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Selected Poems
This selection is drawn from ten earlier volumes by the poet who has been called "the most compelling force in American poetry since Whitman." The late Kenneth Patchen was unique among contemporary poets for his direct and passionate concern with the most essential elements in the tragic, comic, blundering and at rare moments glorious world around us. He wrote about the things we can feel; with our whole being―the senselessness of war, the need for love among men on earth, the presence of God in man, the love for a beloved woman, social injustice and the continual resurgence of the beautiful in life.
- GenresPoetry
146 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 1957
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167 people want to read
About the author
Kenneth Patchen
157 books128 followersKenneth 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.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 20, 2021
The impatient explorer invents a box in which all journeys may be kept.
I imagined a Anglo-Irish figure, shrouded in cigarette smoke, perhaps yodeling in his cups. What a shock then to discover he hails from the Buckeye State. Like a few others, I prefer his later poems, the ones where he appears pissed at the world for its reckless stupidity, the war, the greed and I sense even the pollution. His narrative verse appears akin to Auden, but with clips of argot that would leave Hemingway envious.
I listened to some of his spoken word albums on YouTube and it is certainly an arresting experience.
I imagined a Anglo-Irish figure, shrouded in cigarette smoke, perhaps yodeling in his cups. What a shock then to discover he hails from the Buckeye State. Like a few others, I prefer his later poems, the ones where he appears pissed at the world for its reckless stupidity, the war, the greed and I sense even the pollution. His narrative verse appears akin to Auden, but with clips of argot that would leave Hemingway envious.
I listened to some of his spoken word albums on YouTube and it is certainly an arresting experience.
November 10, 2020
Patchen's sprawling collection covers his writing from the late Thirties to the late Fifties - it's fair to say that he doesn't really get his groove on until the late Forties, midway through the book. By the time he found his voice he slows down on the trite nature poetry and gets into some cartooning to accompany his surreal urban verses.
Favorite lines include: Then I would get my money from the drawer where she keeps her prayerbooks and teeth;
O the chippies discuss democracy in awed tones,
Yep that's what I was after, that goddamn little sad-faced, buck-toothed oyster, happiness.
Cloud with the warm juice of suicides!
By half-dressed I mean the old women were in their birthday suits and the skinny fellow had a couple heavy overcoats on over his regular duds;
Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right. No matter that he'd been a eunuch.
There was a little man with wooden hair who'd sneak into the rear of buses and holler, "Somebody just ate my mother!'
Anyway, the money shots are from The Famous Boating Party and Hurrah For Anything. Those are the collections you should be reading instead of this one.
Favorite lines include: Then I would get my money from the drawer where she keeps her prayerbooks and teeth;
O the chippies discuss democracy in awed tones,
Yep that's what I was after, that goddamn little sad-faced, buck-toothed oyster, happiness.
Cloud with the warm juice of suicides!
By half-dressed I mean the old women were in their birthday suits and the skinny fellow had a couple heavy overcoats on over his regular duds;
Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right. No matter that he'd been a eunuch.
There was a little man with wooden hair who'd sneak into the rear of buses and holler, "Somebody just ate my mother!'
Anyway, the money shots are from The Famous Boating Party and Hurrah For Anything. Those are the collections you should be reading instead of this one.
December 29, 2011
poignant, playful and aching accounts of humanity's follies as well as its more endearing traits. dominated by anti-war poems and tracts against man's baseness and stupidity (which is fine by me, i hate war as much as the next humanitarian utopian dreamer) with some kind-of great, a little bit cheesy love poems thrown in for good measure. I was happy some of his picture poems got included because as much as his regular poems can amaze, i think these lovely experiments are really what set patchen apart even further from his peers. mostly loved it, agreed with his opinions more than those of most poets, (even the left leaning or hippie-esque ones), and was happy to receive them for once. there should be more like patchen.
March 24, 2023
2004 wrote: Hard to say anything bad about your favorite poet or author. Again an inspiring, motivating, hate-filling, loveing, marvelously encompassing book.
July 21, 2017
Employing lyric, narrative, dramatic monologue and even prose, along with a few drawings, Patchen's Selected Poems explores the expressive possibilities of free verse.
Some of the poems appear to allude in their imagery and style to the work of other poets, including E.E. Cummings ("I Feel Drunk All the Time") and Yeats ("Red Wine and Yellow Hair"); others, with their affirmative stance seem to look ahead to the work of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg.
While many of the lyrics are expressions of love, a number of them are works of protest, critical of war and of capitalism.
There is also an anti-urban theme running through many of these poems, and a romantic view of nature. However, Patchen's representation of the nature about which he writes is rather general: he rarely names a particular species of bird or type of tree, but typically uses the word "bird" or "tree." In some instances, I felt almost as if I was re-reading some of the poems, as the simplicity of the language and the repetition of the imagery from one poem to another had the effect of making a few of the poems sound like many of the others.
(This is not to say that Patchen might have done better to avoid linguistic simplicity: the language of "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves" is extremely simple, and perhaps the more expressive because of it).
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few poems that experiment with dialects and with slang. Some of these, sounding like something out of Damon Runyon, may seem particularly dated to the contemporary reader.
A few of the poems appear with drawings, including this great one-liner: "The impatient explorer invents a box in which all journeys may be kept."
Many of the narrative poems are on the surreal side.
Some of the poems appear to allude in their imagery and style to the work of other poets, including E.E. Cummings ("I Feel Drunk All the Time") and Yeats ("Red Wine and Yellow Hair"); others, with their affirmative stance seem to look ahead to the work of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg.
While many of the lyrics are expressions of love, a number of them are works of protest, critical of war and of capitalism.
There is also an anti-urban theme running through many of these poems, and a romantic view of nature. However, Patchen's representation of the nature about which he writes is rather general: he rarely names a particular species of bird or type of tree, but typically uses the word "bird" or "tree." In some instances, I felt almost as if I was re-reading some of the poems, as the simplicity of the language and the repetition of the imagery from one poem to another had the effect of making a few of the poems sound like many of the others.
(This is not to say that Patchen might have done better to avoid linguistic simplicity: the language of "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves" is extremely simple, and perhaps the more expressive because of it).
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few poems that experiment with dialects and with slang. Some of these, sounding like something out of Damon Runyon, may seem particularly dated to the contemporary reader.
A few of the poems appear with drawings, including this great one-liner: "The impatient explorer invents a box in which all journeys may be kept."
Many of the narrative poems are on the surreal side.
March 14, 2013
My connection with Patchen's work was an oddly complex one -- I agreed strongly with the ideals expressed in his poetry -- love among mankind, pacifism, rejection of social injustices -- but I just couldn't connect with it the way I connect with the work of other poets. This isn't to say that I didn't have some favorites in this work -- I found "What is Beautiful?" to be particularly thought-provoking; "And When Freedom Is Achieved . . ." and "Let Us Have Madness" express a strong anti-war sentiment that resonated strongly with me; originating from the Rust Belt, myself, I also enjoyed "May I Ask You a Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?". But, on the whole, I found Patchen's works to be more than just mildly depressing, not void of any hope (he does have hope perhaps in forces of love [as in "The Rites of Darkness": "The only evil is doubt; the only good/Is not death, but life. To be is to love."], love between mankind and love between men and women), but largely the work comes across as horribly pessimistic (of course he lived through two terrible world wars -- as he writes in "A Vision for the People of America," Patchen seems to be one of these "poets with death on their tongues"), with only small, fleeting glimpses of hope and possibility.
June 28, 2012
I tried starting this collection, but I just couldn't get into it. It's not that I don't like it, just not in the mood I guess. So I'll give a try another time.
June 28: So this time I guess I was in the mood! I read the book in three nights and loved every minute of it. I won't even pretend to know exactly what he was writing about in each of his poems. Sometimes it is just enough to appreciate a style of writing, construction and word choice. I certainly found a few in this collection to call favourites.
Looking up the author on YouTube was really gratifying. I have a new appreciation for some of the poems in this collection now that I've heard the poet recite them himself. Then being able to finish reading the book with the author's voice embedded in my mind was wonderful.
I'm not sure why the book didn't click for me the first time I sat down to read it because I actually find Patchen's style to be similar to some other works I like as well as some writing I did during an earlier period of my life.
Once again I've been inspired to, if not sit down and write, look at things a little bit differently. More over, it reawakened an appreciation for using less obvious word choices.
I'd love recommendations on other similar writers.
June 28: So this time I guess I was in the mood! I read the book in three nights and loved every minute of it. I won't even pretend to know exactly what he was writing about in each of his poems. Sometimes it is just enough to appreciate a style of writing, construction and word choice. I certainly found a few in this collection to call favourites.
Looking up the author on YouTube was really gratifying. I have a new appreciation for some of the poems in this collection now that I've heard the poet recite them himself. Then being able to finish reading the book with the author's voice embedded in my mind was wonderful.
I'm not sure why the book didn't click for me the first time I sat down to read it because I actually find Patchen's style to be similar to some other works I like as well as some writing I did during an earlier period of my life.
Once again I've been inspired to, if not sit down and write, look at things a little bit differently. More over, it reawakened an appreciation for using less obvious word choices.
I'd love recommendations on other similar writers.
April 24, 2023
mostly crap
January 23, 2008
Kenneth Patchen, Selected Poems (New Directions, 1957)
Selected by the New Directions staff after Patchen's death, Selected Poems was meant to introduce a new generation to the poet and novelist the back cover calls "the most compelling force in American poetry since Whitman." (One wonders what Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" had been published by New Directions two years previous, had to say about that.) The collection does a good job at introduction, and does an even better job at showing the inconsistency of Patchen's poetic work.
Even those readers who have never attempted creative writing themselves are likely to have had at least one English teacher try and hammer "show, don't tell" into their heads. Patchen's contemporary and fellow New Directions poet William Carlos Williams put it even better: "no ideas but in things." Marshall McLuhan called this immutable rule "the medium is the message." Patchen understood this, and his best work in this collection shows it in breathtaking style, especially in a collection of short prose pieces from The Famous Boating Party towards the end of the book that are worth slogging through the first hundred pages. However, the majority of those first hundred pages show Patchen forgot it, and regularly, in his fervor to write tepid, ineffectual antiwar poems. It's hard to imagine the same guy wrote the painfully awkward
He who can come to his own formulation
Shall be found to assume mastery
Over the roads which lead
On the whole human event
("The Climate of War")
also wrote the jaw-dropping
Sword on the wind, black knuckles of a thief, is this
King to be left here like a cast-off dog? the bloated
tongues of flies licking the juice of is saving wounds?
("Red Wine and Yellow Hair")
As the above section from the uniformly wonderful "Red Wine and Yellow Hair" hopefully makes evident, when Patchen is on his game, he is very, very on his game. Every once in a while, especially towards the end of the book, something rises out of the stew of didacticity and smackes the reader right between the eyes. And those moments are well worth the cover price of this book. I just wish there had been more of them. ***
Selected by the New Directions staff after Patchen's death, Selected Poems was meant to introduce a new generation to the poet and novelist the back cover calls "the most compelling force in American poetry since Whitman." (One wonders what Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" had been published by New Directions two years previous, had to say about that.) The collection does a good job at introduction, and does an even better job at showing the inconsistency of Patchen's poetic work.
Even those readers who have never attempted creative writing themselves are likely to have had at least one English teacher try and hammer "show, don't tell" into their heads. Patchen's contemporary and fellow New Directions poet William Carlos Williams put it even better: "no ideas but in things." Marshall McLuhan called this immutable rule "the medium is the message." Patchen understood this, and his best work in this collection shows it in breathtaking style, especially in a collection of short prose pieces from The Famous Boating Party towards the end of the book that are worth slogging through the first hundred pages. However, the majority of those first hundred pages show Patchen forgot it, and regularly, in his fervor to write tepid, ineffectual antiwar poems. It's hard to imagine the same guy wrote the painfully awkward
He who can come to his own formulation
Shall be found to assume mastery
Over the roads which lead
On the whole human event
("The Climate of War")
also wrote the jaw-dropping
Sword on the wind, black knuckles of a thief, is this
King to be left here like a cast-off dog? the bloated
tongues of flies licking the juice of is saving wounds?
("Red Wine and Yellow Hair")
As the above section from the uniformly wonderful "Red Wine and Yellow Hair" hopefully makes evident, when Patchen is on his game, he is very, very on his game. Every once in a while, especially towards the end of the book, something rises out of the stew of didacticity and smackes the reader right between the eyes. And those moments are well worth the cover price of this book. I just wish there had been more of them. ***
June 14, 2024
I’ve been reading Patchen since I was exposed to his anti-novels in college—Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Sleepers Awake—and he’s one of those authors that I read and reread. Now that he’s worked his way into my novel-in-progress I only expect that to intensify. Selected Poems is only 145 pages but draws from ten books published between 1936 and 1957 so it’s all over the place in terms of tone and style. My favorite period is during the mid-40s when he’s at his angriest and most prolific. For my money, Patchen is the closest thing to William Blake the twentieth century has produced (sorry Ginsburg). He’s got a poem that opens in all caps and grabs you by the throat.
I DON’T MEANT TO STARTLE YOU but
they are going to kill most of us.
Patchen is the great dismantler of decorum, of precedent, of the way things are done. He was a huge influence on the Beats and to my mind is very punk. Check out this excerpt from a poem called “Credit to Paradise”:
The fun of being God would be
In being nothing;
To really live, we should be dead too.
Isn’t all dread a dread of being
Just here? of being only this?
Of having no other thing to become?
Of having nowhere to go really
But where we are?
Thanks for taking us to the edge of the void and fucking leaving us there, Ken. Selected Poems has one of my favorite visual poems, “The Murder of Two Men by a Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves.”
Patchen was also a visual artist—of course he was—who filled his books with drawings, illustrations, and paintings full of strange figures. His art is indifferent to beauty. His lines are confident but crude, like they were drawn for an audience of one, which was the case. He dedicated countless poems to his wife Miriam.
Patchen has the voice of a pulp existentialist and the intensity of a street preacher. There’s a messianic fervor to his poetry that is full of questions, not platitudes. He is always stridently, vehemently anti war, but he comes on like a drifter trying to con the bartender out a free beer.
“It’s dark out, Jack, the stations out there don’t identify themselves…” is a line that has been rattling around my head since a former colleague used it in a student film 30 years ago.
It is dark out there, Jack.
It feels like it’s never been darker.
I DON’T MEANT TO STARTLE YOU but
they are going to kill most of us.
Patchen is the great dismantler of decorum, of precedent, of the way things are done. He was a huge influence on the Beats and to my mind is very punk. Check out this excerpt from a poem called “Credit to Paradise”:
The fun of being God would be
In being nothing;
To really live, we should be dead too.
Isn’t all dread a dread of being
Just here? of being only this?
Of having no other thing to become?
Of having nowhere to go really
But where we are?
Thanks for taking us to the edge of the void and fucking leaving us there, Ken. Selected Poems has one of my favorite visual poems, “The Murder of Two Men by a Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves.”
Patchen was also a visual artist—of course he was—who filled his books with drawings, illustrations, and paintings full of strange figures. His art is indifferent to beauty. His lines are confident but crude, like they were drawn for an audience of one, which was the case. He dedicated countless poems to his wife Miriam.
Patchen has the voice of a pulp existentialist and the intensity of a street preacher. There’s a messianic fervor to his poetry that is full of questions, not platitudes. He is always stridently, vehemently anti war, but he comes on like a drifter trying to con the bartender out a free beer.
“It’s dark out, Jack, the stations out there don’t identify themselves…” is a line that has been rattling around my head since a former colleague used it in a student film 30 years ago.
It is dark out there, Jack.
It feels like it’s never been darker.
June 2, 2018
It was interesting to see his work transform overtime. Grow more pessimistic. i think it was after his back injury. Being in that much pain can do a lot to you. Nonetheless, I enjoyed his touches of surrealism, even his dedication to the ol' love poems. It might not be accurate, but Patchen to me seems to be this bridge between the Beats and the older generation before them. A mix of old and some of what was to come. His visual poetry I think i enjoyed the best.
May 11, 2022
Not the poet for me. Some of his later prose poems and nonsense poems with drawings held my attention, but the bulk of this book passed through me without a trace. Actually, that's not wholly true: his moralistic, judgmental, Christian pacifist poems are bitter, but not built to last, and that overall tone is what I'll recall of this collection.
April 13, 2025
I was enraptured by Patchen’s work! His melodic prose is spectacular, yet succinct. His anti-war commentary is stirring and reverent. His poems on nature were grand and are perfect for reading in the park or on a spring walk. His poems on love were breathtaking and passionate. I haven’t been moved by a poem like I was by several of these poems in a long time, and I highly recommend it!
September 13, 2019
A few standouts but much of his work caught is up in some conflict between abstract, imageless poetry and proto-beatnik.
June 27, 2016
What a voice. What a style. What a legend.
This was a slow burn of a read. I enjoyed a few poems every morning, with a few sessions of 20-30 at a time. At 140-odd pages, this book was far deeper in content then I expected. I read everything and was happy to see a few of his picture-poems includes as well. Lots of inspiration and ideas born out of his work. I was confounded, moved and punched in the jaw by Patchen's work .
This was a slow burn of a read. I enjoyed a few poems every morning, with a few sessions of 20-30 at a time. At 140-odd pages, this book was far deeper in content then I expected. I read everything and was happy to see a few of his picture-poems includes as well. Lots of inspiration and ideas born out of his work. I was confounded, moved and punched in the jaw by Patchen's work .
July 21, 2010
Four or five of these poems are stunning (my favorite is "What Splendid Birthdays"), and there are some good little lines sprinkled throughout ("there are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death"). The rest are melodramatic verbal vomit, usually fixated on war and governments and how modern society is crap. Yawn.
June 21, 2013
Even for a "Selected Poems," this is a bit hit or miss. When Patchen is able to combine image, rhythm, and moral outrage, he's inspiring; otherwise, often pedestrian or worse.
February 15, 2014
Kenneth Patchen rules
June 7, 2017
English 526: Visuality in American Literature - Another experimental book, investigating the merging of images and words. Some linkages to dreams and unconscious connections.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews