Background
Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1911. Kenneth Patchen's father was a steel worker in Youngstown and, later, in Warren, Ohio. As a young man Patchen followed his father's example and worked briefly in the mills.
( The wonderful picture-poems of Kenneth Patchen, long ou...)
The wonderful picture-poems of Kenneth Patchen, long out of print, are being brought back into one generous volume?cryptic creatures quipping quirky quotes and all. The singular work of Kenneth Patchen has influenced poets, artists and political activists for decades. New Directions is proud to launch a Patchen revival beginning with omnibus editions of his unique compositions. Kenneth Patchen's last words to New Directions founder James Laughlin were "When you find out which came first, the chicken or the egg, you write and tell me." Answering his own question comes Patchen's "picture-poem." The Walking-Away World reissues three of his picture-poem classics: Wonderings, But Even So, and Hallelujah Anyway. Inspired by the "illuminated printing" of William Blake, Patchen worked in a spirited fervency with watercolor, casein, inks, and other media to create absurdly compelling works. His entire process was a simultaneous fusion of painting and poetry: neither the poem nor the painting preceded one another. Each picture-poem is inhabited by strange beings uttering everything from poignant poetic adages to cheeky satire. One confides, "I have a funny feeling / that some very peculiar-looking creatures out there are watching us," which sums up the suspicious joys of The Walking-Away World.
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( This selection is drawn from ten earlier volumes by the...)
This selection is drawn from ten earlier volumes by the poet who has been called "the most compelling force in American poetry since Whitman." The late Kenneth Patchen was unique among contemporary poets for his direct and passionate concern with the most essential elements in the tragic, comic, blundering and at rare moments glorious world around us. He wrote about the things we can feel; with our whole beingthe senselessness of war, the need for love among men on earth, the presence of God in man, the love for a beloved woman, social injustice and the continual resurgence of the beautiful in life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0131JKFN8/?tag=2022091-20
( Meet Kenneth Patchen, a prolific, ground-breaking prole...)
Meet Kenneth Patchen, a prolific, ground-breaking proletarian poet/painter whose most eclectic and wildly eccentric works are re-launched in a single startling volume?We Meet. The singular work of Kenneth Patchen has influenced poets, artists and political activists for decades. New Directions is proud to launch a Patchen revival beginning with omnibus editions of his unique compositions. We Meet highlights Patchen's more outlandish side and includes, like fabrics stitched into a crazy quilt, Because It Is, A Letter to God, Poemscapes, Hurrah For Anything, and Aflame & Afun of Walking Faces. "Because to understand one must begin somewhere," opens Patchen's fabulous book of poems Because It Is: perhaps the most ideal reason for such a melting pot of poetry. Open any page at random and find Patchen protesting the Second World War (A Letter to God), or telling the tale of how hot water first came to be tracked onto bedroom floors (Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces), or informing the reader what happened when the nervous vine wouldn't twine (Because It Is), or why he loathes those who act as if a cherry were something they personally thought up (Hurrah For Anything), or answering what he wants out of life: "let's say?no matter" (Poemscapes).
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(Excerpt from Before the Brave About the Publisher Forgo...)
Excerpt from Before the Brave About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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( An unforgettable, apocalyptic novel from a distinctly A...)
An unforgettable, apocalyptic novel from a distinctly American prophet Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean Tom oBedlam (By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wide worlds end / Methinks it is no journey ), Kenneth Patchen sets off on an allegorical journey to the furthest limits of love and murder, madness and sex. While on this disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior), various characters offer deranged responses, conveying an otherworldly, imaginative madness. A chronicle of violent fury and compassion, written when Surrealism was still vigorous and doing battle with psychotic reality, The Journal of Albion Moonlight is an American monument to engagement.
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Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1911. Kenneth Patchen's father was a steel worker in Youngstown and, later, in Warren, Ohio. As a young man Patchen followed his father's example and worked briefly in the mills.
Having decided to be a writer, he attended Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College (which was part of the University of Wisconsin), in Madison, Wisconsin, for one year, starting in 1929.
He travelled around the country, and, while supporting himself with odd jobs, spent what time he could developing his abilities with language. In 1936 he published his first volume of poetry, Before the Brave.
Before the Brave showed Patchen's strong leftist political sensibility, formed in part by his youth in the steel towns and in part by his travels around the country during the Depression. Critics initially labelled him one of the leftist writers of the decade, but if he was a political poet (and in fact his intense political convictions remained with him throughout his life), he was a writer more strongly affected by the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. His response to these movements, however, was restrained. Patchen was no one's disciple, but the Dadaist and Surrealist influence can be felt in the free, whimsical associations characteristic of his work and in his determined lack of concern for traditional forms of literature.
Although Patchen liked to deny this influence, it can be seen clearly in, for example, the very title Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces, his series of prose pieces that retain the external characteristics of traditional fables but which revel in freewheeling Dadaist absurdities. In traditional fables, marvelous things happen—animals talk, snow falls in July, etc. —but these are justified by various conventions; the story, for example, may be an allegory, and the talking animals are supposed to be representations of human types, or the absurdities may be justified as ways of entertaining the reader while he is (although perhaps unaware of this) being taught a moral truth. But Patchen dispenses with the justifications and lets the fable take its own direction, no matter how absurd (and usually, at the same time, hilarious) that may be. The result is wonderful Dadaist nonsense.
Patchen shared with the Dadaists and Surrealists a dislike for the traditional moral and aesthetic objectives of literature. He did not make his work conform to preconceived literary patterns or expectations but was concerned rather with the way language can create or reflect subtle moods and emotional states, and his work was extremely experimental in seeking that end.
His political convictions, as noted earlier, remained with him, and The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), the prose work for which he is best known, has in its anti-war or pacifist emphasis a political dimension, but the real achievement here, as in all Patchen's major work, rests in the evocation of feeling and mood. The Journal of Albion Moonlight presents and sustains, like the work of Franz Kafka (to which it is clearly indebted), the sense of loss, fear, despondency, paranoia, and general emotional suffering. In other words, the book evokes, as no other book of its time did so well, the moods and emotions many Americans must have felt when they found themselves in the summer of 1940, when the book was written, on the brink of another military cataclysm.
Four years later Patchen published Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), a novel which evokes an entirely different set of emotions and moods. On the one hand, it satirizes popular culture—particularly the characters, plots, and language of popular movies, radio dramas, and novels—but Patchen's main achievement lies in sustaining a level of high burlesque, the hilarity of movies like screwball comedies (which, since very little is sacred in this book, he also satirizes). He followed Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer with Sleepers Awake (1946), a Dadaist collage of non sequiturs and startling associations, mixed together with experiments using different type faces. He had varied the use of type faces in some of his earlier work but never as exuberantly and creatively as in Sleepers Awake.
The range of Patchen's abilities can be clearly sensed in his poetry, which ranges from political polemic to love poems (Patchen was one of the great love poets of the century), occasional metaphysical complexities, and extravagant comedy. His poetry is marked by delightful verbal surprises and sudden twists of language. It assumes an extraordinary range of poetic forms, from prose poems to exquisitely-constructed songs.
Both the poetry and the prose are characterized by a sense of innocence, wonder, joy, and, above all, delight in playing with language. From time to time Patchen was deeply sentimental and melodramatic, yet what continues to astonish readers is that he succeeded in attempting such a vast range of fictional and poetic possibilities.
Patchen also wrote plays and essays, and he invented what he called "Picture Poems. " In these, illustrations and language are brought together in a new format. They are not intended as comments on each other but as inseparably unified aspects of works of art. The "Picture Poems" involve the total fusion of two art forms. Patchen also attempted a fusion of music and literature in a highly regarded series of poetry readings he gave with jazz accompaniment in the late 1950s.
A reader encountering Patchen's work without any knowledge of his background might assume that he lived a robustly healthy life, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Patchen suffered from periods of great depression and from an acute spinal problem that kept him semi-paralyzed and in agony during much of the last 30 years of his life. His work involved the victory of his artistic imagination over extraordinary odds. The vast range of Patchen's achievement is all the more astonishing when one realizes the formidable physical and psychological barriers that he overcame in order to make it possible.
( An unforgettable, apocalyptic novel from a distinctly A...)
( Meet Kenneth Patchen, a prolific, ground-breaking prole...)
( The wonderful picture-poems of Kenneth Patchen, long ou...)
( This selection is drawn from ten earlier volumes by the...)
(Excerpt from Before the Brave About the Publisher Forgo...)
(Gathers picture poems by the Ohio-born writer and artist ...)
(The saga of Alfred Budd of Bivalve, New Jersey, a Candide...)
(Book by Kenneth Patchen)
Throughout his life Patchen was a fervent pacifist, as he made clear in much of his work. He was strongly opposed to the involvement of the United States in World War II.
Quotations:
"The one who comes to question himself cares for mankind. "
"Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist. "
"I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing. "
In 1934 he married Miriam Oikemus, to whom he would dedicate all of his nearly four dozen books.