Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenneth Rexroth

It sounds casual, almost like small talk, but Rexroth is quietly staking a claim to authority without the usual credential-flashing. “I’ve been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life” is less a boast than a positioning move: he’s placing himself in the room, on the bandstand’s edge, close enough to feel the heat and timing. For a poet who spent decades translating, hosting radio shows, and acting as a West Coast bridge between avant-garde art and public culture, “around” matters. He’s not saying he played; he’s saying he listened, lingered, learned the social grammar.

The subtext is that jazz isn’t just a genre you “appreciate.” It’s a lived scene, a network of late nights, rehearsal spaces, gigs, conversations, temperament. Rexroth’s phrasing implies intimacy with the labor and the people, not simply the sound. That small humility - “around,” not “inside” - also reads as respect for jazz’s professional seriousness, especially in an era when plenty of literary types tried to borrow jazz’s cool as decorative texture.

Contextually, Rexroth came up as modernism and bebop rewired American aesthetics at the same time: speed, improvisation, variation, and a distrust of polite form. The line acts like a soft preface to criticism or commentary: trust me, I’m not theorizing jazz from a safe distance. I’m reporting from proximity. It’s a poet’s way of saying the same thing jazz says about itself: what matters is time spent in the groove.