwater and reactionary editorials by the owner, William Randolph Hearst Jr. This strange and challenging context often makes for lively reading. Somehow Rexroth manages to convey unconventional and at times even rather subtle ideas to ordinary readers with only the slightest modification of the style he used when addressing more hip or radical or sophisticated audiences. Nevertheless, such columns could hardly be expected to be as consistently excellent as his more carefully composed works. He himself considered them primarily as a job to help pay the rent while he did other writing that he took more seriously. They were usually dashed off at the last minute, and the Examiner did not always do a very careful job of proofreading them. I have silently corrected obvious typos, added an occasional comma that seems to be necessary to make the sense clear, and taken the liberty of composing new titles (the original titles were composed by Examiner editors and often do not give a very good idea of what Rexroth is actually talking about). Footnotes and bracketed comments are mine. Omissions are indicated by bracketed ellipses: [...]. For the moment I have not included any of the Bay Guardian columns, which tended to be almost exclusively and depressingly “political” in the most narrow and quickly dated sense (specific denunciations of LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and countless lesser politicians and officials who are now largely forgotten). If sufficient interest is shown, I may eventually post a more extensive selection that will include such articles. But personally I find his more modest and “positive” efforts to encourage participatory communitarian tendencies, and his accounts of how he himself deals with the day-to-day problems and possibilities of life, more enduringly interesting than his repetitive grumblings about how everything is going down the tubes, which he tended to get increasingly into in the late sixties and early seventies. This selection is substantially the same one that I proposed to several publishers in 1985. At that time none were sufficiently interested, and I put the project on the shelf. I still think it would make a nice and probably reasonably popular book (ironically, there is a very attractive, profusely illustrated French edition of these same columns). But meanwhile, while we’re waiting for American publishers to take interest in the vast, scarcely tapped trove of unpublished Rexroth writings, the advent of the Web has made it possible to make such material generally accessible without worrying about printing costs or potential sales. In my little book The Relevance of Rexroth I have presented my own views on Rexroth (including criticisms of some of the views he expresses in these columns). Here, as in the other Rexroth writings posted at this website, I have let him speak for himself. I think you’ll find him both entertaining and instructive, and maybe even inspiring. Ken Knabb
Table of Contents for Rexroth’s San Francisco (selected columns from the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco magazine). Copyright 1960-1975 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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