Word: patchen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Patchen is a big boy now, 47 years old, and one's initial reaction is to remark that the fellow still hasn't grown up. His work is formless, often maudlin, sometimes downright silly. Yet amongst his poems (and he is, or has been, a very prolific writer) are flashes of humor and even insight that make leafing through this newest volume a not wholly unrewarding hour...
...wholly unrewarding hour' is what you guys would say," Patchen would observe, and probably rightly. He doesn't have much use for academic pedantry, probably rightly, and Chino criticism from undergraduates is strictly small noise in the presence of his immense thunder...
...Patchen's thunder roars at the cities ("black toads"), conformity ("Let us have madness openly"), war ("Democracy must be saved at all costs," he sneers), American art ("The arts of this American land/Stink in the air of mountains"), and indifference ("It is ordered now/That you push your beliefs/Up out of the filth high enough/For the inchworm to get their measure...
Lots and lots of Patchen is pretty erotic: sex cooked well. Here's where the world looks good, where all is clean and warm and endless. If the particular "not wholly unrewarding hour" you choose suits, his erotic stuff will appeal; yet it so much celebrates obvious things badly that it is tedious...
...Where Patchen shines, and indeed where also his Frisco friends shine, is in the chuckle-chuckle material, the looney funnies, the incredible fantasies. In the New Directions volume, Patchen accompanies about a dozen pieces, under the heading "Limericks," with the zaniest sketches you ever did see. They look like a doodle you did in English 10, only not tragic. They're funny...