Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen

Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen

About the Author :
Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was a poet, playwright, fiction and fable writer, artist, and performer of poetry-jazz, working in the tradition of engaged writing which he helped to forge in America. Producing almost a book a year for 36 years, his work stands as an exposed girder in the structure of American character and art. His friendships with such writers as Amos Wilder, Lewis Mumford, James Laughlin, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others place him at the center of dissident writing in America. Rising from his native grounds in working-class Ohio, he became a leading figure among Leftist thinkers and artists in Greenwich Village�s 1930s and 40s. In the 1950s he moved to the West Coast where he created artistic blends of poetry and art, and poetry and jazz. Finally crippled with back pain during the last decade of his life, he created the wonderful picture-poems. For four decades, on East and West Coast, by the force of his own will and his native genius, Patchen molded a life and art as one. With the loving support of his wife Miriam he endured the pain and travail of years of struggle to recast an art based on truth and striking beauty. His is one of the great stories of American literature. Allen Frost lives in Bellingham, Washington, with wife Laura, daughter Rosa and son Rustle. He was born in La Jolla, California, and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine. He has lived and worked in Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Huron, Ohio. He works in the library at Western Washington University. His Ohio Trio: Fictions appeared in 2001 from Bottom Dog Press, followed by Bowl of Water written between 1989-2002. Another Life is drawn from limited edition poetry chapbooks written 2002-2007. Home Recordings appeared from Bird Dog Publishing in 2010. He contributed an article to the collection d.a.levy and the mimeograph revolution (2008). He is an associate editor of Bottom Dog Press.

Review :
When reading Kenneth Patchen, a face stares back out of the text. His very human gaze scrutinizes us and our world with such intensity because he is looking for all the beauty despite such apparent ugliness. The Selected Correspondence reveals the hardships and pain Patchen endured in this search, bolstered by his muse Miriam. Reading Patchen is a profound literary experience, an absolute delighting in humanity's possibilities yet also a despondence, sometimes even anger, over our shortcomings. These themes play themselves out here in Patchen's impassioned letters to such friends and colleagues as Henry Miller, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, et. al. To read this correspondence is to be astonished by Patchen's insatiable quest for all that is good in life, one that led him from proletarianism to concretism to jazz to painted poems. Embrace hope, all ye who enter here. -Eckhard Gerdes, editor of Journal of Experimental Fiction