Kenneth Rexroth is in his 70's, and his books and translations are too numerous to number. He has been living in Japan lately, and, Japaneselike, has become a creature of the floating world. He writes [in The Morning Star]:

                 Time has had a stop.
                 Space is gone.
                 Grasping and consequence
                 Never existed.
                 The aeons have fallen away.

This, of course, from another Japan. Not the one busily exporting Hondas and Toyotas.

In Rexroth's Orient there are plovers that "cry in the/Dark over the high moorland" and a remarkable "mist-drenched, moonlit" spiderweb, the work of an orb-weaver, that reminds the poet of the "net of Indra, /The compound of infinities of infinities."

[Rexroth is looking] for a sort of day-to-day mysticism. A poetry of direct statement and simple clear ideas. A poetry free of superfluous rhetoric. One might call it a poetry of moments.

Victor Howes, "Poetry of...