Craft: Kenneth Patchen

This craft piece was suggested by Tracey Knapp. If you have a suggestion for a topic, please suggest one here:

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Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was an American original. He moved through poetry in the most catholic and fluid sense, applying his idiosyncratic sensibilities to verse, “picture-poems,” and allegorical prose. He experimented with poetry-jazz combinations, and embodied the anti-cool, anti-Beat figure—socially conscious, endlessly inventive, and full of compassionate imagination.

Kenneth Patchen (r) with the tenor saxophone specialist Booker Ervin (l) at the Half Note, New York City, in 1959. Photo by Jonathan Williams

His titles show a mind not beholden to what anyone else in poetry is or was doing: The Teeth of the Lion (1942), An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), The Famous Boating Party (1954), Hurrah for Anything (1957). If William Blake was a 20th century instead of an 18th century figure, he would have been Kenneth Patchen. Both Blake and Patchen produced compositionally similar tapestries that combined their imaginative capacities for image and text.

Patchen’s primary concerns were preserving the imagination amid a world of unrelenting violence, maintain child-like wonder, making life into legend, and worshipping romantic love beside an awareness of God’s presence in all things.