25 Facts About Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist.

Kenneth Patchen experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman.

Kenneth Patchen's family included his mother Eva, his sisters Ruth, Magel, Eunice, and Kathleen, and his brother Hugh.

In 1926, while Kenneth Patchen was still a teenager, his younger sister Kathleen was struck and killed by an automobile.

Kenneth Patchen first began to develop his interest in literature and poetry while he was in high school, and the New York Times published his first poem while he was still in college.

Kenneth Patchen attended Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College, in Madison, Wisconsin, for one year, starting in 1929.

Kenneth Patchen had a football scholarship there but had to drop out when he injured his back.

In 1937, while trying to fix a friend's car, Kenneth Patchen suffered a permanent spinal injury, which was to give him pain, to varying degrees, for the rest of his life and which required multiple surgical procedures.

Kenneth Patchen was strongly opposed to the involvement of the United States in World War II.

Kenneth Patchen lived out the final years of his life with his wife in their modest home on 2340 Sierra Court, in Palo Alto, where Kenneth Patchen created many of his distinctive painted poems, produced while confined to his bed after his disastrous 1959 surgery inadvertently damaged his spine.

Kenneth Patchen died in Palo Alto, on January 8,1972.

Kenneth Patchen experimented with his childlike "painted poems," many of which were published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us.

Laughlin's decision to publish Kenneth Patchen's work started a relationship that would last for the remainder of both men's careers.

Kenneth Patchen pioneered the "drawing-and-poem form" as well as the painting-and-poem form and produced over a thousand "painted books", special copies of his own works with original paintings on the covers.

Kenneth Patchen's Collected Poems was first published in 1969, just a few years before his death.

However, once the Beats' popularity grew, Kenneth Patchen disliked being associated with them and was highly critical of their glorification of drug use and what he perceived to be a strong desire for media attention and fame.

In 1936, soon after the release of his first book, Kenneth Patchen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Kenneth Patchen received a $10,000 grant for his contribution to American literature from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities in 1967.

In 1942 Kenneth Patchen collaborated with the composer John Cage on the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat.

Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada was recorded in Vancouver the same week as a live performance for CBC Radio.

In October 2011 the Claudia Quintet, with guest vocalists Kurt Elling and Theo Bleckmann, released an album on Cuneiform Records of Kenneth Patchen's poetry set to music written by Claudia leader John Hollenbeck.

One reviewer even accused Kenneth Patchen of being "naive," a common criticism aimed at his work, particularly regarding his fervent pacifist beliefs.

In 1958, Kenneth Patchen's Selected Poems and his book When We Were Here Together received significant praise from the reviewer Frederick Eckman in Poetry magazine.

Patchen's most important volume, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, first published in 1968, received largely positive reviews.

Between 1987 and 1991 there were Kenneth Patchen Festivals, celebrating his work, in Warren, Ohio, which encompasses the town of Niles, where Patchen was born and grew up.