The Rare Books & Special Collections department at the University of
Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library has become one of my mainstays for offbeat,
educational art exhibitions. Last week it opened yet another of its excellent
shows, “An Astonished Eye: The Art of Kenneth Patchen,” the
largest-ever exhibition of the graphic art of this relatively obscure,
pioneering painter-poet. Held in celebration of the centennial of Patchen’s
birth, the show presents more than 200 painted books, silk-screen broadsides,
picture-poems, paintings, photographs, and inscribed first editions.
Kenneth Patchen was a fascinating, sadly off-the-radar, prolific blip in
literary and aesthetic history. As usual with these exhibits, the viewer could
spend hours absorbed in a fascinating, worthy-of-celebrating life, explored not
only in object but through insightful commentary by the curators. Opening night
of the exhibit was accompanied by the first in this year’s Neilly Lecture
Series, with a talk offered by fine art photographer, fine press printer, and
keeper of Patchen’s legacy, Jonathan Clark, who provided a window into a life
of hardship, creativity, resourcefulness, and crucially central philosophic
human issues.
Clark’s lecture, “Extending the Medium of Words: The Graphic Art of
Kenneth Patchen,” was a tribute to Patchen not by a cold collector of his
works, but by a person who knew him well – Clark was exposed to the work of the
poet by his teacher father. Clark visited the stranger, unaware of his
bedridden state, and when initially unable to access the poet, struck up a
friendship with Patchen’s wife and muse, Miriam, sharing conversation for
months on the porch before Patchen finally invited him indoors.
Patchen died during Clark’s first year in college, but Clark continued his
friendship with Miriam and helped negotiate the sale of the Patchen archive to
University of California at Santa Cruz special collections, and saved work from
flood damage in 1998 while restoring the house for Miriam.
Though first and foremost a poet, Patchen adopted the idea
of the “total artist, extending his creative process to include printing,
book binding, and design,” says exhibit curator Richard Peek, director of
Rare Books & Special Collections at the University of Rochester. In text as
well as image, Patchen’s work was infused with a “strong moral voice
driven by a wild imagination,” Peek says.
Published from the 1930’s until his death in 1972, Patchen has been
“labeled as Romantic, Proletarian, Socialist, Surrealist, Dadaist, and
Beat, but his life’s work ultimately defies categorization,” says Peek,
which is one of the reasons academia has not focused on him. Of dozens of
books, his anti-war anti-novel “The Journal of Albion Moonlight” is
considered an important work of experimental literature.
The 1941 work begins as a diary documenting an allegorical journey through a
nightmarish landscape, but quickly disintegrates into chaos, with multiple
voices taking on individual typographical forms, marginal stories, lists, and a
man hanging from a rope of letters. William Blake influenced Patchen deeply, as
is evident in the integral imagery found in the book. The complex typography
was printed in letterpress by Patchen himself, and his own handwriting appears
on page 159, “as if his own emotions can no longer be contained by
mechanical type,” says Clark. Patchen’s work also shows influence of E. E.
Cummings, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, and Joan Miro, among others.
The Great Depression broke Patchen’s family into
destitution and “marked his outlook,” says Clark. At age 14, he had a
sonnet published in New York Times, but spent his young adulthood riding the
rails looking for odd jobs to survive, was arrested and beaten, and spent a
terrifying week in a Georgia jail accused of murder due to mistaken identity. His
life story crisscrosses the nation, chasing opportunity and health – his
degenerative back problems were sustained at age 26 when he tried to lift a car
that locked bumpers in an accident. The injury plagued him for the rest of his
life.
Patchen’s first book, “Before the Brave,” was published in 1936,
the poems “a bit like Joe Hill meets Percy Shelley,” says Clark. It
was filled with themes of pacifism and social justice, and earned Patchen a
Guggenheim fellowship. Graphic artwork debuted in his second book, the 1939
“First Will and Testament,” with two drawings on a single page. This
work won critical attention from William Carlos Williams and Henry Miller.
“The Dark Kingdom” featured design and typography by Patchen, and
was the first of nine painted book editions. Confined to bed, the poet painted
on 75 covers, each one of a kind, and offered them for a premium collector’s
price. “The painted books, which began as a marketing device, soon became
a major creative outlet for Patchen,” says Clark, and an upwards of 700 to
1000 total were created.
The tone of later works shifted from complete darkness to comparatively
whimsical, with matching imagery, though his “outrage at injustice never
diminished,” says Clark. One work features a feather-haired figure standing
on an anthropomorphized scrap of ground, and reads: “The best hope is that
one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away –
leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well
stood for up to now.”
After a 1950 operation on his back and a doctor-recommended move to San
Francisco, Patchen began to perform poetry live with jazz accompaniment,
touring widely but briefly with Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Andre Previn,
Ally Ferguson, and Alan Neil. Patchen’s drifty free-verse voice is languid but
persistent over jangly, meandering jazz, recorded in clubs before another
bungled surgery led to greater trouble with his back, condemning him to bed
once more. His final years were spent relatively isolated as he further
developed his picture-poem experiments. “This Room, This Battlefield”
is an autobiographical work covered in cramped text, a perfect visual for his
condition. Patchen died in 1972, at age 60, in poverty and with obscurity
encroaching.
The slim audience for poetry is a tricky enough problem to
navigate during an author’s lifetime, more so after death when a poet is not
favored by academia. Though Patchen’s work is difficult to categorize, and
controversial in its anarchist themes, his works remain personal, immediate,
exhibiting a universal-ness close to the end of his life. Tones of anger,
protest, humor, and contemplation resolved into a compassionate identification
with all things. His own suffering birthed a sense of mystery and wonder about existence.
Some works are lofty, others state it simply: “In the long run/this is a
race where everybody ends up/in a tie, sorta.”
One if my favorite works in the show, a broadside in all neon colors, with a
large figure holding flowers and a bird, states what seemingly always needs to
be said: “I shall proclaim this international shut your big fat flapping
mouth week.” I think I would have liked this guy a great deal.
“An Astonished Eye: The Art of Kenneth Patchen”
Through January 5
Rare Books & Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of
Rochester River Campus
Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
275-4477 | rochester.edu
This article appears in Sep 28-28, 2011.
