Кеннет Патчен: Жизнь и творчество американского поэта и писателя

American poet and novelist

Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911January 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 kept a diary from the age of twelve and read Dante, Homer, Burns, Shakespeare, and Melville. quote=I remember you would put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they'd be so covered with soot
You couldn't tell what they were anymore. |source=from "The Orange Bears",
Red Wine and Yellow Hair (1949)

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."

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.

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. Patchen referred to "Ginsberg and Co." and the media hype surrounding them as a "freak show." Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada (1959) was recorded in Vancouver the same week as a live performance for CBC Radio. The original record included a mimeographed pamphlet featuring poems and credits for the jazz group who played on the record, the Allan Neil Quartet. It was re released on CD by Locust Music in 2004. In 196465, the English composer David Bedford set an extract from Patchen's 1948 poem "In Memory of Kathleen" to classical music for the piece A Dream of the Lost Seven Stars. In November 2004 the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet presented A Homage to Kenneth Patchen at the Chicago Humanities Festival with Mike Pearson reading from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen. A recording was released on the German jazzwerkstatt label entitled Be Music, Night in 2006. Musicians in the performance included Peter Brötzmann (clarinets, alto and tenor saxes), Mats Gustafsson (baritone sax, bass clarinet), Ken Vandermark (baritone sax, clarinet), Joe McPhee (trumpet, alto sax), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Fred Lonberg Holm (cello), Kent Kessler (bass) and Paal Nilssen Love and Michael Zerang (drums). In 1984 Brötzmann had recorded a solo dedication to Patchen for FMP titled 14 Love Poems, a collection of short unaccompanied reed pieces that mirror textures and cadences found in the poet's love poems. On January 21, 2008, El Records released the record Rebel Poets in America, which included poetry readings with jazz accompaniment by both Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, including such Patchen classics as "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves" and "I Went to the City." Patchen made these recordings in collaboration with the musician Allyn Ferguson, who composed and arranged jazz accompaniment for each poem and also led the jazz ensemble. In October 2011 the Claudia Quintet, with guest vocalists Kurt Elling and Theo Bleckmann, released an album on Cuneiform Records of Patchen's poetry set to music written by Claudia leader John Hollenbeck.

Patchen's work has received little attention from academic critics. However, a few scholars have published critical books on Patchen, including Raymond Nelson, Herbert P. Hogue, and Larry R. Smith. Also, a collection of essays on Patchen's work was edited by Richard Morgan for the book Kenneth Patchen: A Collection of Essays (1977). Notable book reviews provide a reasonably accurate gauge of the public response to Patchen's work when it was initially published. For instance, Patchen biographer Larry Smith notes that "[the] initial reception to Patchen's First Will & Testament was positive and strong." Post publication, the book's supporters included Miller, Robert Duncan, and James Laughlin; its detractors included Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, and Anaïs Nin. Despite receiving a favorable review from William Carlos Williams in 1942, the novel's highly experimental style, limited release, and antiwar stance would guarantee it a very limited audience. In 1943, Patchen's Cloth of the Tempest received largely negative reviews. One reviewer even accused Patchen of being "naive," a common criticism aimed at his work, particularly regarding his fervent pacifist beliefs. Patchen's most important volume, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, first published in 1968, received largely positive reviews. A reviewer for the New York Times called the book "a remarkable volume" and compared Patchen's work to that of Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and D. H. Lawrence and also compared it to the Bible. and many bookstores around the San Francisco Bay Area, Patchen's final home, continue to host jazz and poetry events which include his works. On Jimmy Buffett's 1973 album  A White Sport Coat and A Pink Crustacean, the single "Death of An Unpopular Poet" is claimed by Buffett to have been inspired by Patchen and fellow poet Richard Farina. Between 1987 and 1991 there were Kenneth Patchen Festivals, celebrating his work, in Warren, Ohio, which encompasses the town of Niles, where Patchen was born and grew up. These festivals were sponsored by the Trumbull Art Gallery in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Cruz. The little street where he lived as a child was renamed Patchen Avenue by the town of Niles. In 2007, Gallery 324 in the Galleria at Erieview in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, held a Kenneth Patchen Festival reception on April 13. Featured were Larry Smith of Bottom Dog Press, Doug Manson (SUNY, Buffalo) editor of Celery Flute Player (a Kenneth Patchen newsletter), numerous colorful Kenneth Patchen silkscreens on loan from the Trumbull Art Guild in Warren, and Douglas Paisley's paintings of The Journal of Albion Moonlight with text. The following day, at the same gallery M. L. Liebler and the Magic Poetry Band from Detroit accompanied readings by poets Chris Franke, Jim Lang, and others. Later that night, the festival moved uptown to The Barking Spider Tavern in the University Circle area for poetry readings accompanied by the Cleveland band The John Richmond All Stars. In 2011, Kelly's Cove Press published Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, edited by Patchen's friend Jonathan Clark, in celebration of the centenary of Patchen's birth. In April 2012, Allen Frost published the Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen, which includes letters between Patchen and James Laughlin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller, Amos Wilder, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe and E. E. Cummings. A full color collection of Patchen's photos and art, An Astonished Eye: The Art of Kenneth Patchen, by Jonathan Clark, was published by Artichoke Press and the University of Rochester Library in 2014.