Poems of Humor & Protest

by Kenneth Patchen

"Understand that they were sitting just inside the door / at a little table with two full beers and two empties. / There were a few dozen people moving around, killing / Time and getting tight because nothing meant anything / Anymore / Somebody looked at a girl and somebody said / Great things doing in Spain / But she didn't even look up, not so much as half an eye. / Then Jack picked up his beer and Nellie her beer / And their legs ground together under the table. / ... / No one knew just why it happened or whether / It would happen ever again on this fretful earth / But Jack picked up his beer again and Nellie her beer again / And, as though at signal, a little man hurried in, / Crossed to the bar and said Hello Steve to the barkeeper." ("The State of the Nation," pg. 7). Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), is a Poet's Poet. Many Poet's-Poets are marred by a certain stuffiness, given to flaunting their erudition, to dangling allusion-heavy Rabbit Holes of Joycean heft before the reader. Patchen, on the other hand, could not be more different: his existence as a "Poet's Poet" has nothing to do with the sort of lofty, hermetic altitudes at/from which many-a bespectacled-Modernist wrote. It has nothing to do with the footnotes at the end of The Waste Land, nothing to do with the cornucopia of references which gild Pound's Cantos. Patchen is a man whose inviting, accessible verse is characterized by a swaggering ebullience and distinctive emotional intelligence that many find enchanting.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

48 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1954

About the author

Kenneth Patchen 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.

Reviews

[Craven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patchen is a really great writer who has always been overlooked. His rage against cruelty, oppression and war and the abstract language that he uses to describe it is fucking brilliant and inspiring. As well, his vision of a different world, where folks don't dehumanize each other. Anybody who lives or takes a stance against this fucked up world could get something out of Patchen if they gave him a chance. Which would, of course, require getting past the fact that it's poetry. Most of it's prose poetry
Meaning every now
and then it goes something like this. But it's still pretty readable and far from cheezy. Read this or Collected Patchen

[Brandon Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a fine day in the mirror

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Join the world and see the army.

I purchased an OG copy from the Book Lady, a veritable Savannahian plug for all deceased literature, without expecting much from this meager offering of Pocket Poets. While resolutely thin (about 40 pages), Patchen is an artist (not poet) whose coagulates are gin and cheap cigarettes, writing with a delicate snarl of anti-literature, anti-establishment, and anti-war. This book contains (but is not limited to): a prank call between Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the menu of a monied war general's restaurant (selling the butchered remains of soldiers), sketches from an absurd mind, slices of poésie concrète, a gentleman duck, a cannibal's lullaby, an intern who has to blow up the world (and succeeds) for his job, and an inquiry to the origin of baseball. Poems of Humor and Protest in attitude reads like the proto-zine, and manages to have more subterranean claims than any other Beatnik luminary. Stomach this if you can daddy-o.

[Persephone Abbott]

These words felt as if they deserved to be on Broadway. Savagely on Broadway.