dumbfoundry

Carl Rakosi [Guardian obituary]:

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

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. [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

Also this at the Wikipedia.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Monday, June 28, 2004 at 2:45 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.