“First came Patchen, then Ferlinghetti….” That line from a Ron Padgett poem keeps echoing, pinpointing one of the coordinates shared by poets born at just the time––1940 or so––when Kenneth Patchen’s own writing took off––those searching out the corners where evidence of something “other” in the present day, alive and taking out the edges, was to be found. Patchen’s non pareil tough-guy, great-hearted stance, his unruliness, too, delighted and opened up all sorts of possibilities when I read him (and then with friends sat rapt by the phonograph to hear the jazz intermingling, too) beginning in the late 1950s.––Bill Berkson

Note: Bill Berkson will read at the centennial celebration at City Lights Bookstore on November 30.