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Riding Kenneth Patchen’s Long Train: An Appreciation
An essay by Larry Smith
Reprinted from the Summer 2001 Ohioana Quarterly
Kenneth Patchen was and remains a living force in the world of writing
and art. Writing for five decades, he produced nearly a book a year within
the vital tradition of alternative art that he helped to open. In the radical
1930s, he was that courageous rebel-poet of conscience and confrontation:
“I am the world crier, and this is my dangerous career/ . . .I am the one to call
your bluff, and this is my climate” (First Will and Testament, 1939). In the
turbulent 1940s, amidst a world war supported by Left and Right alike,
Patchen published one of the strongest pacifist novels ever written in his The
Journal of Albion Moonlight: “But I tell you that the writing of the future will
be just this kind of writing - one man trying to tell another man of the
events of his own heart” (Journal, 1941). The 1950s saw his move with
beloved wife Miriam to San Francisco where he created new blends of
poetry and art in his early poems-and-drawings, and of poetry and music in
his provocative and moving poetry-jazz. In the 1960s and early ’70s when
his back injuries and botched operations crippled him, he turned away from
the bitterness this situation might have brought to create the brilliant
picture-poems of his final Wonder Period.
Patchen’s last poem, done when he could no longer sit to type, was a
picture-poem of two creatures who emerge from bare brush strokes to gaze
at each other. Its message sums up in succinct directness the values of
Patchen’s life and work:
Every Man Is Me
Everyman is me,
I am his brother.
No man is my enemy.
I am Everyman
and he is in and of me.
This is my faith,
my strength,
my deepest hope
and my only belief.
Today, for an ever-renewing crowd, his art stands as a huge exposed girder
in the heart of America - the radical poet-prophet of love and humor and
protest bravely witnessing in a voice that challenges our own. Like countless
other writers, I have been affected by Kenneth Patchen’s work and life. He
gets you where you live and work. David Meltzer says it well: “Patchen’s
work is a Bible torn out of America’s heart. It is the prophet’s urgent
warning....Patchen’s intense and humane visions have inspired new generations
of poets and writers. Like Blake and Whitman, his spiritual forefathers,
Patchen’s work lays the vital groundwork of man’s future” (Kenneth
Patchen, 17-18). Drawing this to myself, I find that, for me as a writer, editor,
and publisher, Patchen makes the concept of “alternative” vital and real.
As an Ohio youth, I recall the wonder upon hearing that James Wright, a
poet from nearby Martins Ferry, had won a grand prize for his poetry (the
Yale Younger Poet’s Prize). The wonder was not that he had won, but that a
poet from my own world of steel mills and railroads along the industrial
Ohio River Valley could write
important and vital poems. I
carried that knowledge with
me as I went off to
Muskingum College and began
to write secret poems in my
journals.
As a working-class college
student in the 1960s, I first
discovered Ohioan Kenneth
Patchen’s poems of humor as
something that broadened the
too-serious tone of the Modernist poets I had been studying. This led me
immediately to this seminal poem, “The Orange Bears,” which Patchen so
aptly subtitles in his recording as “Childhood in an Ohio Steelmill Town.”
This poem gave me courage to voice my own working-class life in the midst
of an academic world that chose to deny both Patchen’s work and my own
life experience. It has molded much of my own work, and I give it to you
here:
The Orange Bears (Childhood in an Ohio Steelmill Town)
The orange bears with soft friendly eyes
Who played with me when I was ten,
Christ, before I left home they’d had
Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs
Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting
Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped
Out, and I went down through the woods
To the smelly crick with Whitman
In the Haldeman-Julius edition,
And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail
Into the cover - What did he know about
Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal
And the National Guard coming over
From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates
With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers?
I remember you could 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.
A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!
(Collected Poems, 384)
Relentless in its confrontation of struggle and its depiction of internalized
conflict, this poem creates multiple voices (young boy, striker, older man)
and emotional levels (innocence, violation, outrage) doing what poetry can
and must do - name and witness life. In its calling out, it expresses all the
nameless and silent. It liberates as it exposes the world. For me, Patchen
captures the essence of the act of poetry in freeing life.
Later in graduate school at Kent State University in 1969, I was searching
for a dissertation topic when I came upon Patchen’s pacifist novel The
Journal of Albion Moonlight. It was a book that spoke to many during those
turbulent years of the Vietnam War. Its social relevance pulled me into the
world of dissident literature, and as the shots rang out over the Kent State
campus, I knew the rightness of the work. While writing my dissertation on
Patchen, I was also completing the Twayne volume on him for the U.S.
Authors Series. Later, I grew impatient with the way his vital work was not
being anthologized or taught and so completed a video docu-drama on him
with my colleague Tom Koba. Finally, I was tapped to complete the life
biography by his wife, the late Miriam Patchen. It was a project that took a
decade and taught me much.
In Kenneth Patchen’s work I find my own voice quieted, then enlarged by
the life of these others who become my life. Like James Wright, Patchen
teaches us the authenticity of writing, that the poet needs first to listen close
and then express back the felt life shared.
Larry Smith is the author of six books of poetry, a book of memoirs, two books of fiction, two literary
biographies, a life biography, and a book of translations from the Chinese.
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