Kenneth Rexroth

As Americans watch the stunning and, potentially, ominous transformation now underway in Egypt, they're going to hear a great deal about that country's Muslim Brotherhood and what its participation in a post-Hosni Mubarak regime may portend. It's a...

"Step High, Stoop Low, Leave Your Dignity Outside." This phrase appeared on the door of the historic Dill Pickle Club, a social club founded in 1914, which moved into its club space on Tooker Alley off Dearborn Street in 1915, according to records at the...

George Hitchcock, a poet, painter and UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor whose iconoclastic vision as publisher of the literary magazine "kayak" helped free American poetry from mid-20th century orthodoxies and provided an early forum for such distinguished...

Forgotten Men As you probably read, film director, Joseph Von Sternberg has sued Fox for $1 million, charging the 1959 version of "The Blue Angel" with May Britt and Curt Jurgens was made without his consent and was inferior to his 1929 version with...

It may seem a stretch to call Jim Powell's second collection of poetry, "Substrate" (Pantheon: 138 pp., $26), a book about nature, but that's exactly what it is. Human nature, philosophical nature, the nature of place and identity, as well as deftly...

"On this day of drink and depression / I think about life on our Tuling farm / where will I be on the Ninth of next year / in such hard times I can't hope to go home," wrote the poet Wei Ying-Wu in the year 756 AD. At the time he was only about 20, and...

Al Alvarez: "The Biggest Game in Town" (Picador) Back in the early 1970s, Al Alvarez wrote "The Savage God," a study of suicide which contributed in no small part to the mythology that came to surround his friend, the great poet Sylvia Plath. A poet...

The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge....

When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country's most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade. "Who Is Mark Twain?" -- a...