Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman.
Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence." Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence on the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His father, Wayne, worked in the nearby steel mills of Youngstown, 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.
His 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."
Patchen 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 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, where he lived 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 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. They were 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. The couple moved to a cottage in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1947. In 1951, a few years after befriending the West Coast poet Kenneth Rexroth, the Patchens moved to the West Coast, living first in San Francisco and then moving to Palo Alto in 1957.
In 1937 Patchen suffered a permanent spinal injury, which was to give him pain, to varying degrees, for the rest of his life and which required multiple surgical procedures. In a letter to a friend from 1960, Patchen explained, "In 1956 a spinal fusion [operation] (second of two operations) gave me relief and mobility (& for the first time I was able to go about giving readings, and so on."
By this point, he and his wife had moved from San Francisco to Palo Alto to be closer to the Palo Alto Clinic, where both were receiving treatment. Then, in 1959, Patchen noted in the letter quoted above that another surgery at the Presbyterian Medical Center of San Francisco ended in disaster. He wrote, "During [a] surgical procedure for my throat, and while under complete anesthesia, I suffered another slipped disc." Though he was heavily sedated during the procedure, Patchen suspected that he had been dropped at some point; in any event he was in considerably more pain afterward, and disabled for the rest of his life. In 1963, he sued his surgeon for medical malpractice and lost.
Around this time, Jim Morrison paid for the publication of the Mt. Alverno Review, a poetry anthology edited by his friend, Michael C. Ford, to help Patchen with medical expenses.
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. 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 physical immobilization, may have prevented wider recognition or success beyond what some consider a "cult" following.
Patchen lived out the final years of his life with his wife in their modest home on 2340 Sierra Court, in Palo Alto, where Patchen created many of his distinctive painted poems, produced while confined to his bed after his disastrous 1959 surgery inadvertently damaged his spine. He died in Palo Alto, on January 8, 1972. His wife, Miriam, died in March 2000, also in Palo Alto.
Patchen's first book of poetry, Before the Brave, was published by Random House in 1936. His earliest collections of poetry were his most political and led to his being championed, in the 1930s, as a "proletariat poet". This description, which Patchen rejected, never stuck, since his work varied widely in subject, style and form. As his career progressed, he 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 childlike "painted poems," many of which were 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 and then moved to Hollywood in 1938, where he tried, unsuccessfully, writing film scripts and worked for the WPA. His next book of poems, First Will and Testament, drew the attention of James Laughlin, who was 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. For a short time, in 1939, Patchen even took an office job working for New Directions. In addition to their professional relationship, Patchen and Laughlin also became good friends.
Patchen pioneered the "drawing-and-poem form" as well as the painting-and-poem form and produced over a thousand "painted books", special copies of his own works with original paintings on the covers. His many hundreds of drawings and paintings have been described as being reminiscent of those of Blake and Klee. During the course of a long and varied career, he also tried his hand at writing experimental novels, such as The Journal of Albion Moonlight and The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, and the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. Patchen's Collected Poems was first published in 1969, just a few years before his death.
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. In this essay, Miller wrote, "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.'" Patchen also had a close, lifelong friendship with the poet E.E. Cummings, which began when they were both living in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Patchen was also a close peer of the West Coast poet Kenneth Rexroth, who shared Patchen's antiwar radicalism and his interest in combining poetry readings with jazz accompaniment. The two poets began a correspondence in the late 1940s and continued it in the 1950s. Rexroth encouraged the Patchens to move to San Francisco in the early 1950s.
In the 1950s, Patchen became a major influence on the younger Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Miriam Patchen recalled some of these young poets, including Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure, visiting the Patchens' home in San Francisco to pay their respects. However, once the Beats' popularity grew, Patchen disliked being associated with them and was highly critical of 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."