After having been included in the Objectivist issue of Poetry, edited by Louis Zukofsky in 1930, Carl Rakosi’s work was both rewritten and then collected in Selected Poems. This slim volume appeared in James Laughlin’s New Directions ‘The Poet of the Month’ series in 1941. At this point Rakosi gave up writing poetry and only reappeared in print with Amulet (1967), which was dedicated ‘To Andrew Crozier, who wrote the letter which started me writing again.’ In an interview with L.S. Dembo on 4 April 1968 (published in Contemporary Literature, 10.2) Rakosi answered the question as to what it was that had made him decide to start writing poetry again after that lapse of over two decades:
Letter from Carl Rakosi to Andrew Crozier, 7 June 1965
Well, that’s a very good story. I got a letter one day that had gone the rounds of a number of different cities, before it finally reached me, from a young Englishman named Andrew Crozier. He said that he had run across my name in an article by Rexroth, had looked up my work in magazines, and copied every single poem I had written. He had made a bibliography and wanted to know whether I had written any more. Well, the thought that somebody his age could care that much for my work really touched me; after all, there were two generations between us. And that’s what started me.
There’s an amusing bit to that letter. You know my legal name is Callman Rawley, not Carl Rakosi, and Crozier had a great deal of trouble tracking me down. Fortunately he was not discouraged by a letter from my publisher saying that he doubted if I was alive and that he had heard that I may have been a secret agent for the Comintern and died behind the Iron Curtain. However, this was only a rumour and Crozier must not breathe a word of this to anyone! I can guess where this rumour might have come from. My publisher must have gotten to someone who knew my old friend, Kenneth Fearing. Fearing and I had been roommates at the University. This is just the kind of prank he would play. I can hear him laughing like hell over it.
In a later interview with Tom Devaney and Olivier Brossard, published in The American Poetry Review, July/August 2003, Rakosi added that he had
got a letter from an Andrew Crozier, who described himself as a young British poet studying with Charles Olson at the University of Buffalo. Olson had suggested that he read my work. Apparently it had made such an impression on him, that he had made copies of everything that he could find in the University Library and in his discreet British way wondered whether I was still writing. I looked at the letter. I wasn’t sure I had read it right. It was just an ordinary communication, but it was like a missive from another planet. I reread it to make sure I was reading it correctly and to collect my thoughts. I had not been with poets or given any thought to poetry for almost 25 years, so it took me a few minutes to register it in my mind. I had long assumed that nobody, I mean nobody, remembered my work any more, or even remembered my name. That Crozier found my work so interesting meant that others of his generation might also. That knowledge rushed through me and propelled me into writing again.
In 1995 Crozier edited an edition of Rakosi’s Poems 1923–1941. His introduction is a model of careful tracing of bibliographical detail and its incorporation into a thorough understanding of poetic trends. The book, published by Sun & Moon Press, won the PEN award for the best book of poetry published in that year. Geoffrey O’Brien, the editor of the Library of America, wrote to Rakosi to say that reading the collection of poems was ‘like finding a new country on the map…marvelling at the freshness of what was withheld for too long. A feast of language.’ The following extract is from Crozier’s Editorial Introduction:
How much of modernism went unenacted in its permanent record of published works? Not all that much, perhaps, but one important omission to note in the list of America’s classic modern texts is the collection of Carl Rakosi’s poems which To, Publishers, and later the Objectivist Press, intended to publish. How far Rakosi himself proceeded with this intention is open to doubt, but the prospect of collecting his work in the early 1930s was serious enough for him to have discussed with Margery Latimer, his literary confidante, the wisdom of publishing with a non-commercial imprint, and to inquire about other possible publishers. We can assume that the unpublished book would have embodied and given shape to his first decade of writing and publication at a point when he was at the zenith of his early development as a poet. We can also be certain that, although he wrote only a few more poems during the remainder of the Thirties before falling silent (the alternative was literary obscurity) for decades, in the way of other ‘Objectivist’ poets, the missing book would not, in significant respects, have resembled this one, although just what its difference might have been (or yet its consequences for Rakosi’s subsequent career) is beyond conjecture. This edition of Rakosi’s early poems cannot attempt to capture the moment of confident self-appraisal which marks a deliberate and mature first book, and is in any case sixty years too late for that. Instead it offers, without significant inflection or emphasis, the annals of Rakosi’s career from 1923 to 1941.
Despite history, nevertheless, it does have something of the character of a chronologically belated first book, for what it emphatically is not is a retrospective issue of juvenilia. It is, to the contrary, a return to make good a major historical omission. Rakosi is well known now, among other things, as one of the ‘Objectivist’ poets, the associate of George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky. This group may be a construction of the late Sixties, a differentiation among the poets (including T.S. Eliot and Whittaker Chambers) who published as ‘Objectivists’, but it nonetheless has historical presence, and yet of the four only Rakosi is not known by his work of the ‘Objectivist’ epoch, which until now has been unavailable except in substantially revised forms. Thus the work on which Rakosi’s historical status is predicated, as one of that distinctive group of second-generation modernists, has remained virtually unknown, in an extraordinary intra-historical lacuna. Some of Rakosi’s readers will have seen his Selected Poems (1941) and been misled by it, for it is a valedictory gesture in which his early poems received a high-contrast treatment as cameos and vignettes; others, perhaps, will have come across some of the poems in ones and twos in contemporary anthologies or the files of old magazines. Here for the first time, however, the poems Rakosi wrote as an ‘Objectivist’, together with his other poems of the 1920s and 1930s, are brought together in one place in the original versions. To be able to read Rakosi thus historically is both to discover his true pedigree and to see his Collected Poems in the new light of its textual derivation. The reader is thus called to perform a double duty, both to attach Rakosi to the real historical past of modernism, and to reread the later Rakosi who has (no doubt partly in debt to the vicissitudes of history) been able to keep his text freely at his disposal as its own creative resource. Some readers may find that the poems collected here enable them to extend their historical understanding of Rakosi in a new and seamless unity. Others may find that the two phases of Rakosi’s career remain distinct (such is my opinion) but that here at last the vigour and resourcefulness of its early phase are brought fully into view. But readers, being readers, will decide for themselves, and however that may be, here is a virtually unknown collection of original poems which, in excess of the sheer pleasure they afford, will extend significantly our knowledge of the repertoire of modernism and our historical understanding of the ‘Objectivists’.
It would be inappropriate here to offer a critical appraisal of poems now for the first time seen all together, or to analyse their conditions of meaning, but it may be helpful to outline a more connected historical and biographical narrative of their production than can be provided by editorial annotation, even if only to restore to them something of their historical aura. Rakosi’s career as a poet is interlocked with his life as an American: the two identities have a common dynamic and are shaped by the same historical forces. Thus if in the following account I discern distinct stages in Rakosi’s early poetic career, these are also stages of assimilation and resistant self-assertion in the life of a foreign-born American citizen, whose English is the language of the external, social horizon, rather than the home, yet also the language of the autonomous self – a linguistic parenthesis around the family all the more noteworthy in a poet the epoch of whose first maturity was marked both by a strident ideological opposition of the individual and the collective, on the one hand, and on the other by a no less ideological inscription of the domestic unit as the embodiment of the American way.
[…]
Carl Rakosi and Andrew Crozier, Cambridge 1997
If we look no further than the conflict between poetry and work, thrown sharply into relief by Rakosi’s history of publication between 1923 and 1941 as it may appear to be, his career might seem damaged and his art vulnerable. But to do so is to give implicit assent to a modernist myth of the poet of the sort promulgated, for example, in Pound’s repeated interventions on behalf of writers he thought needed rescuing from financial exigency. This is to insert the relations of aristocratic patronage within the quite different social ethos of the artist as professional in a way which ignores the real social relations of the poet in the age of popular media (which began longer ago than we often think) and thus ignores the actual creative matrix of modern poetry. Equally it ignores the fact that a writing block or inhibition is part of the phenomenology of writing. The point in relation to Rakosi is that his stallings, hesitations, and diversions, even his bitter complaints about his situation as a writer, belonged fully to his writing, and contributed to it beyond any call for alleviation. It is idle to bewail the notion that a poet has not produced more when he has already written much. If one were tempted to deprecate any aspect of his career it should be borne in mind that Rakosi never committed the authentic sin against poetry of the contemporary poet, forswearing it in the name of a more adult or a more fully social self.
‘The Heifer’ was dedicated to Jean Crozier and first published as part of Tom Raworth’s ‘Infolio’ series in August 1986.
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