Interview by Zoë Brigley
I write largely by ear. In my teens I was obsessed with Mozart, and folk music… and I’m absolutely sure that both of these taught me about pacing and register and the tonal possibilities of form.
From Lines by Kenneth Patchen #13
It wasn’t much of a summer. You could as well write the biography of southern rain as sit on a deck chair in some sweeping expanse. All the flowery talk, the magical mouse, the screen for company and the house, the house, the house, the lack of a house; that lute in the attic sat silent these three hundred years. It has no dimensions left, but still at night you can vaguely make out its little airs. Something once plucked those strings. Two ghosts together, we sit, and it’s for me, the living, to make some music here in this attic. It wasn’t much of a summer, but I did manage to pick up a few things.
So tell me about Kenneth Patchen. I know that you have written a few poems inspired by Patchen, and I would love to hear more about him.
Ah, Patchen!
Kenneth Patchen wrote from the 1930s to his death aged 60 in 1972 — in America, this means Depression to WWII, through McCarthyism to Vietnam time. He was a pacifist who wrote anti-war poems, poems about modern hypocrisy, inequality, despair about the state of the world, poems about being human in its darkest and most vulnerable — and also hopeful — aspects.
I think we are very influenced by the decade or two before we’re born — at least, I was. So much had happened. It seemed somehow bigger than the present. Patchen fits into a cultural landscape, that of my parents, aunts and uncles and their friends, that also includes Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Dalton Trumbo, and others who opposed the vicious conservatism of the 1950s and the repression of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. It’s hard to overstate how traumatic those decades were for my parents’ generation in America.
Patchen was a working-class guy who had one year of uni on a football scholarship and had to stop because he injured his back. It was 1929, year of the stock market crash, and he spent the next few years itinerantly, taking what jobs he could. (He injured his back for good only a few years later and was disabled, in pain, and finally bedridden, for the rest of his life.) His output is variable, but important. He undeniably possessed genius. He wasn’t really part of a group; his work was influential in several directions, ranging from Langston Hughes and jazz poetry to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats (from whom he wanted to distance himself, once they got big, got druggy, and started strutting around. In true dad style — ‘Do you call this music?’). He was a profligate and experimental poet and novelist, who would also make drawings and paintings as poems, a bit like Blake. He had quite a bit in common with Blake: I’ve read in an essay somewhere that his concern was ‘not personal psychology but rather the commune’; it’s a moral, spiritual, urgently social outlook. He’s generous, personal, political, and kind of mythic. There are a couple of great videos on YouTube of him reading his work over very beatnik jazz, but of course I didn’t know these recordings when I was a kid.
The day Patchen died, so it goes, my mother’s best friend Mrs Underwood was drinking tea in our kitchen. The doorbell rang, and it was a telegram — not for my parents, but for Mrs Underwood. It was from Mr Underwood, one street away, telling her that Kenneth Patchen, her favourite poet, was dead; he was too scared to break it to her in person! These kinds of stories made a big impression on me, so when I reached my teens and started reading adult poetry, of course I remembered that name: PATCHEN.
He’s a one-off. And I don’t think he’s ever been of huge interest to the academic poetry world, except when someone’s discussing politics, and that may be one reason why I love him.
Here are a couple of his poems:
Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?
The poem is part of a series ‘From Lines by Kenneth Patchen.’ Is it something you enjoy – using other poet’s work as a starting point for your own? (Although maybe this is a silly question as it might be something we all do to an extent all the time, although perhaps not so blatantly!)
I’ve never been a writer of ‘versions’, though I have occasionally written a response. And about 10-12 years ago I went through a phase when I had a lot of fun writing spam poems. But I’ve ever really done cut-up poetry, or felt like I needed to start from someone else’s line.
By last year, though, various events of recent years — homelessness & displacement, Covid, Long Covid, year of lockdowns — had sent me so far into my own head I didn’t feel able to write my own poems. I had written a few, but they felt (like Berryman’s ‘life, friends’) boring. They came from the wrong part of me. Or the wrong kind of me. I couldn’t even articulate it. It was like the first line of Patchen’s poem ‘Parting Coney Island’: ‘We had so much to say; we had no faith in words’.
One day I was thinking of a tin full of words that my friend Peter Daniels keeps for prompts, and thought I would try it. I still had my old broken copy of Patchen’s Collected Poems, bought when I was 15. Then I thought of the fancy flat round box from a chocolate wafer my friend Natalia had brought me from Warsaw. And started cutting out lines and phrases. I hadn’t read these poems in years, and I didn’t stop to reread them, just worked on automatic pilot: phrase-spotting. Antennae twitching. There was no plan, but I quickly realised that no one else’s words were going to go into my wafer box. It was personal.
I thought I might write ten poems. They quickly grew to twenty, and I started sending them out. I thought maybe a pamphlet. Now it’s a collection of 50, about 14 have been published, and I’m ready to send the whole thing out.
Patchen had been like a poetry dad to me during an intense period of my life when I was lonely and a bit lost. Now he’s brought me back to myself in another similar period, when I’ve been displaced and isolated and confused. He’s given me back the world: even myself, in relation to it. The poems have often almost written themselves; I was just taking dictation as if from a Ouija board. Something is telling me something, just as much as the other way round. So, as with the ghost of a lute in this Elizabethan attic I currently live in, they feel much more like a conversation than just cut-ups. There’s also a poem where I address Patchen:
I’m handing you a tin can, Ken. Punctured with a length of knotted string. I’m holding it out across the decades — it was a very popular toy — and here in a present that loops back through a different kind of past I’m holding a can of my own. …Come on, Mister — help a girl out of a jam. I’m using your poems, if you don’t mind, like a phone. Hold the string taut. You’re doing the talking. I’m taking notes. Then I’m doing the talking, and you took the notes.
I’ve used Patchen’s phrases as they came to me from my little box, not from his actual poems. Sometimes you can spot them at work, sometimes not so much, and sometimes I’ve changed them. One of the poems contains the word ‘nighfalutin’ and my friend Joe told me he loved that — like ‘highfalutin’, only not — was it mine, or had that come from Patchen? To my embarrassment, I couldn’t even remember. Stumped! Rather like the conversations he and I have, where it becomes blurred, who said what, as we were both talking at the same time. (Turns out it was mine. Phew!) So the poems are my own, even if KP was also talking the whole time I was.
I think that your line-breaks are masterful bringing surprise and tension to the lines. Do you think that your American influences are showing up there?
Thank you! I’ve never thought about this, but common sense says it must be the case. I never had any real adult poetry life in the US, as I came to the UK so young, but I’d read poetry ever since I could read, without ever knowing about Poetry Wars, or schools, or factions. I read everything and asked no questions. I flipped from Millay to Pound to Angelou to Shelley to Whitman to Nikki Giovanni to Chaucer to Blake to Yeats to many others. I had a copy of ‘Ash Wednesday’, carefully levered from a book, thumbtacked by the corner of the pages to the wall over my bed. So my lineation influences were wide.
I write largely by ear. In my teens I was obsessed with Mozart, and folk music (from Appalachian to Steeleye Span), and I’m absolutely sure that both of these taught me about pacing and register and the tonal possibilities of form. Just in terms of this set of poems I’m writing now, the way I’m using line breaks is integral to the restlessness, confusion, pain, and rage that are driving the poems — and sometimes just the sheer absurdity of trying to make sense.
Ages ago I wrote an essay called ‘The Line’ for an anthology (Stress Fractures, Penned in the Margins), in which I go over the various ways I think a line break can work, with plentiful examples. Funnily enough I didn’t draw on the poetry I’ve mentioned above, or on Mozart, and I might write the essay differently now — but it is still the most complete treatment of line-breaks in poems that I’ve seen anywhere. I wrote it to answer the questions I’d been asking myself. It’s now in my book Forgive the Language: Essays on Poets and Poetry.