Kenneth Patchen Archive is one of the most actively used in the Special Collections, UC Santa Cruz. The main collection was acquired from Miriam Patchen in the mid-seventies. In addition, related collections and papers have been added throughout the years to enhance and supplement the existing material.
The Archive has been used in the highly successful Sierra Club book, "What Shall We Do Without Us?" and featured in a film created by San Francisco public television station KQED. Books, newspaper and magazine articles have been written by users of the collection, and many of the Painted Poems have been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe since the acquisition of the material. The Archive became an integral part of the four-day Kenneth Patchen Celebration in 1987 and was featured in the 1989 Kenneth Patchen Literary Festival, both in his hometown of Warren, Ohio.
Kenneth Patchen papers, MS160, is the core collection of the Kenneth Patchen Archive. It is composed of original manuscripts, extensive set of outgoing and incoming correspondence, first and subsequent editions of his books, limited painted book editions, original Painted Poems, scrapbooks, recordings, paintings and other art work. Bulk of the material dates between 1929-1972.
Other related archives with primary material (correspondence, manuscript pages, first editions, recordings etc.) include:
Since an early childhood private activity, drawing and creating his own 'comic' strips ...not interfere with his being most active in athletic and collegiate affairs; football, track, debating team, class president, et al, in his school and college.After leaving Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, his rambles through the country during the depression included most of the classic jobs and situations of such a life with one notable difference: everywhere, he left behind him sheafs of manuscript: forgotten, overlooked, lost - but he was always creating.
After a violent attack of back disability in 1937, he found himself forced back to his world of visual-structured creatures. The first application of them came with the limited edition of The Dark Kingdom. After that as Patchen continued working the, for him, inevitable need to expand the written word brought about first the "understanding", then the "engagement" then, finally, the marriage of words and drawings. The "Painted Books" are the door, as it were, to the "Picture-Poems".
When a spinal fusion in 1956 gave the first relief he had had from pain for 19 years, he started back into the outside world. In 1959, a "surgical mishap" destroyed his freedom; replaced in even more violent and vicious form his life of pain confined totally to bed. Faced with the death of a book he had planned for years - The Human Winter, the wonderful happenstance of being made the recipient of some hundreds-of-years-old handmade papers started him back to painting. Physically torturous for him since he can not sit, lie on his back, or move more than slightly without incurring monstrous pain, painting little works on paper gives him air from the cramped bedroom, everything else, including the page, closes in.
Despite saying that he is not a "Painter" because he has not devoted his time and efforts to the problems of paintings, Patchen has been acclaimed by many leading artists and galleries as a powerful force in the art world. Everywhere his influence is to be see. Essay addapted from Kenneth Patchen: Painter of Poems. Exhibit Catalog, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1969
Jazz Play: "Don't Looks Now"
Poster: (image)
The first production of Patchen's jazz play "Don't Look Now" opened on Oct 31, 1959, at the Outside the Inside Theater in Palo Alto. It was produced by the Troupe Theatre group under the direction of Phillip Angeloff and ran for six weeks. The play was build around 7 characters interacting in an upside-down living room while a live jazz band reacted to the actions unfolding on stage. Critics labeled the play as "4th dimensional realism", "hallucinatory fantasy", "extra-sensory theater".
Poetry and Jazz
Patchen's occupation with poetry and jazz began back in April of 1957 when he met Allyn Ferguson, a jazz musician and band leader of The Chamber Jazz Sextet. The encounter ultimately lead to the recording of Kenneth Patchen Reads with Allyn Ferguson and the Chamber Jazz Sextet (Cadence, 1957), multiple bookings at San Francisco's Blackhawk Club, an invitation to appear in Bobby Troup's TV show "Stars of Jazz", and tours in United States and Canada between 1957-1959. Reported in The Los Angeles Examiner on a LA performance, Dec 30, 1957,
"...not just words but phrases and thoughts so beautifully woven into the jazz background, and so expertly phrased and times, that it is a revelation to the ear and mind."
Note: Because of Patchen's involvement in the poetry-jazz movement of the 1950's, he was, and still is, wrongly labeled as a Beat Poet. In response to the inaccurate connection, he released a statement of independence:
" What I have to say is said for the purpose of throwing light on a situation about which many people have expressed puzzlement. My name and activities have not figured in recent publication coverage of 'the San Francisco Scene' for the simple reason in so far as I could I rejected all such identifications...I am not and never have been 'a regional poet...".
I Went To The City: (Sample Track 1: 11.3 MB)
The Murder of Two Men by Young Kid Wearing Lemon-Colored Gloves: (Sample Track 2: 8.74 MB)
Do The Dead Know What Time It Is? (Sample Track 3: 4.88 MB)
Union of Word and Picture
Patchen began experimenting with combination of visual and written word through use of typography in his early novels and poetry. His innovations extended to hand-written pages, illustrations and abstract drawings to accompany the text.
In addition he later issued limited painted editions, books with hand-painted covers, and in the 1950's silk-screened sets of poems, which were printed on fine Japanese papers and designed to induce more personal reader experience.
Patchens final manuscripts exclusively consist of Painted Poems, modern versions of the illuminated texts of the middle ages, aimed at a mystical union of word and picture. Medium incorporated in the Painted Poems include torn pieces of both rare Japanese papers and common construction paper, glue (from wheat paste to Elmer's Glue), tempera, watercolors, casein, crayons, inks, pencil, Tintex cloth dyes, cloth string, coffee and tea as dyes.
Painted Book: (image)
Hurrah for Anything: poems and drawings. Kenneth Patchen. Jonathan Williams: Highlands, 1957. Limited to 75 copies, prepared and painted by author, no. 7 (front cover) Copy donated signed by Laurence Ferlinghetti.
Painted Book: (image)
Hurrah for Anything: poems and drawings. Kenneth Patchen. Jonathan Williams: Highlands, 1957. Limited to 75 copies, prepared and painted by author, no. 7 (colophon page) Copy donated and signed by Laurence Ferlinghetti.
Silkscreen Print: (image)
"An old Lady named Amber Sam filtched a reverse-stripe zebra off 2 stalled Movingvan but since the zee had no built-in spoon any soup she gave him lacked all jiggable tune so she put on an old pair of baggy pants and snuck quietly out to a neighbors car and shifted both of its headlights onto the rear-bumper."
Silkscreen Print: (image)
"O listen is a purple elephant/ Who comes to the woods each night/And with his mole-soft and curling trunk/ Touches all the stars with light/ And written on his blanket/ Are the names of tress and grass and men/ Of where we shall go tomorrow/ And of what it will be like then/ O of what it will be like then"
Painted Poem: (image)
"Imagine seeing you here, after all it's not every day that the two nicest people in this big old lousy world get together like this"
Painted Poem: (image)
"I have a funny feeling that some very peculiar-looking cratures out there are watching us"
Painted Poem: (image)
"What Shall We Do Without Us?"
Painted Poem: (image)
"Declaration of PEACE my country the world"
Painted Poem: (image)
"Everyman is me, I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am Everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strenght, my deepest hope, and my only belief."
Signed self-portrait, Aug 9, 1964: (image)
Some were Rebels out of choice; I had none-I wish they'd give me just one speck of proof that this 'world of theirs' couldn't have been set up and handled better by a half-dozen drugged idiots bound hand and foot at the bottom of a ten-mile well. I'ts always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to give a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do.on his youth:
My blood inheritance is of England, Scotch, Irish, and French strains. My mother's father was a coal miner; my father's a farmer-blacksmith...One of my paternal forebears deserted his Red Coat regiment in the Revolutionary War...to marry a Pennsylvania farm girl; his name was Sir Aaron Drake...I started a diary in my twelfth year; been writing at something ever since. I had a consciousness of being a poet when I first realized that the medium of writing had something in it more than just communication-something happens, and I suppose it has to do with...being a poet...My grandfather was a Scot and who had a wonderful sense of humor, and a tradition going back to the time of Burns, whose poetry he read to me when I was a little boy... and in the stories he told me...there was what you would call magic.on his art:
I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend-give an extra dimension to the medium of words. There is always...between words and the meaning of words, an area which is not to be penetrated...the region of magic, the place of the priestly interpreter of nature, the man who identifies himelf with all things and with all beings, and who suffers and exalts with all of these...I think that the mystery of life will ring in the work, and when it rings most strongly, truly and honestly, it will ring with a sense of mystery...of wonder, childlike wonder...a sense of identification with everything that lived.on the Journal of Albion Moonlight:
I attempted to write the spiritual account of this summer... [1940]-a summer when all the codes and ethics which men lived by for centuries were subjected to the acid tests of general war and universal disillusionment. I had to recreate that chaos...uncharted horror and suffering and complete loss of heart by most human beings...I have I think kept the reader on his toes-I have made him a participant...To love all things is to understand all things; and that which is understood by any of us becomes a knowledge embedded in all of us...To recognize truth it is only necessary to recognize each other.
