SOURCE: "The Holiness of the Real: The Short Poems of Kenneth Rexroth," in Breaking Through to the Other Side: Essays on Realization in Modern Literature, Whitston Publishing Company, 1994, pp. 133-36.

In this excerpt, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's erotic Love Poems of Marichiko.

The Love Poems of Marichiko represents an order of love verse strikingly different in some ways from all Rexroth's other love verse and remarkable for a man in his late sixties. Marichiko is a sequential verse narrative of sixty short verses (supposedly written by a Japanese "poetess" named Marichiko) that Rexroth claims to have translated in Japan during the 1970s. Actually, Rexroth did not translate the poems; he wrote them. I have considered at length elsewhere why Rexroth perpetrated this curious ruse. Let it suffice to say here that the poems constitute an unforgettable union of passion and poignancy, crystallized by a context of love bliss and...