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We Meet
By Kenneth Patchen
Preface by Devandra Banhart
(New Directions; New York) 

It can be tempting to view Kenneth Patchen’s "picture-poems," as the poet himself called them, as the fey, trippy-dippy doodles of an ecstatic visionary. If one simply focuses on the rough-shod shapes and untrained aesthetic that dominates the works — jazzy, childlike drawings populated with fantastic creatures rendered in lines that equally recall Dada, surrealism, and AbEx abandon — and not the cursive ramblings of lyric poetry, satire, and fables that they are strewn with, then your mind might make the associative leap to a few of the following: posters advertising Bread & Puppet processions; cozy Pacifist Vermont kitchens; or a vegetarian high school nestled in the citrus groves of Ojai, California. But it is Patchen’s words — both caustic and credulous, folksy and high-minded, always beautiful and stinging and staunchly political — that make the woodland creatures take on a weirder, more artful and complicated cast. Thus in a page from Wonderings (published in 1971, a year before the poet died), the cheerful figures of a turtle, or perhaps a flea, and a wide-eyed head on jaunty legs are accompanied by a lilting ribbon of words that winds its way around them like so: "The words that speak up from the mangled bodies of human beings/This is the fallout/that covers everything on earth now."

The conflict inherent in such a world vision — Patchen’s trumpeting of love and doom, fairy-tale bestiary and nuclear fallout — not only characterizes his picture-poems but his larger, prodigious output of experimental novels and poetry as well. This activist-naïf persona was born out of the contradictions of a lifetime that stretched over much of the 20th century. From impoverished, steel-mill-bound roots in Niles, Ohio, where the poet was born, in 1911, Patchen would go on to attend an experimental college in Wisconsin; sample an itinerant, hobo life across the South; participate in Greenwich Village’s early artistic milieu; take a Pacifist stance against WWII; collaborate with John Cage and Charles Mingus; accept a post as a grandfather to the Bay Area Beats; and finally die as a result of the spinal injury that plagued him most of his life. The injury left Patchen an invalid for his last 15 years, and it was during this period that his concentration on experimental typography and imagery really took off. In these two new collections, his artwork comes into focus. The Walking-Away World collects three of Patchen’s titles from the last decade of his life: Hallelujah Anyway (1960) and But Even So (1968), in addition to Wonderings. The more various We Meet collects five books from a wider period: Because It Is (1946), Poemscapes (1957), A Letter to God (1958), Hurray for Anything (1960), and Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces (1970).

While wildly comprehensive and very welcome, both collections unwittingly put the high/low contradictions of Patchen’s practice on full display by including breathy, self-consciously casual introductions that de-emphasize the serious aspects of the poet’s oeuvre. Cartoonist Jim Woodring’s intro to The Walking-Away World, while infor-mative and ardent, is less a thoughtful assessment of Patchen’s achievement than a ranting indictment of the poet’s naysayers. His devoted defensiveness recalls an earlier preface to a Patchen collection by Henry Miller. In the hysterical and somewhat incoherent essay that he wrote in Big Sur in 1946, Miller calls the poet a "snorting dragon," inside of which there is a "gentle prince who suffers at the mention of the slightest cruelty or injustice," and slams all those who had or would contribute to the poet’s unhappiness. Such defensiveness only serves the picture of Patchen the Innocent, which his actual work would seem to (mostly) contradict. The preface to We Meet is even more pandering in its insistence on Patchen’s folkish guilelessness, as written by musician Devandra Banhart. While sweet, the brief text amounts to nothing more than fan mail — though it makes apparent the folk singer’s lyrical common ground with the poet. While Banhart’s contribution could succeed in introducing Patchen’s work to a new generation, it might also be accused of embroidering twee flowers over the man who strikingly wrote in the poem "A Vision for the American People": "The poets with death on their tongues/shall come to address you./The slimy hypocrisy will end./You will go down in your filth."