Poems of Humor & Protest

"Understand that they were sitting just inside the door / at a little table with two full beers and two empties. / There were a few dozen people moving around, killing / Time and getting tight because nothing meant anything / Anymore / Somebody looked at a girl and somebody said / Great things doing in Spain / But she didn't even look up, not so much as half an eye. / Then Jack picked up his beer and Nellie her beer / And their legs ground together under the table. / ... / No one knew just why it happened or whether / It would happen ever again on this fretful earth / But Jack picked up his beer again and Nellie her beer again / And, as though at signal, a little man hurried in, / Crossed to the bar and said Hello Steve to the barkeeper." ("The State of the Nation," pg. 7). Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), is a Poet's Poet. Many Poet's-Poets are marred by a certain stuffiness, given to flaunting their erudition, to dangling allusion-heavy Rabbit Holes of Joycean heft before the reader. Patchen, on the other hand, could not be more different: his existence as a "Poet's Poet" has nothing to do with the sort of lofty, hermetic altitudes at/from which many-a bespectacled-Modernist wrote. It has nothing to do with the footnotes at the end of The Waste Land, nothing to do with the cornucopia of references which gild Pound's Cantos. Patchen is a man whose inviting, accessible verse is characterized by a swaggering ebullience and distinctive emotional intelligence that many find enchanting.