Meet Kenneth Patchen, a prolific, ground-breaking proletarian poet/painter whose most eclectic and wildly eccentric works are re-launched in a single startling volume--We Meet, The singular work of Kenneth Patchen has influenced poets, artists and political activists for decades. New Directions is proud to launch a Patchen revival beginning with omnibus editions of his unique compositions. We Meet highlights Patchen's more outlandish side and includes, like fabrics stitched into a crazy quilt, Because It Is, A Letter to God, Poemscapes, Hurrah For Anything, and Aflame & Afun of Walking Faces, Because to understand one must begin somewhere, opens Patchen's fabulous book of poems Because It Is: perhaps the most ideal reason for such a melting pot of poetry. Open any page at random and find Patchen protesting the Second World War (A Letter to God), or telling the tale of how hot water first came to be tracked onto bedroom floors (Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces), or informing the reader what happened when the nervous vine wouldn't twine (Because It Is), or why he loathes those who act as if a cherry were something they personally thought up (Hurrah For Anything), or answering what he wants out of life: let's say--no matter (Poemscapes).

Literary Nonficton. Poetry History & Criticism. Letters. Edited by Allen Frost, SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE includes photographs and brief biographies of Patchen's correspondents. They include Harvey Breit, Alex Comfort, E.E. Cummings, Robert Duncan, James T. Farrell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, James Laughlin, James Boyer May, Alexander Meiklejohn, Henry Miller, Henry Moe, Harriet Monroe, Lewis Mumford, Alan Neil, Miriam Patchen, Henry Rago, Kenneth Rexroth, Harry Roskolenko, Isabel Smith-Stein, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Leon Trotsky, Louis Untermeyer, Amos Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, and Jasper Wood."When reading Kenneth Patchen, a face stares back out of the text. His very human gaze scrutinizes us and our world with such intensity because he is looking for all the beauty despite such apparent ugliness. The SELECTED CORRESPONDENCE reveals the hardships and pain Patchen endured in this search, bolstered by his muse Miriam. Reading Patchen is a profound literary experience, an absolute delighting in humanity's possibilities yet also a despondence, sometimes even anger, over our shortcomings. These themes play themselves out here in Patchen's impassioned letters to such friends and colleagues as Henry Miller, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, et. al. To read this correspondence is to be astonished by Patchen's insatiable quest for all that is good in life, one that led him from proletarianism to concretism to jazz to painted poems. Embrace hope, all ye who enter here."--Eckhard Gerdes

Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean "Tom o'Bedlam" ("By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end / Methinks it is no journey..."), Kenneth Patchen sets off on an allegorical journey to the furthest limits of love and murder, madness and sex. While on this disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior), various characters offer deranged responses, conveying an otherworldly, imaginative madness. A chronicle of violent fury and compassion, written when Surrealism was still vigorous and doing battle with psychotic "reality," The Journal of Albion Moonlight is an American monument to engagement.

Sleepers Awake, first published in 1946, is one of Kenneth Patchen's major prose books. A work of extraordinary imaginative invention, it might be described as novelistic fantasy--a pioneering new direction in fiction which created its own protean form as it was written. Patchen mingled narrative with dream visions, surrealism with satire, poetry with statements of principle, and explored the then almost uncharted territory of visual word structures twenty years before Concrete Poetry became a popular international movement. Sleepers Awake is a rallying cry to young and old, as Patchen advances his long struggle against inhumanity, oppression, war and hypocrisy. Now brutal, now lyrical, he gives us life and the world as we must take them if they are to have full meaning, the horror and the beauty, the joy and the suffering together.

A collection of abstracted prose stories with illustrations.

From the appearance in 1936 of Kenneth Patchen’s first book, the voice of this great poet has been protesting war and social injustice, satirizing the demeaning and barbarous inanities of our culture—entrancing us with an inexhaustible flow of humor and fantasy. With directness and simplicity, he has restored the exaltation of romantic love to its ancient bardic place beside an awareness of God’s living presence among all men. For this collection, assembled in his fifty-fourth year, Kenneth Patchen has drawn from the contents of twelve of his books. It provides the reader in many cases with the texts of poems no longer available even in rare editions.

The late Kenneth Patchen was unique among contemporary poets for his direct and passionate concern with the most essential elements in the tragic, comic, blundering and at rare moments glorious world around us. He wrote about the things we can feel; with our whole being the senselessness of war, the need for love among men on earth, the presence of God in man, the love for a beloved woman, social injustice and the continual resurgence of the beautiful in life."

The wonderful picture-poems of Kenneth Patchen, long out of print, are being brought back into one generous volume--cryptic creatures quipping quirky quotes and all. The singular work of Kenneth Patchen has influenced poets, artists and political activists for decades. New Directions is proud to launch a Patchen revival beginning with omnibus editions of his unique compositions. Kenneth Patchen's last words to New Directions founder James Laughlin were When you find out which came first, the chicken or the egg, you write and tell me. Answering his own question comes Patchen's picture-poem. The Walking-Away World reissues three of his picture-poem classics: Wonderings, But Even So, and Hallelujah Anyway, Inspired by the illuminated printing of William Blake, Patchen worked in a spirited fervency with watercolor, casein, inks, and other media to create absurdly compelling works. His entire process was a simultaneous fusion of painting and poetry: neither the poem nor the painting preceded one another. Each picture-poem is inhabited by strange beings uttering everything from poignant poetic adages to cheeky satire. One confides, I have a funny feeling / that some very peculiar-looking creatures out there are watching us, which sums up the suspicious joys of The Walking-Away World.

Can you imagine why a pornographer would be shy? Are you satisfied with the state of (a) World Society (b) your soul (c) American writing? Are you in the habit of reading books that could have been written by anybody? Do you really want the truth? Do you know how angels learn to fly? What would you feed a green deer? Do you think a profound social message can be conveyed by a book that is comic in character? When Kenneth Patchen's comic masterpiece, The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer first appeared in 1945, these questions were asked on the dust jacket. They have never seemed more relevant. The hilarious saga of Alfred Budd of Bivalve, New Jersey-a Candide-like innocent and part-time pornographer, written with what Diane DiPrima called Patchen's "tender silliness," should inspire a new generation of readers