Poems of Humor and Protest

One of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series titles Bob Thomas sent to me when I lived in Maine in the mid-seventies was Kenneth Patchen's Poems of Humor and Protest, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti published in 1956. Patchen's book was the third in the City Lights venture, and still remains among my favorites. Patchen was a fantastic poet.

Patchen had a rough life, beginning with the loss of his sister when he was a teenager. Her death cast a pall over his life that he never completely transcended. Then, while still in his twenties, he was hurt when a friend's car fell on him as he worked on it. The accident damaged his spinal cord and Patchen suffered through a series of experimental surgeries, culminating in a final botched surgery that immobilized him. His wife, Miriam, took care of him and Patchen and her had a rare, completely dedicated relationship that produced a number of very fine love poems by the writer.

Patchen's success was marginal, partially because he was a committed pacifist during World War II, and he acquiesced to no one (and of course poets are marginalized in general in the U.S). If ever a writer was committed to the ideal of peace it was Patchen, whose job as he formulated it was to delineate the world's suffering and pathos to a sleeping public.

His protest drew the attention of many notable writers on both coasts of the U.S. Henry Miller wrote a laudatory essay about his life and work, and the Beats gathered at his feet. With Kenneth Rexroth and a few others, he founded the jazz poetry movement of the forties, an idea Jack Kerouac ran with in 1959's Mexico City Blues, 242 improvised "choruses" that Kerouac affiliated with Charlie Parker and bebop. For his part, Patchen read with Charlie Mingus as early as 1955. Unfortunately, their gigs were never recorded.

A decade prior to working with Mingus, Patchen recorded with John Cage for a radio program, work I've never heard, but can easily imagine is stunning if you understand Cage's work, an acquired taste like most experimental music.

(In Portland in the late seventies Dan Lissy, a well-known writer and musician, had committed to memory the entirety of Kerouac's book, a mammoth accomplishment. When Lissy recited the work you could hear Parker, I am convinced).

At mid-career, Patchen tried his hand with free-associative novel writing and penned The Journal of Albion Moonlight, a deep meditation on delirium and madness that is confounding in the manner of the "new novel," fragmented as open stasis and uninvolved with typical time-evolved narrative. It has a dadaist or surreal quality, comparisons of which Patchen, always obstinate, disputed. The book was brought out by James Laughlin's New Directions, another of that publisher's great coups, in 1961.

Patchen wrote one other long prose work, in 1945, titled Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, which amounts to a long inside joke about novel writing. The book's protagonist must suffer all the indignity that a poor would-be author suffers in his quest to be heard. His shyness about the world's reaction to his work has him spelling hell: h--l, so as to not offend the good taste of the masses. Etc.

Patchen died in 1972 at age 61.

The Temple

To leave the earth was my wish, and no will stayed my rising.
Early, before sun had filled the roads with carts
Conveying folk to weddings and to murders;
Before men left their selves of sleep, to wander
In the dark of the world like whipped beasts.

I took no pack. I had no horse, no staff, no gun.
I got up a little way and something called me,
Saying,
'Put your hand in mine. We will seek God together.'
And I answered, 'It is your father who is lost, not mine.'
Then the sky filled with tears of blood, and snakes sang.

Kenneth Patchen


TS