Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen
Born	December 13, 1911(1911-12-13) Niles, Ohio
Died	January 8, 1972(1972-01-08) (aged 60) Palo Alto, California
Nationality	United States
Genres	American poetry
Spouse(s)	Miriam Patchen
Influences E. E. Cummings, Walt Whitman, William Blake
Influenced Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac

Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist. Though he denied any direct connection, Patchen's work and ideas regarding the role of artists paralleled those of the Dadaists, the Beats, and the Surrealists. Patchen's ambitious body of work also foreshadowed the popularity of poetry recited with jazz accompaniment. He later experimented with visual poetry which he called his "picture poems."

Life

Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His father Wayne made his living in the nearby steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio which Patchen would reference in his poems "The Orange Bears" and "May I Ask You A Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?" Patchen kept a diary from the age of twelve and read Dante, Homer, Burns, Shakespeare and Melville.

I remember you would put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they'd be so covered with soot
You couldn't tell what they were anymore.

“

”

from "The Orange Bears",
Red Wine and Yellow Hair (1949)

The family included his mother Eva, his sisters Ruth, Magel, Eunice, and Kathleen, and his brother Hugh. In 1926, while Patchen was still a teenager, his younger sister Kathleen was struck and killed by an automobile. Her death deeply affected him and he would later pay tribute to her in his 1948 poem "In Memory of Kathleen." In 1964/65 parts of the poem were set to music, as A Dream of the Lost Seven Stars, by English composer David Bedford.

He first began to develop his interest in literature and poetry while he was in high school, and the New York Times published his first poem while he was still in college. He attended Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College (which was part of the University of Wisconsin), in Madison, Wisconsin, for one year, starting in 1929. Patchen had a football scholarship there, but had to drop out when he first injured his back. After leaving school, Patchen travelled across the country, taking itinerant jobs in such places as Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia.

Next, Patchen moved to the East Coast, living in New York City and Boston. While in Boston, in 1933, he met Miriam Oikemus at a friend's Christmas party. At the time, Miriam was a college freshman at Massachusetts State College in Amherst. The two kept in touch and Patchen started sending her the first of many love poems. They soon fell in love and decided to get married. First Patchen took her to meet his parents in Youngstown, then they got married on June 28, 1934 in nearby Sharon, Pennsylvania.

During the 1930s the couple moved frequently between New York City's Greenwich Village and California, as Patchen struggled to make a living as a writer. Despite his constant struggle, his strong relationship with Miriam supported him and would continue to support him through the hardships that plagued him for most of his adult life.

In 1937, while trying to fix a friend's car, he suffered a permanent spinal injury which was to give him extreme and recurring pain and which required multiple surgical procedures. It was relieved somewhat by an operation in 1950, at which point he and Miriam had moved to San Francisco. Although the first two operations eased some of his pain, a final third procedure, which failed, left him in considerable pain and disabled him for the rest of his life.

In Patchen's final years, he and his wife moved to a modest house in Palo Alto, California, where he created many of his distinctive painted poems, produced while confined to his bed. He died in Palo Alto on January 8, 1972.

Throughout his life-time Patchen was a fervent pacifist, as he made clear in much of his work. He was strongly opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II. In his own words: "I speak for a generation born in one war and doomed to die in another." This controversial view, coupled with his immobilization, prevented wider recognition or success beyond what was considered a "cult" following.

Career

Patchen's first book, Before the Brave, was published by Random House in 1936. This was followed in 1939 by First Will and Testament and then, in 1941, by The Journal of Albion Moonlight. His first collections of poetry were his most political and led to his being championed, early on, as a "Proletariat Poet". This description, which Patchen rejected, never stuck however, since his work varied widely in subject, style and form. As his career progressed, Patchen continued to push himself into more and more experimental styles and forms, developing, along with writers such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth, what came to be known as jazz poetry. He also experimented with his child-like "painted poems," many of which were to be published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us.

After the appearance of his first book, he and Miriam traveled to the Southwest on a Guggenheim Fellowship, moving on to Hollywood in 1938 where he tried writing film scripts and worked for the WPA. His next book of poems First Will and Testament drew the attention of James Laughlin, then launching New Directions Publishing as a student at Harvard. Laughlin's decision to publish Patchen's work started a relationship that would last for the remainder of both men's careers. In addition to their professional relationship, Patchen and Laughlin also became good friends.

The lions of fire
Shall have their hunting in this black land

Their teeth shall tear at your soft throats
Their claws kill

O the lions of fire shall awake
And the valleys steam with their fury
...
Because you have turned your faces from God
Because you have spread your filth everywhere.

“

”

from "The Lions of Fire Shall Have Their Hunting"
The Teeth of the Lion (1942)

Patchen first started painting in 1942 to make cover illustrations for his book The Dark Kingdom. Patchen’s biographer Larry Smith has noted that Patchen pioneered ".. the painted book, the concrete poem in which type set is used to paint the poem on the page, the drawing-and-poem form, the poetry-prose experiments of his anti-novels, and finally the picture-poem form." During the course of a long and varied career, Patchen also tried his hand at writing experimental novels such as The Journal of Albion Moonlight and The Memoirs of A Shy Pornographer, as well as the radio play The City Wears A Slouch Hat. Patchen's Collected Poems was first published in 1969.

One of Patchen's biggest literary supporters was the novelist Henry Miller who wrote a long essay on Patchen, entitled Patchen: Man of Anger and Light in 1946. Patchen also had a close, lifelong friendship with the poet E.E. Cummings that began when they were both living in Greenwich Village in the 40's. Later, in the 1950s, Patchen became a major influence on the younger Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dick McBride who visited Patchen when they were in California, participating in the West Coast literary scene. However, once the Beats' popularity grew, Patchen disliked being associated with them and was highly critical of the their glorification of drug use and what he perceived to be a strong desire for media attention and fame. Patchen referred to "Ginsberg and Co." and the media hype surrounding them as a "freak show." In 1954 Patchen received a $10,000 grant for his contribution to American literature, from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities.

Miller writes: "Patchen’s pacifism is closely tied to what he sees as the loss of innocence in society, the corrupted human spirit, and is often expressed with animals. Such is the case with the forbidding 'The Lions of Fire Shall Have Their Hunting.'"

Musical collaborations and recordings

In 1942 Patchen collaborated with the composer John Cage on the radio play The City Wears A Slouch Hat. In the 1950s Patchen collaborated with jazz bassisit Charles Mingus, reading his poetry with Mingus' group, although no known recordings of the collaboration exists.

In the late 1950s Moe Asch of Folkways Records recorded Patchen reading his poetry and excerpts from one of his novels. These recordings were released as Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada (1959), Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1960) and Kenneth Patchen Reads His Love Poems (1961). A further record, From Albion Moonlight, recorded later at Patchen's home, was released by Folkways in 1972.

The Jazz in Canada album was recorded in Vancouver, the same week as a live performance for CBC Radio. The record, also released on Folkways, included a mimeographed pamphlet featuring poems and credits for the jazz group who played on the record, the Allan Neil Quartet. It was re-released on CD in the Locust Music label in 2004.

On January 21, 2008, El Records released the record Rebel Poets in America, which included classic poetry readings with jazz accompaniment by both Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, including such Patchen as "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves" and "I Went To The City." These Patchen recordings were made in collaboration with the musician Allyn Ferguson who composed and arranged jazz accompaniment for each individual poem and also led the jazz ensemble.

In October 2011 The Claudia Quintet, with guest vocalists Kurt Elling and Theo Bleckmann, released an album on Cuneiform Records of Patchen's poetry set to music written by Claudia leader John Hollenbeck.

Legacy

Although he did not achieve widespread fame during his lifetime, fans and scholars continue to celebrate Patchen's art. The University of California, Santa Cruz, hosts an archive of Patchen's work entitled "Patchenobilia," and many bookstores around the San Francisco Bay Area, Patchen's final home, continue to host jazz and poetry events which include his works.

Between 1987 and 1991 there were Kenneth Patchen Festivals, celebrating his work, in Warren, Ohio, which encompasses the town of Niles where Patchen was born and grew up. These festivals were sponsored by the Trumbull Art Gallery in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Cruz. In honor of Patchen, the town of Niles also re-named the little street where he was born to "Patchen Avenue."

2011 saw the publication of Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, edited by Patchen’s friend Jonathan Clark and marking the centenary of his birth.

Bibliography

• Before the Brave, (Random House) 1936
• First Will and Testament, 1939
• The Journal of Albion Moonlight, 1941
• The Dark Kingdom, 1942
• The Teeth Of The Lion, 1942
• Cloth of the Tempest, 1943
• The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, 1945
• An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air, (Untide Press) 1945
• Outlaw of the Lowest Planet, 1946
• The Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, 1946
• Sleepers Awake, 1946
• Panels for the Walls of Heaven, 1946
• Pictures of Life and Death, 1946
• They Keep Riding Down All the Time, 1946
• CCCLXXIV Poems, 1948
• Red Wine and Yellow Hair, 1949
• Fables and Other Little Tales, 1953
• Poems of Humor and Protest, 1954
• The Famous Boating Party, 1954
• Hurrah for Anything, 1957
• When We Were Here Together, 1957
• Selected Poems, 1957
• The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, 1960
• Because It Is, 1960
• Hallelujah Anyway, 1966
• But Even So (picture poems), 1968
• Collected Poems, 1969
• Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces, 1970
• Wonderings, 1971
• In Quest of Candlelighters, 1972
• The Argument of Innocence, 1976
• Patchen's Lost Plays, 1977
• Still Another Pelican in the Breadbox, 1980
• What Shall We Do Without Us, (picture poems) 1984
• Awash with Roses: Collected Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, 1999
• We Meet, 2008
• The Walking-Away World, 2008
• Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, 2011

Discography

• Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen: Read by the Author, 1959, Folkways Records, FW09717 (cover artwork by Jackson Pollock)

• Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada - with the Alan Neil Quartet, 1959, Folkways Records, FW09718

• Kenneth Patchen Reads His Love Poems, 1961, Folkways Records, FW09719

• The Journal of Albion Moonlight, 1972, Folkways Records, FW09716

• Rebel Poets of America, 2008, (with Lawrence Ferlinghetti) El Records/Cherry Red Records (recorded 1957)

External links

• Kenneth Patchen Home Page
• Picture Poem Examples
• Obituary of Miriam Patchen by Marcus Williamson in The Independent (UK)
• The Orange Bears, a poem that references his childhood in Youngstown, OH
• Tracing the Places of Kenneth Patchen
• "Portrait of a Rebel Poet" by Larry Smith at smithdocs.net
• Selected Poems & Paintings by Patchen, with Photographs and Biography
• "Kenneth Patchen, A Tribute Page" at recollectionbooks.com
• "Kenneth Patchen centennial: poetry that still resonates" by J. H. Miller, 12.12.11, at sfbg.com - An appreciation of Patchen's work with audio clips of him reading his work.