“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

Kenneth Patchen  is one of the suppressed treasures of American poetry. A kind of cross between e. e. cummings, and William Blake, he was a mercurial genius, by turns visionary, political, hugely romantic, cosmic, wildly whimsical, sentimental….His omission from our cannon shows how anal, humorless and pragmatic American poetics are; we will take a visionary like Patchen and declare him “minor” as soon he’s he dead. Patchen’s passionate and athletic poem The Orange Bears is one of my favorite American poems by anyone. —Tony Hoagland

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

Kenneth Patchen is and will remain one of the outstanding figures in American Letters. . .  No one can read him without being affected and influenced in his own life and work.—Henry Miller

“I worked with a poet named Patchen. He was wearing a scarlet jacket & sitting on a stool . . . .  We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time. ‘It’s dark out, Jack’—Patchen’s a real artist, you’d dig him doctor.”—Charles Mingus, from Beneath the Underdog

Wonderful to have the opportunity to salute Kenneth Patchen! The two Kenneths–Rexroth and Patchen–were among my earliest loves in poetry. Patchen seemed so bold, so outrageous with his scrawly wild drawings and his scrawly wild imagination. Wild and yet delicate. Reading his work all those years ago now–it must be four decades at least–gave me an early clue about what the life of a poet might be like: intense, emotional, intuitive. I so admire the fierceness with which he loved and the way his poems call out again and again to the imagination. Though his life was filled with pain, his work is filled with the glory of the imaginative life. And the glory remains.-Jim Moore

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

When I think of Kenneth Patchen, I think ‘bebop poet, bebop painter’ utilizing the lexicon of Lester Young and the impasto of Rouault. He is tough like Philip Marlowe yet tender as the wit of Raymond Chandler. His illuminated books and poems are unique works of genius, bulwarks against the replicant screed of academe. His bold jazz poetry improvisations speak the subversive uncompromising American yawp of a true original. He is beautiful. He is dangerous. That’s why I like him.—Pat Nolan

Hey Kenneth, Happy Birthday. It’s way way cool to see your work in print again from Kelly”s Cove Press. You always had great titles for your books, and I especially loved “The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer” which I read as a teenager and loved because it made me laugh. I think of you as one of the original hipsters, and as a kind of Pied Piper you led the way to California, and I followed you, arrived on the coast the year you died. Sorry we never got to met face to face, but now there’s the new collection of your work that will help me to become reacquainted with you all over again. —Jonah Raskin

He is a poet with a painter’s eye, and I’m amazed by the way he moves between language and image, and refuses to be limited by traditional labels. “It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing,” he once said. The breadth of his work is beautiful and astounding.—William Reichard

Always edgy, wounded and generous, Patchen is an underrated American gem who sprang out of the steeltown of Youngstown, Ohio and always carried some knowledge of the furnance with him. In the face of lifelong chronic pain, he created a distinctive body of work that deserves a greater audience.
—Jay White