Today, December 13, 2011 is Kenneth Patchen’s 100th birthday.

What a relief – someone finally paying long overdue attention to Kenneth Patchen again.When I was in college, I kept a slim edition of Patchen’s poem paintings wide open on my desk the whole four years. I would return to them every time my brain felt overloaded or cooked (often). Always, Patchen’s fluent words and images served as a crucial restoration. Someone borrowed the book and never gave it back, so I am really pretty desperate for this new edition.–Naomi Shihab Nye

“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.

“Like Whitman, Patchen was an American Visionary. Our Blake.Key texts like The Journal of Albion Moonlight& Sleepers Awake remain as unique as Leaves of Grass or Moby Dick.  Tender poet, angry singer, Patchen endures even in his apparent absence from the litter of Literature studied in English Departments. Shame.” —David Meltzer

Note: David Meltzer will read from Patchen on November 30, at 7pm, at City Lights Bookstore