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Patchen was no starry-eyed, ivory-tower dweeb. He was born in 1911 in blue-collar northeastern Ohio, the son of a mill worker and a devoutly Catholic housewife mom, and he remained a champion of workers, the downtrodden and the marginalized all his life. He was a vocal pacifist who knew who his enemies were—the war mongers, the money-mad, the lethally complacent—and he fought them the only way he knew how.
But Patchen also loved the broken world — the balm of nature and the crazy energy of cities — and he loved his wife, Miriam (a Massachusetts native and self-declared “youngest card-carrying member of the American Communist Party”; Patchen wrote virtually all of his poems for and about her), and that love sustained him through decades of financial troubles, career struggles and, in his last years, it sustained him through unremitting physical suffering.
full: https://www.theawl.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-kenneth-patchen/ The Hangman's Great Hands by Kenneth Patchen And all that is this day. . . The boy with cap slung over what had been a face. .. Somehow the cop will sleep tonight, will make love to his wife... Anger won't help. I was born angry. Angry that my father was being burnt alive in the mills; Angry that none of us knew anything but filth, and poverty. Angry because I was that very one somebody was supposed To be fighting for Turn him over; take a good look at his face... Somebody is going to see that face for a long time. I wash his hands that in the brightness they will shine. We have a parent called the earth. To be these buds and trees; this tameless bird Within the ground; this season's act upon the fields of Man. To be equal to the littlest thing alive, While all the swarming stars move silent through The merest flower . .. but the fog of guns. The face with all the draining future left blank. . . Those smug saints, whether of church or Stalin, Can get off the back of my people, and stay off. Somebody is supposed to be fighting for somebody. . . And Lenin is terribly silent, terribly silent and dead. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
