Collected Prose of Carl Rakosi

Author: Carl Rakosi

Publisher: National Poetry Foundation (1983)

The Collected Prose consists of seven pieces of varying lengths: “Day Book,” a revised and extended version of the prose passage of the same name which had appeared in Ex Cranium, Night; “My Experiences in Parnassus,” a short, satirical account of how to achieve fame as a poet; “The Artist,” a fictional epistolary story which had previously appeared in Ex Cranium, Night; “The Ordeal of Moses,” a brief satire about the nature of ‘Jewish’ art; “Observations,” a collection of aphorisms and meditations on life, art and identity; “Scenes from My Life,” a collection of nine autobiographical vignettes addressing his relationships with his parents, his college friendships with Margery Latimer, Kenneth Fearing, and Leon Serabian, Louis Zukofsky and the “Objectivist” label, Eugene McCarthy, Marya Zaturenska, Jorge Luis Borges, George Oppen, and Robert Duncan; and “Little Meditations,” another collection of meditative aphorisms.