And how this world of wildness through Permit me voyage, Love, into your hands. Who march among a thundershower Red Sea How long this way: that everywhere SONG WITH WORDS When Eve first saw the glistering day Watch by the wan world side When Adam saw the mastering night First board the wan world's lifted breast He climbed his bride with all his might And sank to tenderest rest. And night took both and day brought high And all our grief and every joy And weave us one and wave us under TWO SONGS ON THE ECONOMY Temperance Note: and Weather Prophecy IN HEAVY MIND In heavy mind I strayed the field The summer overthroned with leaves Me among men upon the earth But now was logy with the weight of brain And life a lean long while, the starving slow When, not to see, some previous bird RAPID TRANSIT Squealing under city stone The millions on the millions run, Every one a life alone, Every one a soul undone: There all the poisons of the heart Branch and abound like whirling brooks, And there through every useless art Pour forth upon their frightful kind That now is tamed, and once was wild. K Kenneth Patchen ENNETH PATCHEN was born December 13, 1911, in Niles, Ohio. When he was four his parents (Scotch-French-English) moved to near-by Warren; where he was raised and attended high school. At seventeen Patchen went to work with his father's crew in the steel-mills; most of his relatives worked either in the mills of the Mahoning Valley or in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Out of work and briefly "schooled" at Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College, University of Wisconsin, Patchen spent several years drifting from one end of the country to the other, working at anything that came to hand. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936. His first volume, Before the Brave (1936), was crammed with revolutionary fervor and technical experiment. Unfortunately its ardor was overinsistently strained and too often its oratory was a crescendo of screams. It was succeeded by a richer and far more genuinely startling volume, First Will & Testament (1939), which included about one hundred poems, three surrealistic dramas, and the beginning of a projected epic planned to fill several volumes. First Will & Testament is sensational in its tempo, amazing in its gusto, and unique in its uncanny combination of delicacy and disorganization. The tone is savage disillusionment, but not apathy; it is rebellious and ribald, indignant and desperate, but clean-cut even in its fury. Much of Patchen's work is conceived in the limbo of nightmare, in a world where the humor is worse than the horror. Frenzy rules here; phantasmagoria triumphs in slapstick satire, casual killings, and sinister obscenity. But there is more to Patchen than his power to evoke ugliness, violence, and nonchalant treachery. Only a poet of unusual sensibility could have fashioned the nuances of "In Memory of Kathleen," "Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?", "The Deer and the Snake," and the cold terror of "Street Corner College." The contradictions in Patchen's work are obvious. His poetry is determinedly. "hard-boiled" and yet (possibly as a compensation) it often turns naïvely sentimental; it is elaborately simple, but it speaks the language of the street interspersed with literary allusions. In its breathless candor, its grim juxtaposition of dignity and disgust, this is the poetry of a generation "born in one war and seemingly destined to perish in another." The Journal of Albion Moonlight, a many-voiced prose work comparable in polyphony to James Joyce's Ulysses, was published in 1941. IN MEMORY OF KATHLEEN How pitiful is her sleep. Now her clear breath is still. There is nothing falling tonight, Bird or man, As dear as she; Nowhere that she should go DO THE DEAD KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS? The old guy put down his beer. Son, he said, (and a girl came over to the table where we were: asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink.) Son, I am going to tell you something The like of which nobody ever was told. (and the girl said, I've got nothing on tonight; how about you and me going to your place?) I am going to tell you the story Meeting with God. of my mother's (and I whispered to the girl: I don't have a room, but maybe . . .) She walked up to where the top of the world is And He came right up to her and said So at last you've come home. (but maybe what? I thought I'd like to stay here and talk to you.) My mother started to cry and God Put His arms around her. (about what? Oh, just talk . . . we'll find something.) She said it was like a fog coming over her face And light was everywhere and a soft voice saying You can stop crying now. (what can we talk about that will take all night? and I said that I didn't know.) You can stop crying now. THE DEER AND THE SNAKE The deer is humble, lovely as God made her These strange priests enter the cathedral of woods Foot lifted, dagger-sharp-her cars Poised to their points like a leaf's head. But the snake strikes, in a velvet arc As mountain water at which a fawn drank. While I stand counting the arms of your Cross Thinking that many Christs could hang there, crying. STREET CORNER COLLEGE Next year the grave grass will cover us. Watching the girls go by; Betting on slow horses; drinking cheap gin. Last year was a year ago; nothing more. We manage to have the look that young men have; We shall probably not be quite dead when we die. We are the insulted, brother, the desolate boys. Where solitude is a dirty knife at our throats. Cold stars and the whores. LIKE A MOURNINGLESS CHILD The rescuing gate is wide On villages that drift through the sun. Cows pasture on stalks of green hours N Nathalia Crane ATHALIA CLARA RUTH CRANE was born in New York City August 11, 1913. Through her father she is descended from John and Priscilla Alden, Stephen Crane being a not distant kinsman; on her mother's side she inherits the varied gifts of the Abarbanels, that famous family of Spanish Jews which counts among its members poets, musicians, and ministers of state. Nathalia began to write when she was little more than eight years old. At nine she sent some of her verses to The New York Sun and they were accepted wholly on their merit, the editor having no idea that the lines were written by a child. For six years her volumes appeared in rapid succession. During her attendance at New Jersey College for Women and at Barnard she was kept from publishing, but at twenty-two she assembled another collection of her half-childish, half-pedantic verses, Swear by the Night (1936), with a foreword by the editor. Nathalia's first volume, The Janitor's Boy, appeared when its author was ten and a half, in 1924. It went rapidly through six editions, and became one of the most discussed publications of the year. Some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of medium, an instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others, considering the book a hoax, scorned the fact that any child could have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones. The verse is sharply divided into two kinds: the light and childish jingle-the sort of thinking native to most children but which most of them are unable to compress into such facile rhyme—and the grave and cryptic poetry. Even in the first division there is a quality unusual to child verse; in such merry stanzas as "The Flathouse Roof," "Love," "Oh, Roger Jones" there is a sophistication which lifts them above Eugene Field's rhymes on similar themes. The other division of Nathalia's work reveals that Nathalia has read much not only in books of legends but in the dictionary. This juvenile mystic is as fond of archaic terms as Francis Thompson (she collects unusual words as other children postage stamps), and she enjoys using a string of glistening alliterations to express an intuition or a mere mathematical fact. But the fact rises from its foundations on an imaginative sweep which any poet might envy. Other volumes followed swiftly: Lava Lane (1925), The Singing Crow (1926), Venus Invisible (1928), three volumes of poetry more sedate than her first book. Prose paralleled her verse: The Sunken Garden (1926) showed her curiously pompous style in a long alliterative account of the Children's Crusade; An Alien from Heaven (1929) is a novel on a more unusual theme in which the symbolism is seemingly autobiographical if suspiciously mature and dry in tone. To her defects one might add Nathalia's dependence on roses were it not that some of her finest verse uplifts the flower-cliché. The mingling of pathos and humor in "The Dead Bee" recalls Emily Dickinson. As a rule, there is little evidence of derivations, and finally one ceases to question whether the author is a conscious child or an influenced medium; one forgets who may have written the phrases and listens only to the long implication which "challenges the crypt, and |