Kenneth Patchen

• Born: December 13, 1911
• Birthplace: Niles, Ohio
• Died: January 8, 1972
• Place of death: Palo Alto, California

Other literary forms

Although mainly known as a poet, Kenneth Patchen (PAHT-chehn), a dedicated experimentalist, rejected normal genre distinctions, participating in radical new forms of prose, concrete poetry, poetry and jazz, picture poems, and surrealistic tales and fables, as well as other innovations. His first published prose work, a short story titled “Bury Them in God,” appeared in a 1939 collection by New Directions. Two years later, in 1941, he published his most celebrated prose work, a pacifist antinovel titled The Journal of Albion Moonlight. After that, his prose work began to appear irregularly between the publication of his numerous books of poetry.

Achievements

An extremely prolific writer, Kenneth Patchen published roughly a book a year during his thirty-six-year writing career from 1936 to his death in 1972. Besides poetry, his artistic works consisted of prose and drama, silkscreen prints, paintings and drawings, hand-painted books, and even papier-mâché animal sculptures. Holding strongly to his belief in the “total artist,” Patchen experimented with a wide variety of artistic forms, influencing a generation of poets with his creative energy.

Patchen also played a role in initiating the Poetry-and-Jazz movement in San Francisco during the 1950’s. With Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Patchen began reading his poetry to jazz accompaniment at the Cellar, a small club in San Francisco, in 1957. Patchen’s own innovations in this area had begun six years earlier when he read and recorded his Fables and Other Little Tales (1953) to a jazz background. As early as 1945, in his novel The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, Patchen had presented a two-page list of “the disks you’ll have to get if you want a basic jazz library.”

In addition to the Poetry-and-Jazz movement, Patchen made important contributions to at least three other areas of poetic experimentation. First, in the 1950’s, Patchen began to work with surrealistic fable and verse forms in such works as Fables and Other Little Tales, Hurrah for Anything, and Because It Is. Second, as an early experimenter in concrete poetry—particularly in Cloth of the Tempest, Sleepers Awake (1946), and Panels for the Walls of Heaven—Patchen provided American poetry with a uniquely visual poetic form in which the poet is concerned with making an object to be perceived rather than merely read. Patchen’s third contribution, also involving visual expression, is his fusion of painting and writing forms. Many of Patchen’s books include self-painted covers, drawings printed with poems, and picture-poem posters. Such “painted books” as The Dark Kingdom, Panels for the Walls of Heaven, Red Wine and Yellow Hair, and Poemscapes illustrate Patchen’s impressive skill as a painter. Although he usually refused to exhibit his paintings, claiming that he preferred bookstores to art galleries, in 1969, a few years before his death, he finally conducted a one-man art show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Patchen received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936, the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry in 1946, the Shelley Memorial Award in 1954, and a cash award of ten thousand dollars in 1967 from the National Foundation of Arts and Humanities for his lifelong contribution to American letters. A small but moving volume titled Tribute to Kenneth Patchen (1977), published after the poet’s death, attests the great respect in which he was held by contemporaries, publishers, critics, and friends.

Biography

Kenneth Patchen was born into a working-class milieu in Ohio’s industrial and mining area, an environment that helped to forge his reputation in the late 1930’s and 1940’s as a significant proletarian poet. His father, Wayne Patchen, had spent more than twenty-five years working in the steel mills, where both Patchen and his brother also worked for a time. As Larry R. Smith writes in his biography Kenneth Patchen (1978), “much like D. H. Lawrence’s mining background in England, Patchen’s roots in a hard working yet culturally wasted community of poor and semi-poor gave him an early sense of strength and violation.” In his early childhood, the family moved to nearby Warren, Ohio, where Patchen received most of his schooling. The town is located a few miles from Garretsville, the birthplace of Hart Crane.

In Warren, Patchen began writing poetry. He also spent two summers working in the steel mills with his brother and father to earn tuition money for his brief attendance at the University of Wisconsin in 1929. Following this successful year at the university, Patchen wandered around the United States and Canada, working at odd jobs, writing poetry, attending Columbia University for a while, and eventually meeting Miriam Oidemus, the daughter of Finnish immigrants, whom he was to marry in June, 1934, and with whom he would spend the rest of his life.

With the exception of a brief period in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a short stay in Hollywood in 1937, the Patchens lived in and around Greenwich Village from 1934 to 1950. Although his marriage was happy, Patchen spent a good part of his life in intense physical pain caused by a serious back disability that began in 1937 when Patchen tried to separate the locked bumpers of two cars that had collided. In 1950, a writer’s committee, consisting of such notables as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, and William Carlos Williams, gave a series of readings to earn money for Patchen to have corrective surgery.

Finding a renewed sense of mobility after the surgery, Patchen and his wife moved to San Francisco, where, in 1954, he befriended Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with whom he collaborated in 1957, after a second spinal fusion, to create the Poetry-and-Jazz movement. By 1956, the Patchens were living in Palo Alto, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, which was to become an important artistic center. In 1959, following a surgical mishap after prescribed exploratory surgery, further surgery was canceled and Patchen returned to Palo Alto to a bedridden life of almost constant pain. The 1960’s, despite his disability, were productive years for Patchen, resulting in such books as Because It Is, Hallelujah Anyway, But Even So, and The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, as well as several recordings of his works and an exhibition of his art in Washington, D.C.

By the time of his death in January, 1972, Patchen had gained a sound reputation as one of America’s most influential avant-garde poets and “painters of poems.” His experimentation with new forms, whether poetic or painterly, as well as his insistence on living the life of the “total artist,” despite excruciating pain and deteriorating health, points unmistakably toward a quality that made him the greatly respected artist he was: action even in the face of chaos and pain. “The one thing which Patchen cannot understand, will not tolerate, indeed,” wrote Henry Miller, “is the refusal to act. . . . Confronted with excuses and explanations, he becomes a raging lion.”

Analysis

One way to trace the development of Kenneth Patchen’s vast poetic output is to posit a shift from the emphasis on class-consciousness and protest in the poetry of the 1930’s to 1940’s to a later concern with a sense of wonder and with the spiritual and irrational side of existence. Another and perhaps more compelling approach is to view the entire body of Patchen’s work as both spiritual and revolutionary, marked by the antiestablishment anger of the Old Testament prophets, who condemned the greed of the secular world while celebrating the coming of a just and sacred Kingdom of God.

Before the Brave

In his first book of poetry, Before the Brave, Patchen combines a vision of revolution with the wonder of the spiritual world. While lashing out angrily at the “sightless old men in cathedrals of decay” (“Letter to the Old Men”) and the police with “their heavy boots grinding into our faces . . .” (“A Letter to a Policeman in Kansas City”), he still confirms, in Whitmanesque terms, the ability of humanity to seize control of events:

O be willing to wait no longer.Build men, not creeds, seed not soil—O raise the standards out of reach.new men new world new life.

In contrast to the world of the “culture-snob” and the emptiness of “civic pride,” Patchen’s prophetic voice calls out for a world of unity and wonder, for a “jangling eternity/ Of fellowship and spring where good and law/ Is thicker love and every day shall spawn a god.”

First Will and Testament

In another of his so-called protest books of the 1930’s, First Will and Testament, Patchen again combines or synthesizes the dual impulses of spiritual wonder and revolutionary zeal. In a poem called “A Revolutionary Prayer,” he cries: “O great good God/ I do not know that this fistful of warm dirt/ Has any mineral that wills that the young die. . . .” Here the miner’s son, Patchen, looks to the lesson of the ore that he, his father, and his brother had mined to confirm the injustice of war. Similarly, in “The Soldier and the Star,” Patchen contrasts the grace, wonder, and wholeness of nature with the destruction of warfare. In the opening four lines, he writes: “Rifle goes up:/ Does what a rifle does/ Star is very beautiful:/ Doing what a star does.”

Antiwar poetry

In all Patchen’s poetry, life’s energy and fruitfulness is contrasted with the mechanical, dead, and often violent world of the war makers and the ruling elite. Throughout his work runs a triple vision that serves to direct his approach to the world. First is the painful reality of alienation and corruption, of a brutal, ruling monolith that forces people to move toward violence and control rather than growth and human fulfillment. In his earlier poetry, this force often takes the form of an actual ruling class in the language of Marxist ideology, while in later works, it appears as the nebulous darker side of human nature depicted by Mark Twain in his later works. Second is the need for humankind to become engaged in or committed to the fullness of life, unity, and social solidarity. Third is the sense of wonder and imaginative power that opposes the brutal side of human nature.

The corruption and alienation that Patchen sees running rampant in society are characterized largely by capitalist greed and human violence. Although the first evil is emphasized in his earlier works, the second emerges and is stressed throughout his entire poetic career. “War is the lifeblood of capitalism; it is the body and soul of fascism,” wrote Patchen in his novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight, and it is mainly in his poetry that Patchen vividly depicts the bloody force of war. In such poems as “I DON’T WANT TO STARTLE YOU” and “Harrowed by These Apprehensions” (First Will and Testament), as well as in the later, more subtle antiwar works such as “In the Courtyard of Secret Life,” from his 1957 book, When We Were Here Together, Patchen’s pacifist sentiments, which he held his entire life, are powerfully expressed.

Love as redemption

Faced with chaos, alienation, and violence, Patchen believed that the poet must not fall into apathy or bitterness but rather must adopt a worldview in which belief, love, and action are possible. In the face of nothingness, Patchen offers the richness of being; in the face of chaos, he offers unity and order; and in the face of despair and confusion, he offers belief. In the poem “No One Ever Works Alone,” from Panels for the Walls of Heaven, Patchen further pursues his prophetic faith that a new order will soon sweep away the injustice and evil of the outmoded system. “O Speak Out!,” urges Patchen, “Against the dead trash of their ’reality’/ Against ’the world as we see it.’/ Against ’what it is reasonable to believe.’”

Ultimately, for Patchen, the path that leads from destruction to unity is the path of love. “There is only one power that can save the world,” writes Patchen in “The Way Men Live Is a Lie” (An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air), “and that is the power of love for all men everywhere.” Though it is a rather prosaic statement, this affirmation illustrates the poet’s unswerving belief in the need for commitment to and engagement in the energy of life as opposed to the forces of death that always threaten to engulf humanity. Love, both sexual and spiritual, is an important weapon in that struggle.

A sense of wonder

Apart from love, another element that maintains unity in life, and one that is particularly evident in Patchen’s later books, is a sense of wonder, or, one might say, childlike amazement toward life. In a 1968 interview with Gene Detro, Patchen speakes of the absolute necessity of childlike wonder. Losing this sense, for Patchen, would be equivalent to death. In “O Fiery River” (Cloth of the Tempest), Patchen warns that “men have destroyed the roads of wonder,/ And their cities squat like black roads/ In the orchards of life.”

For Patchen, as for such Romantic poets as William Blake and William Wordsworth, the most perfect paradigm for wonder is to be found in the innocence of the child. In describing the wonder that exists between two people in sexual union, for example, Patchen speaks of how coming to his beloved Miriam’s “wonder” (“For Miriam”) is “Like a boy finding a star in a haymow” (The Teeth of the Lion). Like Blake in his Songs of Innocence (1789), Patchen finds a kind of salvation from injustice and pain in the world of childlike wonder. “Children don’t want to know,” writes Patchen in “O What a Revolution,” a prose poem from The Famous Boating Party, and Other Poems in Prose, “They want to increase their enjoyment of not knowing.” In “This Summer Day” (An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air), the child serves as a metaphor for both life and death. “O Death,” writes Patchen, “must be this little girl/ Pushing her blue cart into the water,” while “All Life must be this crowd of kids/ watching a hummingbird fly around itself.”

As vividly as tanks and the “rustless gun” represent, for Patchen, the horror of history and the blind destructiveness of patriotism, the image of the child and childlike wonder (depicted often in collections of tales and verse such as Fables and Other Little Tales, Hurrah for Anything, and But Even So) represents the innocence, energy, and potential of life’s richness. The critics who accuse Patchen of being a poet of dreary negativism ignore the fact that, throughout his poetry, Patchen offers a continuous prophecy of a world of wonder and delight that will inevitably shine through the universal darkness. As a revolutionary and a prophet, Patchen was never far removed from the vision of humanity’s enormous potential.

Bibliography

Morgan, Richard G. Kenneth Patchen: A Collection of Essays. New York: AMS Press, 1977. A comprehensive and diverse collection of articles and essays on Patchen, with a foreword by Miriam Patchen. From reviews and radio interviews to critical analyses, this is a must for all who are interested in this poet.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Kenneth Patchen: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Paul Appel, 1978. A comprehensive, annotated, descriptive bibliography of primary and secondary works. Essential for the Patchen scholar.

Nelson, Raymond. Kenneth Patchen and American Mysticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. A full-length and important literary criticism of Patchen that attempts to secure him a place among contemporary poets without the stigma of “cultist following.” Discusses his major works and his leanings toward the mystical in his poetry. An appreciative study of Patchen that concedes, however, that his work is uneven.

Nin, Anais. The Diary of Anais Nin, 1939-1944. Vol. 3. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. Contains a short biographical sketch of Patchen during his New York days. Favorably analyzes his work The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

Pekar, Harvey, et al. The Beats: A Graphic History. Art by Ed Piskor et al. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. Comics legend Harvey Pekar provides a history of the Beat poets in this graphic book. Contains an entry on and references to Patchen.

Smith, Larry R. Kenneth Patchen. Boston: Twayne, 1978. This study attempts to correct misunderstandings about Patchen by placing him in the context of his independence. Notes that his love poetry combines “hard realism with a visionary idealism.” Discusses also his “poetry-jazz” form, which was one of his highest achievements.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America. Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 2000. An authorized biography of Patchen by Smith, who completed an earlier critical study of Patchen’s works published by Twayne, and a video docudrama Kenneth Patchen: An Art of Engagement in 1989. Here this American rebel artist stands exposed as a person of great strength and perseverance. His and wife Miriam’s story is one of the great love stories in American literature.