A Meditation on Kenneth Patchen’s Painted Poems

Abstract

While in my teens in the mid-1950s in Chicago, I discovered Kenneth Patchen through reading an essay titled “Patchen: Man of Anger and Light,” by Henry Miller. This was before Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was available in the States. I had already read all of Miller’s New Directions books. Once I discovered Patchen, I read everything of his I could find. And in doing so discovered the inner world of the man’s passionate feelings and thoughts. They gave me an anchor....