PARTISAN REVIEW
But
it is so slight that I wonder whether even a stanza as handsome as
this one will keep it in memory:
She climbed a farther hill
More fair than show
The meadows here
Into an air more clear,
A light more still.
It might. Poets capable of the hesitation on
show,
as
if
it were a sub–
stantive (and how beautiful the hovering meaning), are not very numer-
ous.
Omnibus reviews lead sometimes, as here, to juxtapositions inex–
pressibly violent. Kenneth Patchen undoubtedly has, or has had, some
talent, and only a man in his right senses would deny that his work is
interesting.
The land is darker than the sea, but God
Is darker than the land.
Move your left breast nearer.
When the soldier scrammed
I heard a blond girl weeping her guts out,
Which is more than you did. Or you.
Holy as stars and flowers,
Sadder than Mary, filthy as human war,
I endure the afflictions of the birds.
I think this piece is characteristic in its air (God, sex, weeping, war, the
Virgin), its intimacy ("Come here, reader, look in my pocket"), and its
vices (incoherence, blasphemy, cant, vagueness, sentimentality, the un–
subject and un-form). Yet it moved me deeply as I made it up two
minutes ago, and I believe the only things I neglected to put in were
Patchen's apocalypticism, his righteous wrath, snow, and his "Brothers."
Writing like Mr. Patchen's is usually called self-expression, but I am
convinced that this is a mistake. On the contrary: you take your eye off
your self (also off the subject if any, the English language, the forms of
poetry, the world, and the spirit) in order to fix it solely and ardently
upon your reader. Anything goes. It is very easy, frankly, to write this
way; all you want is to convince the reader that you are real, the means
of course being rhetoric. "There are two ways of falsifying," says Valery:
"one by the work of
embellishment,
the other by the effort to
make true.
The latter case is perhaps that which reveals the more acute affectation.
It also marks a certain despair of arousing general interest by purely
