Carl Rakosi, 100; Poet (Pound protege)
Hyfler/Rosner
Carl Rakosi
A protégé of Ezra Pound and member of the Objectivists in
the 1930s, he took a 30-year break from poetry to work as a
psychotherapist
Michael Carlson
Monday June 28, 2004
The Guardian
Only one degree of separation links Carl Rakosi, who has
died aged 100, with the poets of Victorian England, and that
link is Ezra Pound. Rakosi made his mark in the Objectivist
issue of Poetry magazine, in 1931, as a Pound protégé. But
Rakosi and his fellow poets, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff
and Louis Zukofsky, were already moving past Pound's
modernism, which seemed to them almost as moribund as the
tradition it was trying to overthrow.
Yet the Objectivists were primarily the children of Jewish
immigrants, and that experience linked their work far more
than any "objective" style. Neither were they allied
politically with Pound. It is no coincidence that Rakosi and
Oppen, both Marxists, each took a long break from poetry.
Rakosi spent three decades as a social worker before being
"rediscovered" by the British poet Andrew Crozier.
Rakosi was born in Berlin. A year later, his parents
separated, and he spent six years with his mother's family
in Hungary. His father moved to the US, working as a
watchmaker in Chicago, where he befriended socialist
thinkers such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnicht. In 1910
Rakosi's stepmother came to Hungary to take Rakosi and his
brother to America.
The family eventually settled in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and
after starting university at Chicago aged 17, Rakosi
transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where,
surrounded by what he later described as "10,000 Babbitts",
he edited the literary magazine.
After college he went to Australia as a mess boy, and worked
with disturbed children in New York, which led him to return
to Wisconsin to take a master's degree in psychology. For
the next 15 years, he drifted: he began further degrees in
law and medicine, taught English, and worked in a variety of
jobs.
All the while he was writing poetry, which was published in
magazines as prestigious as the Nation. In 1929 he changed
his name, legally, to Callman Rawley, which he thought - in
disguising his immigrant origins - would lead to quicker
acceptance in literary circles. His writing was influenced
strongly by the giants of American modernism: Pound's focus
on the image, the musical language of Wallace Stevens, the
inventive forms of ee cummings, and William Carlos Williams,
whose spare lines and concern with everyday things helped
redefine Rakosi's poetry.
Through correspondence with Pound, Rakosi was introduced to
Zukofsky and the other Objectivists. Although the
Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine linked them as a group,
to Rakosi, Zukofsky's strict formal experiments and
Reznikoff's "found poetry" were as different to each other
as Oppen's pared down lines were to his own relaxed, almost
casual rhythms.
The Objectivists did for American poetry what Henry Miller
did for American fiction at the same period, opening it up
and saying that the experience of being the child of
immigrants is as worthy of being the subject of literature
as that of the literary establishment. None of them,
however, were accepted by that establishment. But in 1941,
James Laughlin, another Pound disciple, with his own small
press, published Rakosi's Selected Poems as an early New
Directions book.
By then, Rakosi had earned an MA in social work at the
University of Pennsylvania. As a Marxist, he became
convinced poetry was not an instrument for social change. "I
fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a
poet," he said later, and for nearly 30 years he worked as a
psychotherapist with disturbed children in St Louis,
Cleveland, and Minneapolis.
Then, in 1965, Crozier, then a student of Charles Olson's at
State University of New York-Buffalo got in contact with
Rakosi, and his interest inspired Rakosi to begin writing
again. In 1967, New Directions, by now a successful
publisher, brought out Amulet, which included his older work
alongside new poetry. This was followed by Ere-Voice (1971)
and, from Black Sparrow, Ex Cranium, Night (1975). His
Collected Poems was published by the National Poetry
Foundation in 1986, and Poems 1923-1941, published by Sun
and Moon Press in 1989, won a PEN award. Etruscan Books in
this country has published new work, in Earth Suite (1997)
and Old Poets Tale (1999).
Although Rakosi, in poems such as New Orleans Transient
Bureau, 1934, captures the rhythms of real speech, as it
affects the reality of daily life, he could be wry on a
larger scale. His Americana series contains a brief poem
called The Blank Page:
What's the matter? Have you nothing to say about America? Do
you not dare be grandiose?
Unassuming and engaged, Rakosi had much to say about
America. His poetry may be richer for his three decades of
silence, but even in its reduced form, his body of work
marked him out as a major modern poet.
His wife, Leah, predeceased him. He is survived by two sons.
· Carl Rakosi, poet and psychotherapist, born November 6
1903; died June 25 2004