Carl Rakosi, 100; Poet Was Admired for His Wry Wit and Insight

Carl Rakosi, a prolific poet whose nonrhyming narratives were precise, perceptive and pithy commentaries on life as he witnessed it, has died at the age of 100.

Rakosi, cited as a major American poet by the National Poetry Foundation, died June 24 in his San Francisco home of unspecified causes associated with aging.

Marilyn Kane, his partner since the death of his wife, Leah, in 1989, said Rakosi had been in good health until the end and that only three weeks before his death had shipped off a batch of new poems to the New York Review of Books.

His work influenced younger generations of poets, including the Beats. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and co-founder of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, called Rakosi “one of the poets that the Beat Generation poets read and admired for his unadorned presentation of objective reality.”

Rakosi was especially known for his down-to-earth “Americana” series of poems and another called “Country Epitaphs,” published in 1999.

In the latter, Rakosi’s wry wit as well as insight on humanity sparkled in such lines as, “The widow Fairchild spoke into a headstone: ‘At last I know where he is at night,’ ” or when the widow Benson similarly addressed her buried husband with, “Gone but not forgiven.”

Rakosi became associated with what became known as the objectivists -- a term coined by Louis Zukofsky -- along with Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and others, when all of them were invited to contribute to a special issue of Poetry magazine funded by Ezra Pound.

“Objectivist writing,” according to Contemporary Authors, “is characterized by the presentation of concrete images; direct treatment of the subject without ornamental verbiage; and insistence on a high degree of craftsmanship, such that the poem itself is an object deliberately constructed in a form appropriate to its content.”

The term became “a bit of a nuisance,” Rakosi conceded in a 2003 interview in the American Poetry Review, because it begs definition yet cannot be defined by the diverse work of the four poets. He said Zukofsky disliked being forced into coming up with the term, but when he asked whether Rakosi minded its use, “I wrote back: ‘... No, just as long as I get into the magazine.’ ”

Diane Wakoski, writing for the 1980 edition of Contemporary Poets, described Rakosi’s work as “short and sprightly and not at all meditative, though seemingly made up of conclusions about the meaning of the world.”

“It feels like the language of a man who has been active all of his life and now has comments about everything he has experienced, slightly wry and not at all uncritical, though delivered with friendliness,” she wrote. “As a poet, he is a sort of gadfly, not taking on any epic subjects ... but stinging and buzzing about everything, a reminder that to live intelligently is never to relax or to leave unnoticed any slightly foolish thing -- the poet as commentator on all of life.”

Rakosi published more than a dozen books of poems, from “Two Poems” in 1933 through “The Old Poet’s Tale” in 1999, even though his pen was stilled for about three decades beginning in the 1930s. After he married in 1939 and became a father, he needed to earn a living. He chose social work, and found it simply didn’t mix with being a poet. Rakosi also attributed his hiatus to Marxist doubts about the social utility of poetry.

Born in Berlin on Nov. 6, 1903, Rakosi spent his early years in Hungary and in 1910 came to the U.S. with his father, a watchmaker, who remarried and raised him in Kenosha, Wis. He never again saw his mother, who died in Auschwitz.

Rakosi earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at the University of Wisconsin and later another master’s degree in social work at the University of Pennsylvania. After teaching briefly at the University of Texas in Austin, he settled into a career as a social worker, family counselor and psychologist.

Throughout that career, he was known by the name Callman Rawley.

“At the time,” he once said, “there were very few foreign names in the press, and they were all factory workers. I thought I’d never get a job at a university with a foreign name.”

He worked in Chicago, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Austin, San Antonio, St. Louis and Cleveland, and from 1945 until he retired in 1968 was executive director of the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minneapolis.

Fortuitously, as he contemplated his retirement, Rakosi received a fan letter from a British student poet who was familiar with his early work and asked whether he still wrote.

“It was like a missive from another planet,” Rakosi said in an interview with the American Poetry Review. “I had long assumed that nobody, I mean nobody, remembered my work anymore or even remembered my name. That [he] found my work so interesting meant that others of his generation might also. That knowledge rushed through me and propelled me into writing again.”

Rakosi churned out volumes of poetry, publishing the bulk of his work during his latter decades.

The National Endowment for the Arts gave him awards and grants in 1969, 1972 and 1979. He received a distinguished service award from the National Poetry Assn. in 1988 and the PEN Award in 1996 for his book “Poems, 1923-1941,” published the previous year.

In addition to Kane, Rakosi is survived by a son, George Rawley of Chico, Calif.; daughter Barbara Rawley of London; six grandchildren; and four great-grandsons.

The family has asked that memorial donations be sent to the Strybing Arboretum Society, 9th Avenue and Lincoln Way, San Francisco, CA 94122.