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Collected Poems (New Directions Books)

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Kenneth Patchen, 1911-1972, was born in Ohio, fought in WWII, and spent the rest of his life invalided by spinal disease. His was a powerful, angry voice that could sing some of the most beautiful love poems of the past century. His art was violent and primitive; usually he incorporated poetry into his painting. His strongest influence was William Blake, e.e. cummings was a mentor. He moved easily among the San Francisco poets, a contemporary of Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the famed City Lights Book Store. He was truly a poet's poet and never compromised his art.

I don't know if was influential; he certainly didn't care. His public, his peers sought him; never the other way around. I read once that he wrote "naked poetry." The following poem is an excellent example of his wondrous way with words, the beauty, the anger and the savagery all in a few short stanzas.

The dove walks with sticky feet

Upon the green crowns of the almond tree,

Its feathers smeared over with warmth

Like honey

That drips lazily down into the shadow...

Anyone standing in that orchard,

So filled with peace and sleep,

Would hardly have noticed the hill

Nearby

With its three strange wooden arms

Lifted above a throng of motionless people

---Above the helmets of Pilate's soldiers

Flashing like silver teeth in the sun.

Kenneth Patchen is by far my favorite poet. This is a brave statement coming from a reader/literature buff who prefers poems that are far more traditional in form and meter. While I respect and admire all creative forms of poetry (I myself shamelessly admit to being a lousy poet, which is probably why I read more of the stuff than I write), I have always had a higher interest in poets who follow rhyme-schemes because I always figured that this type of poem was more difficult to write. To follow a certain pattern and meter throughout a poem, and yet to still successfully make your statement and evoke emotion is a powerful example of creativity and ingenuity. Give me Yeats and Donne over blank-verse any day.

Having said that, I must confess that Patchen was a poet who always wrote to the beat of his own drum. He rarely used traditional form or meter, yet in steering away from traditional schemes, he managed to create his own rhyme and forms in brilliant wordplay that have since been copied by never replicated. Plus, the raw, honest emotion (often rage) and powerful, offbeat images that Patchen constantly creates only get better with each read. It is difficult for me to describe the man's work except for the title I have given this review. Do not expect traditional poetry in any shape of the imagination. But do expect beauty and honesty in all the themes that Patchen explores, whether he is describing life for all of its beauty, darkness, or sadness.

In other reviews I have written for this site, I have felt the need to expand into lengthy prose in order to promote to work I was writing about. I do not feel the need to do that here, as Patchen is better known than the previous writers and artists who I have reviewed (indeed, if you are reading this, it probably means that you're a fan of Patchen's anyway). Having said that, it is a pity that he is not included in more anthologies and that he is not studied more in English classes. There is something here for everyone, and the questions and comments that he evokes about life and society are not to be missed.

I shall conclude with one of my favorite poems by Patchen, to demonstrate the raw emotion and themes that he creates with his unusual form and dynamic images. Thankfully, this volume includes this particular poem and others like it with similar haunting beauty.

"If We Are To Know Where We Live"

"I came to the house. It was dark.
It was hell standing there.
No one answered my knock.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING IN MY HOUSE

I tapped on the window. I banged on the door.
They pulled the shades. They threw the heavy bolt.

But I knew that they wanted
And I saw what I was not to see
And I heard what I was not to hear.

They wanted to murder the thing within the house.
I saw my own face with the knives about it.
I heard my own screams as they tortured me.

And I was everyone. We all stood there."

Hopefully, this poem has proven any point that I've tried to make. If you love poetry or are just beginning to dive into the world of literature, Patchen is an important, often overlooked writer who you simply should not miss.

Kenneth Patchen is a one of a kind poet. He wrote two or three poems worth all the musty little university poetry journals put together. His sincerity is brutally sweet when he's sweet, and brutally cruel when he's angry. Every word shivers with ethical and political commitment but without sentimentality and cheap moralism. He makes Ginsberg's howls look like squeaks, and the university poets look like conmen. He makes Bukowski seem flower-scented. He's unlike anything else. That he's forgotten proves that the contemporary world of poetry is a sham and a crime.

I am not surprised that Albion Moonlight has so many wonderful comments, but this, the Collected Poems has none. Speechlessness made by endlessness.

Patchen gave us so much, that we nothing to say.

The poet Kenneth Patchen is a fascinating figure. He was a conscientious objector in World War II, the "good war" even many pacifists would refuse to have stayed out of. He was unconnected to academia, writing highly personal poetry without quotation of other works or allusions to the canon. And he was an eclectic figure, the poet-as-loner one moment and a collaborator with jazzmen in poetry recitals the next. Yet, for all the fascinating details of his biography, his poetry is overwhelmingly disappointing. This volume of "collected poems", really a selection of material from 1936 to 1967 that leaves quite a bit out, shows the wild inconsistency of his entire career.

In the poetry of World War II, pacifist prophecy is in the spotlight, and it is often as troublesome to the reader as Ezra Pound's work of the same era. In the "The Stars Go to Sleep So Peacefully", the first poem selected from "An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air" (1945), written long after the U.S. was dragged into the war and the Final Solution was underway, Patchen calls the Allies "little fools ... in haste of money". That he afterward adds the eloquent lines "Love is impaled on a million bayonets" doesn't mean the reader forgets about his peculiar view on this war. In "The Way Men Live is a Lie", from the same volume, a diatribe against supposedly greedy generals looking for profit--which due to its considerable use of profanity I cannot quote here--is again followed by general pacifist sentiments that would be unobjectionable if not for what came before.

The war poems could be left aside if the rest of the material were good--as, for example, is often done with Pound. But he other themes make for embarassing verse. Patchen deeply loved his life Miriam, writing numerous love poems to her. These, however, are usually doggerel worthy of shy high-school note passing. Take, for example, the poem "For Myriam" (1942): "O the world is a place of veils and roses / when she is there / I come to her in wonder / ... And there is nothing cruel or mad or evil / Anywhere."

This last poem features furthermore one of Patchen's most tired trope, the filler "O". Almost every poem of his contains this, e.g. "O the eagle empties his terrible eye upon them", "O the beautiful again...", "O the wonderful wonderful wonderful", "O green birds / that sings the earth to wakefulness", "O she is as lovely-often as every day". Patchen the poet had no skill in naturally flowing poetry, everything is full of ridiculous rhetorical exaggeration.

Patchen's prose works, THE JOURNAL OF ALBION MOONLIGHT (published by New Directions) and SLEEPERS AWAKE (long out of print, but available at many libraries) are much less problematic than his poetry.