Doubleheader: Hurrah for Anything / Poemscapes & A Letter to God

by Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen

Genres: Poetry

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

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

[Amanda Pruett]

Kenneth Patchen constantly reimagines what language can do and it’s very whimsical and it’s very serious and it makes me happy to be alive and to be reading.

[Max Nemtsov]

Два переизданных перевертышем сборника.
«Ура всему» — это маленькие сюрреалистические зарисовки, то ли подписи к картинкам, то ли наоборот, картинки к подписям, не всегда понятно, что было раньше и было ли. Совершенно гениально.
«Поэзошафт» (ну или «Поэмозаж») — тут не стоит делать ошибку и считать его «сборником стихотворений в прозе»: на самом деле это единое высказывание с достаточно связным сюжетом, который, правда, с ходу не считывается, до того дробна и причудлива там система образов.
Завершается все это «Письмом Богу» — вполне пылкой разборкой на ту же тему, что обычно у Пэтчена.

[Jude]

he has been with me for so long i forget sometimes how he sweetened my heart while raging and pleading for us to cease our self-destructive folly, and how he modeled the potential of words and letters as graphic elements.
this doubleheader is the fastest road to the heart of his heart. as with the truest voices, i am always growing into him.

[Matthew]

Some very nice stuff here.

[Tom Romig]

Well, that was pretty boring. Perhaps back in the 50s and 60s I thought that nonsense verse and ugly scribbles were avant garde. If so, I was wrong.

[Craven]

He gets a little bit too into his nonsensical tall tale mode in this book and that stuff goes over my head, but still, when he hits he really hits and he does plenty of that in this book.

[Stephen]

Beautiful.