Notes - Section 2 - Carl Rakosi
1 Rakosi, Letter to I. P. Stone, 1923, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Palms was a little poetry magazine which withheld all authors’ signatures until each subsequent issue.
2 Rakosi, Ex Cranium, Night (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975), p. 117.
3 Personal interview with Rakosi, 28 November 1978, San Francisco.
4 Martin J. Rosenblum, “Carl Rakosi: An Interview," Margins: A Review of Little Magazines and Small Press Books, 17, 2 (1975), 19-20.
5 Rakosi, Letter to I. P. Stone, 1923, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
6 Letter received from Rakosi, 14 August 1979.
7 Personal interview with Oppen, 10 November 1978, San Francisco. [Published in Speaking with George Oppen : interviews with the poet and Mary Oppen, 1968-1987, ed. Richard Swigg (Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2012).]
8 This and other interpretations here are based on a personal interview with Rakosi, 18 January 1980, San Francisco.
9 I quote these four poems, without further notes, from Exile 2 (Autumn 1927), 36-39. They are reprinted with slight variations in Amulet (New York: New Directions, 1967), pp. 82-85.
TEXTUAL VARIATIONS: The Amulet version of “Characters” adds to the Exile original an end comma line 4, quotation marks lines 12 and 16, and changes “any” in line 15 to “a.” “Wanted” ends line 17 with an ellipsis instead of a comma, and drops the following line, “that is, one without gentile deformations.” It closes up the strophe-break between the dropped line and the next, and it breaks into three lines, lines 10-12 in Amulet, what were originally two lines in the Exile broken after “spares.” “Superproduction” is unchanged, but note that the page-break does not coincide with a strophe-break. “Revue” is titled “Revue 2,” whose page-break does coincide with a strophe-break, and which drops commas in lines 7, 8, 9, and 14 after “stings,” “day,” “heart,” and “gents.” None of these four poems were included in Selected Poems (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941).
10 L. S. Dembo, "Interview of Carl Rakosi,” Contemporary Literature, 10, 2 (Spring 1969), 182; in The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets, eds. L. S. Dembo and Cyrena N. Pondrom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), p. 195.
11 Personal interview with Rakosi, 18 January 1980, San Francisco.