Because It Is: Poems and Drawings

by Kenneth Patchen

book

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1960

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

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

BECAUSE GOING NOWHERE
TAKES A LONG TIME

Something in the climate of a hammer
Struck him when young. Call a
Sparrow a lamp, you'll still need
The liking of chairs to settle
What is at bottom only painted over
Cloth; and that flat cunning of plates,
How little it speaks above the soup's
So roundly directional bravura. Count the sky
A pan, you'll still be hard put to find
Any flash in its like. But ah, alas, alas,
Lottipo . . . the mushy marshes, those tree-lined woods,
The so-small journeying, and the trivial occupants thereof...
These, too, and all else, alas, are only real. So may we
Remember once again how the grasses cause the wind to move...
Ah, alas, dear Toppilo, what then is this realm that seems
So like a cell, without jailor or judge, or witness even . . .?
And that we love! is this not a proof of something!
No, I admit—not necessarily of heaven. . .

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Еще одна книжка нереальных миров Пэтчена, с их удивительными персонажами, перетекающими из одного текста в другой. Загадка, конечно, в том, что по-русски Пэтчен обнаруживается примерно всего в одной подборке, озаглавленной "английская сюрреалистическая поэзия" (сами попробуйте).

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sitting outside, reading these poems aloud, a small audience of birds gathered. One scrub jay listened intently. The black-tailed deer were not interest, in poetry or Patchen, I couldn't tell.

[Claire Aoibhbeas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found Poem

Because It Is
Kenneth Patchen
In the end, rose and ostrich smell much
Alike; and only the thinking of clouds
Keeps the world on its untroubled course.
There are days nobody gets a break.
Oh, lay it on the water, lean it on the wind;
"Suppose," he said, "you were a wisp of sour loneliness
Stuck to the wrong side of life;
It'll take some real circling
To square that field with any unified theory!
cuspidacious
she'd bend that person
The shape of lampwick
And we are but the shadows of still more shadowy things.
One of the town's leading social blights
Bit him in the leg!
at his
Melancholicly rollicking best;
It suddenly came to wonder
why the sky was up above there; and also,
Whether, if he could stand on top of it,
The sky might not wonder the same thing about him.
Our lives are watching us--but not from earth.
Because sometimes the handwriting eats away the wall
All memory is piecemeal murder;
But the event itself, it has no speech; nor has it
Any meaning or purpose outside its own being. For existence
Is an animal substance, indivisible, and hence, unknowable;
When all the deaths of my life are wailing at once?
I, the wind . . .

[Wil Gilbreath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun, invigorating, I liked it

[tortoise dreams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of nonsense poems by the multimedia writer and dedicated pacifist, Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972).

Poetry Review: Because It Is is not the best place to start with Kenneth Patchen. It's not his best work, it's not really representative of his style, it's an odd collection even for him. The content is more like prose poems broken into lines, and more like an intoxicated Edward Lear spouting random gibberish in an amusing but nonsensical way. Others may think of James Joyce or Lewis Carroll. Puns, portmanteau words, silly juxtapositions. Absurdist. Dada. A lobster on a leash. And each poem is accompanied by one of Patchen's drawings, illustrating less or more some aspect of the piece, none like the Thurberesque dog portrayed on the cover. Each poem begins with "Because ..." and concludes with a more profound statement than anything that came before. For example, a poem might begin "Because she felt bashful with palm trees," or "Because a door in the hill opened," or "Because going nowhere takes a long time." A poem might include a line such as "pasting vile tasting labels on cans," or "Oh, flaming pig in a frockcoat," or "a supply of used burro stoppers." And a poem might conclude "There are days nobody gets break," or "Keeping her damn snapping turtles in my back-pocket," or "Our lives are watching us -- but not from earth." No one can tell which beginning ended with which conclusion. The poems in Because It Is are fun and mildly if briefly entertaining, mostly for their sheer oddness. And occasionally there's a line that, all by itself, makes the reader stop and think, such as: "the several/Systems for preventing rain from falling upward," or "When we love,/God thinks in us," or "trying to dry water on a cold fire." Overall I most enjoyed the drawings. Although I like to believe that I'm a free thinker and know that poems can be most anything, in my heart of hearts I would call most of the poems here doggerel and amusements and not so much poetry. This sort of thing was not characteristic of Patchen's work, which could be infinitely touching and meaningful. I think he agrees with me because no poems from Because It Is were included in his Selected Poems (1957) or Collected Poems (1968); the latter was an awesome labor of love by all concerned. Although not his best or most representative work, it does abound in silliness and Because It Is is still another volume that sits on a shelf in the limitless archive of wrongly forgotten American poets. [3★]

[Mike Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

from NOÖ [14]:

Read this walking around eating delicious Trinidadian food in Charles Village in Baltimore. In a Craigslist ad for a subletter, I talked about swoony light and flower colors against row houses, all in a mood I think I stole from Kenneth Patchen. If you haven’t devoured everything by Kenneth Patchen I have to admit I will never trust you when you sing along at high volume to a sad song with a trumpet in it. My stupid outdated blog is topped with a quote from this book that is more aspiration than honesty: “Oh, the kind of angel I’m on the side of / Won’t ever try to hide from the terrible responsibilities of love!”

[Albion · Rating 5 out of 5]

These narrative, nugget "poems" are a lot like the kind of stories God's little special brother used to scribble up to disappear his sorrowful longings during all those cosmic arguments the rents were up to way back before the big bang blew a hole through his bedroom wall--you know, the one with all the pretty posters on it of things we never got to see, like laughing lions and people born with two or three hearts because with the way things are made nowadays, it's just too not tough enough for most people to eat just one.

BECAUSE IT IS is now part of a collection available on Amazon called WE MEET: highly recommended, regardless of your familial connections.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars