Open Madness

Lash on your desert boots, kiddies; we're off on another trip to scialytic San Francisco.

Agents for the big tour are New Directions, which, scant days ago, saw fit to publish Kenneth Patchen in the New Classics series (along with Conrad, Kafka, West and Stein), and Cadence Records, which celebrates this signal event with the release of an LP of Patchen reading his stuff to the Chamber Jazz Sextet, jouant. Despite the fact that much of the poetry in the book is lousy, the effect of the two-part package is invigorating.

Patchen is a big boy now, 47 years old, and one's initial reaction is to remark that the fellow still hasn't grown up. His work is formless, often maudlin, sometimes downright silly. Yet amongst his poems (and he is, or has been, a very prolific writer) are flashes of humor and even insight that make leafing through this newest volume a not wholly unrewarding hour.

"'A not wholly unrewarding hour' is what you guys would say," Patchen would observe, and probably rightly. He doesn't have much use for academic pedantry, probably rightly, and Chino criticism from undergraduates is strictly small noise in the presence of his immense thunder.

Patchen's thunder roars at the cities ("black toads"), conformity ("Let us have madness openly"), war ("Democracy must be saved at all costs," he sneers), American art ("The arts of this American land/Stink in the air of mountains"), and indifference ("It is ordered now/That you push your beliefs/Up out of the filth high enough/For the inchworm to get their measure").

Lots and lots of Patchen is pretty erotic: sex cooked well. Here's where the world looks good, where all is clean and warm and endless. If the particular "not wholly unrewarding hour" you choose suits, his erotic stuff will appeal; yet it so much celebrates obvious things badly that it is tedious.

Where Patchen shines, and indeed where also his Frisco friends shine, is in the chuckle-chuckle material, the looney funnies, the incredible fantasies. In the New Directions volume, Patchen accompanies about a dozen pieces, under the heading "Limericks," with the zaniest sketches you ever did see. They look like a doodle you did in English 10, only not tragic. They're funny.

In these "Limericks," Patchen writes of little men with wooden hair, playful street-cars, forgetful commuters, and a man two inches shorter than himself--all of them good, very good.

An undergraduate's Chino criticism might suggest, however, that Patchen shows us why much of the poetry written by the "Beat" boys of North Beach isn't so very successful. It's very hard to say America stinks more than once; maybe, if you're good at stringing words together, you can say it twice. But if you want to fill a volume of poetry you have to start thinking about why America stinks. The humor of Patchen indicates a great deal of talent; one could wish he'd forget his sophomoric, tragically bombastic approach to America and look around for a while to find what makes it the way it is. Comedy is a thing that nobody will bother to argue; the damnation of the American cities or art or conformity are things lots of people will contest. But in Patchen's poems he gives you no cause that you can debate.

If one of the best characteristics of written Patchen is his vitality, one of the worst features of spoken Patchen is his boredom. It's surprising because before hearing him read you'd think he was jumping all over the place while writing his stuff. The choice of poems on the record is a good one, largely because he leans on the chuckle-chuckle side and forgets this country's inevitable American woe. All of the "Limericks" are included, and they sound just as good, and maybe better, than they read.

Patchen backed by jazz is something else. The jazzmen, led by Allyn Ferguson (who wrote the note on the jacket and was considerate enough to quote himself at one point), seem competent enough, but the effect of the two working on each other destroys more than it gives. Words blot out the music, and, as they say, vice versa. Patchen claims to have thought up jazz and poetry, love and marriage. Kenneth Rexroth, across the street and down the hill, claims the same thing. They both would do well to forget the unhappy, er, nuptuals.