Carl Rakosi

Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903 – June 25, 2004) was the last surviving member of the Objectivist poets, still publishing and performing poetry well into his 90s.

Rakosi himself had reservations about the Objectivist tag, feeling that the poets involved were too different from each other to form a group in any meaningful sense of the word.

Years earlier, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Rakosi had legally changed his name to Callman Rawley, believing that he would not find work with his foreign-sounding name.

A letter from the English poet Andrew Crozier about his early poetry was the trigger that started Rakosi writing again.

Upon his death Jacket Magazine editor John Tranter observed the following: Poet Carl Rakosi died on Friday afternoon June 25 at the age of 100, after a series of strokes, in his home in San Francisco.