On Sunday, September 3, 2023 at 9:53:46 AM UTC-4, George J. Dance wrote:
On Saturday, September 2, 2023 at 10:24:46 PM UTC-4, Will Dockery wrote:
Death Of An Unpopular Poet / Jimmy Buffett https://youtu.be/UyZgzOKyLhw?si=cygcWtbp746xLPnf
Thanks, Will. I appreciate your looking for and finding the best Buffett songs. I don't know Buffett's music at all, so I can't do a thing on my own. So keep posting them, even if all you can find are stills; the important thing is to have the songs,
and we can look for YT-quality versions later.
This one's perfect; and made me want to find out who the "poet" was. Turns out Buffett was thinking of two poets, Richard Farina and Kenneth Patchen.
https://thedeependwithnick.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/who-was-the-poet-jimmy-buffett-sings-about-in-death-of-an-unpopular-poet/
https://pleasekillme.com/kenneth-patchen-rebel-poet/
********************* Poet, artist, performer, pacifist and visionary, Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was the closest thing America had to a William Blake. He was, in the words of biographer Larry Smith, the ‘Rebel Poet of America,” influencing the
likes of Henry Miller, young Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder and, later, Jim Morrison and Richard Brautigan. PKM spoke to Larry Smith about Patchen’s life and literary legacy. Today (Dec. 11) is the anniversary of
Kenneth Patchen’s birth.
“The trick is to get truth and lies / To sound just the same / That way you’ve got it made / Everybody is mad after while / Then you can come up with a world / Where madness is the normal thing / Of course those who rig it that way / End up mad
themselves / But—who’s to know the difference? / This world’s the best example I know.”-Kenneth Patchen, “Sure There Is Food,” written in 1946 but prophesying 2019.
Kenneth Patchen may have wielded more influence on two generations’ worth of our counterculture than any other poet you’ve never heard of. He had a hippie pacifist sensibility 30 years before the hippies existed and a Beat Generation aura a decade
before that term was common coinage.
He was such a true original that he, like his biggest champion Henry Miller, became a genre unto himself, always on the outside of the literary establishment—partly by their own design. Henry Miller saw Patchen’s forebears as Blake, Lautreamont,
Picasso, Bosch and John of Patmos (he of the Book of Revelation). Patchen’s books, Miller wrote in his 1946 essay “Patchen: Man of Anger and Light,” were “something alive and breathing, something which looks back at you with equal astonishment.”
Patchen came by his rough-hewn quality naturally, growing up in a working-class family near Youngstown, Ohio, where his father and other family relations all seemed to end up damaged and beaten down by their work in the steel mills—or breathing its
smoke. After dropping out of college, he wandered the country in the 1930s in search of his muse, living for short periods of time in Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Boston, New York and Connecticut. Among his closest friends and confidantes were the
equally idiosyncratic poet e.e. cummings and James Laughlin, who would go on to found New Directions, the imprint that published most of Patchen’s work. Patchen met his future wife Miriam in Boston in 1934, when she was a college student. After they
married, they eventually settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1951.*********************************
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