Carl Rakosi was born on November 6, 1903, in Berlin, Germany, and came to the United
States with his father and stepmother in 1910. He received his B.A. (1924) and M.A. (1926)
from the University of Wisconsin, and completed his Masters of Social Work at the University
of Pennsylvania in 1940. He married Leah Jaffe in 1939.
During the thirties, Rakosi was a member of a group of poets called "The Objectivists,"
which included Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen. Between 1939 and 1965,
he stopped writing in order to devote himself to social work and psychotherapy. It was not
until 1965, at the urging of Andrew Crozier, that Rakosi started to write again. Rakosi
practiced social work and psychotherapy as Callman Rawley, his legally adopted professional
name. Between 1945 and his retirement in 1968, Rakosi was Executive Director of the Jewish
Family and Children's Service in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He also conducted a private
practice in psychotherapy between 1955 and 1971.
As an important Objectivist poet, Rakosi's style of writing can be summarized by Stanley
Cooperman's comment: "What Rakosi has, delightfully, is an ability to translate emotion into
objects, tastes, smells: and these, in turn, are completely familiar- except that the
familiarity occurs in unexpected juxtapositions of sound and theme...Rakosi's work is at
once irreverent and serious; highly intellectual and simplistic."
His published works include SELECTED POEMS (1941), AMULET (1967), ERE-VOICE (1971), EX
CRANIUM, NIGHT (1975), MY EXPERIENCE IN PARNASSUS (1977), SPIRITUS I (1983), COLLECTED POEMS
(1986), THE EARTH SUITE (1997), and THE OLD POET'S TALE (1999). Besides his literary work,
including poetry, essays and book reviews, Rakosi also published articles and reviews on
social work and psychology.
In 2003, Rakosi's 100th birthday celebration was marked by several poets--including Anselm
Hollo, Lyn Hejinian, George Evans and others--reading from their own work at Rakosi's
request. Until his death on June 24, 2004, Rakosi continued to develop new poems and to
correspond with younger writers interested in his and other Objectivists' work.
