From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the bohemian poet Kenneth Rexroth, (books by this author) born in South Bend, Indiana (1905). His father was a wholesale drug salesman, and Rexroth was offered a position in the business and that would have eventually made him one of the top executives. He spent a couple days thinking about that job offer and finally decided that he'd rather try to go off and become some kind of artist.

He wasn't sure what kind of artist he wanted to be, but in the 1920's he was drawn to the artistic community in Chicago's West Side, where speakeasies called the Dill Pickle Club and the Wind Blew Inn were full of politics, theater, jazz and poetry. It was there that Kenneth Rexroth became one of the first poets to try reading his poetry to the accompaniment of jazz music.

Then he got involved in left-wing politics and traveled around the country, speaking from soapboxes for the International Workers of the World, supporting himself by horse-wrangling, sheep-herding, and selling pamphlets that promised a cure for constipation.

He eventually settled in San Francisco, and California changed the way he wrote poetry. His early poems had been full of references to Greek mythology and philosophy, but after his arrival in California, he began to write poems about camping trips and fly fishing and love affairs, in addition to politics.

In the 1950's, San Francisco became the destination for lots of young poets and Rexroth invited them all over to his house, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder. He became a mentor to them, and it was he who helped organize the famous 1955 Six Gallery reading where many of the original Beat Poets first read their work to the public. Rexroth became known as the godfather of the Beat Generation.

Kenneth Rexroth published more than fifty more books of poetry and criticism in his lifetime, including The Signature of All Things (1950) and Saucy Limericks and Christmas Cheer (1980). The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth came out in 2002.

Kenneth Rexroth said, "I've never understood why I'm [considered] a member of the avant-garde...I [just] try to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life."

And, "Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust."