We Looked for Kenneth Patchen in Ohio, But We Couldn’t Find Any Trace of Him Until We Got Home

Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972), American poet and
novelist. Photograph by Chester Kessler, circa 1952.
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38096697

I’m a lifelong admirer of the poet Kenneth Patchen, and while I was in Youngstown last month I decided to go and look at his birthplace. He was from Niles, Ohio, after all, and I figured there should be a plaque or monument or at least a sign somewhere in Niles to show that this fearless and peace-loving poet got his start there. But though we searched online and asked at the McKinley Memorial Library (Niles' branch of the public library, which did have a few volumes of Patchen’s poetry), there didn’t seem to be any acknowledgement that Patchen was a native son. (To be accurate, he is listed on the Niles Wikipedia page under “Notable people.”) 

Near the library, a statue of another of Niles’ Notable people, President McKinley, gives the 25th president the appearance of a Greek or Roman orator, and it stands in the courtyard of a lavish neoclassical building that honors him. In that building there’s a welcoming little museum, and we also asked there about whether or not there was a memorial for Kenneth Patchen nearby, but no one knew. Why, I wondered, doesn’t Niles celebrate the poet who clamored for peace every chance he got? Wouldn’t that help to counteract in some small way the fact that McKinley's life was ended by an act of violence, by assassination?

Permanent memorial to the birthplace of President William McKinley, 25th President
of the United States in Niles, Ohio. Photo by Lilly Conforti, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There was a time when more was made of Patchen in his native state, and for a few short years, there was a Kenneth Patchen Festival in Warren. I attended the Festival in 1989, and I met Miriam Patchen and asked her to sign my copy of Patchen’s Collected Poems. But the present-day indifference to Patchen in Niles saddened me. When I got back to Tucson and had access to my books again, I organized a little Kenneth Patchen Festival of my own. I celebrated the diversity of Patchen’s work as a visual artist, a poet, and a playwright, much as the 1989 Festival did. But because this was a very small and private festival, I focused on a limited sampling of each aspect of his life’s work.

 As always, I started with the visual. I have a copy of What Shall We Do Without Us? The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen, which was published by Sierra Club Books in 1984 and contains 37 color images of Patchen's Picture Poems. In a review of the book that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Steven Ratiner gave a thorough and respectful description of Patchen as a visual artist, noting that the spinal injury that kept the poet in nearly constant pain for most of his adult life caused him to spend his last 13 years in bed. It was during this time, when he couldn't find the strength and energy to work on longer writing projects, that he began to produce his Picture Poems.

According to Ratiner, Patchen, who was not trained as a graphic artist, was influenced by William Blake's illustrated books, and art critic Alfred Frankenstein called Patchen "probably the most sophisticated primitive in the history of American art." Ratiner says the creatures in Patchen's Picture Poems affect us profoundly. "Seemingly childlike, realized with a surprising simplicity of form, they establish a powerful bond with their audience," projecting an aura that is "wise, magical, yet quite vulnerable," and he says Patchen was influenced by Klee and Miro.  In fact, Patchen’s drawings remind me more of those of Karel Appel, who helped form the CoBrA group and who was also inspired by Klee and Miro. 

I decided to choose a Picture Poem from the book and look at it carefully, the way I do when I’m writing an ekphrastic essay. I chose the one which says, “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.” This Picture Poem, like Patchen’s many other such works, features alert-looking creatures that remind us of animals and birds, though the one at the bottom of the page, with six legs, a tail, a head like a hillock and a long brown body has flowers sprouting from its front and back and seems to be the ground that is getting disgusted enough to walk away. Its head and body are ochre-colored, which is appropriate because ochre is a clay earth pigment, and this adds to the notion that this creature is actually meant to be the ground. Its eyes are intense and golden, and it has a bemused expression on its face, gazing at the viewer in a slightly helpless way, standing firmly on its little stubby peg-like legs, like a dog that’s just about had enough. Its tail is not wagging. 

Two other creatures nearly fill the rest of the image, outlined against a yellow background and jockeying for space amidst the hand-lettered text of the poem, the last bit of which extends along the body of the standing ground. One of the creatures is a mix of animal, vegetable, and human, wearing leaves for hair and with a small tail, human-like legs and an elephantine sort of nose. It seems to be stepping down off the ground as it looks at us with one eye, the way someone does in an ancient Egyptian image, its head and body in profile and its eye gazing forward. The other creature is birdlike with swirling feathers and a pointed beaky face. It’s doing a good job of standing its ground and seems calmly balanced. Both creatures are yellow and blue. 

But people are the subject of this Picture Poem, and none of these creatures are people. People are the ones who would be left with nothing more to stand on except for that which they have stood for, which sounds like an angry condemnation of people as a species, implying that they have stood for some terrible things. And, of course, they have. Yet when you look at the faces of all three creatures, you don’t really feel as though they or Patchen are angry at you. Instead, they seem to say that you had better be sure that you stand for something ethical and reasonable and well-thought-out, so you will have something to stand on under trying and difficult circumstances, which seems like sound advice to me.

A few books from my Kenneth Patchen collection.

For the second act of my small festival, I spent some time reading older poems from Patchen’s Selected Poems, concentrating on the ones that have the most to do with Youngstown (when it was a steel town) and on the air Patchen and I breathed there (though not concurrently). “Orange Bears” (from Kenneth Patchen: Selected Poems) is one of the most anthologized of Patchen’s poems and appears many places on the internet. It’s a poem about childhood, but it’s also very clearly about environmental and economic justice. The orange bears that played with the poet when he was ten could have been stuffed animals or imaginary friends, but what happens to them is a reflection of something very real. The orange bears have their backs “seared by hot slag,” and they also have their “soft trusting/ Bellies kicked in.” The ideas expressed in these descriptions alternate between what happens to the land in a steel town and what can happen to the people.

As the poet goes down by the “smelly crick” to read Whitman, he realizes that you have to have lived in a mill town to understand these injustices, because even Whitman, who was the quintessential poet of the American people, didn’t know much about “the National Guard coming over/ From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates/ With drawn bayonets/ Jeering at the strikers…” And at the end the poem turns again to the air and the water and the land and tells us that “…you could put daisies/ On the windowsill at night and in/ The morning they’d be so covered with soot/ You couldn’t tell what they were anymore.” In this poem the industrialists who own the mills are shown to be just about everything the orange bears are not. Which is why the bears didn’t stand a chance where Patchen grew up in the 1920s and I grew up in the 1960s. Now the mills are gone and the jobs are gone and most of the most damaging effects on the river and the air are gone, but the sadness remains.

And though you might think that “And May I Ask You a Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?” (also from Selected Poems) is going to be an even more intense poem about those same issues, it is and it isn’t. It does start out lamenting “…the yellow-brown smoke/ That blows in/ Every minute of the day. And/ Every minute of the night,” but then there’s some dialogue between people who turn to alcohol in order to survive the exploitation and the gloom. And there’s less of a clear connection to issues of environmental justice and more of a dramatic portrayal of how people try to keep themselves from despairing when work is hard and unrelenting. At the poem’s end, in spite of death and sadness and living with “the taste of tar in your mouth,” the poet announces that “[t]he day shift goes on in four minutes.” In this way Patchen comments on the routinized and standardized life of shifts and schedules that dominated people’s lives when the mills were operating 24 hours a day. Now that they are not, people must fend for themselves and the lack of the taste of tar isn’t always appreciated.

Finally, looking for a third act for my festival, I turned to Patchen as a playwright and listened to a 1942 radio play called “The City Wears a Slouch Hat,” which I found online quite by accident. It features a “sound score” by John Cage, which was commissioned by CBS’ Columbia Workshop to accompany a play written by Patchen. I was drawn to it because I encountered Cage’s avant-garde music the same year I first read Patchen, in 1970. Cage also directed the "orchestra of sound players,” consisting of five percussionists. There are gongs and chimes and bells and cymbals that fill in for the sounds of rain and ocean waves in the play, though sound effects are also used. In the play an unnamed man, referred to in the credits as "The Voice" wanders the cityscape on a rainy night, talking to people, generously giving a panhandler some money and listening patiently to a distraught woman. He also survives being mugged and harassed by street toughs, and he shows himself to have strange and more-than-human powers as, for example, when he goes up to answer a ringing phone on the sixth floor of a nearby building in order to tell the caller that a family will die in ten minutes time. We are given clearer evidence that he really has such abilities when we learn that he already has a picture of his mugger in his wallet and knows that the three men who later follow him have no bullets in their revolvers.

At one point he simply says "Let's walk up and look around in the sky a bit." The percussion score during that sequence is especially resonant, and it ends when he says, "We better get back down, I guess." But The Voice isn't the only person who has had unreal and unexpected experiences: one man tells another about a talking horse, there's a machine that laughs and a woman who claims to have had a terrible accident with broken glass that disfigured her, yet she is not scarred and won’t explain. Toward the end of the play The Voice recites some poetry ("The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlow and "Death, be not proud" by John Donne), and then he swims out to a rock in the ocean to get away from the city noise and strife, where he muses that "I'll enjoy being alone..." But he soon encounters a man who says he lives on that rock because he got "sort of tired of things onshore. Men and women doing the same stupid things over and over. And the noise of the city..." As he speaks, the sounds of percussion -- the gongs and chimes – substitute for the frenzy of the waves.

After listening to what the man on the rock has to say, The Voice turns his attention to the need for getting along with the other people around us and finding a way to accept the crowds in the city. A slouch hat, which the city is said to wear according to the play’s title, is mostly a military sort of headgear, and in the play the city is depicted as a place that can cause people to be defensive and fearful. But The Voice cautions against this in his small final soliloquy, saying: "We were not meant to be strangers to each other. We have the same fears, the same hopes, joys, and sorrows. We must not be suspicious. We must learn to love each other.” This might be a somewhat straightforward way to end such an avant-garde play, but it’s a message that seems entirely appropriate coming from Kenneth Patchen.

In this play, as in his other work, Patchen advocates harmony and compassion. In his above-mentioned Christian Science Monitor review, Steven Ratiner talks about the "powerful pacifist message" of Patchen's art, and he notes that interest in Patchen's writing was strong during the decade of the Vietnam war, which is when I discovered him. Ratiner says that the poet’s work gained attention again in the 1980s "when speculation about nuclear war and the survival of the planet [arose] in daily conversation and newspaper headlines.” Since those speculations are just as apropos today, I hope there will be a resurgence of interest in Kenneth Patchen's work, which also contained a great deal of wisdom about how human beings can learn to live together without violence.