I.

Kenneth Patchen, born in Niles, Ohio in 1911, watches orange bears turn black. At twelve, he reads Dante, Burns, and Melville as flowers wilt from the soot of steel mills. His younger sister would be struck by an automobile, which permanently alters the features of Kenneth’s face. His eyes blear black and furious, his nose curves a bird’s handsome beak, his mouth frowns as his chin walks away. Fighting to get out of a town seized by soot and steel, he ends up in New York, where his eyes smoke into more severity. In the thirties, he would come to be celebrated as a Proletarian poet, but his poems perpetually wrest themselves out of belonging as soon as they are championed.

In Boston in 1933, Patchen begrudgingly inches his way through a Christmas party, his mouth tight and his back wailing. Orange lights and smoke, a record and a fog of chatter. It's on this day that he meets Miriam Oikemus. He notices her taut hair, her long forehead, and her severity. They marry a year later and Patchen soon begins to write Miriam into a body of books. Each time you see Patchen’s cursive weep “for Miriam” in a book, you will feel a tightness in your chest and beg to get out of your body.






Patchen soon began to contort. His poems fade into the ether of talk, or turn into shapes that can’t be recognized as poems. His work “looks back up at you with equal astonishment.” Faced with his poems, you are flushed with visual and textual figures. The eyes adjust to a figure too ambiguous to identify, almost recognizable. The figure looks back with crudely drawn eyes, mouth slightly agape, body stippled into transparency.

You sift to find a poem through this puddle and arrive obliquely at a sentimental one. Amidst harsh reviews, Patchen flaunts unbelonging. He willingly casts himself off to the shameful realm of the sentimental poem. On the back of his book The Cloth of the Tempest, he puffs negative criticisms, using harsh reviews to welcome the reader to his book. On the back of Tempest, he includes a review that reads “Patchen is not a serious poet… his fulsome self-indulgence, combined with the continual intrusion of a personality that insists on talking, singing, weeping, fighting, and cooing to itself, is very trying…”






At a certain point Kenneth’s back becomes unruly. His sunken eyes, which often brim over with tenderness, welt into disgust. Henry Miller describes him as “a fizzing human bomb ever threatening to explode in our midst.” He writhes in the precarious border between repulsion and embrace. Witnesses receive sneers, sulks, and shout. In his bed, broiling in his tin of hurt, he composed poems the way his body told him to. Miriam at his side. Miriam, prophetess, who feels a great burning sensation.

The beauty of what he calls his “picture poems” lies partly in the pressure of his handwriting, the way the shapes distort with size and thickness. Imagine the pressure of his hand, how it quakes in the process of writing through winces and blush. Go to a journal with bleared eyes that drip and blur your scrawl. Rage or softness shines through the ballooning of words, the uneven tapering of your lines.







II.

When Patchen talks of poetry, he says Miriam. When I talk of Patchen, I say Cy. Cy is a compulsive journal writer, a studious reader of events and a timekeeper. Cy’s handwriting is small and looks like anything they make with their hands: delicate, wobbly, and of its own decisive world. Cy cuts moons on a wooden grid. They are a tastemaker in the most religious sense, making a world of their own that reorganizes time into something simultaneous.

I know Cy’s name before meeting them. I guess what their name is in my journal after I catch them in our high school library, wearing the same red boots as me. I face them to say “nice boots.” They say “thanks yeah I like yours too.” We share the exchange with the same low quaking voice, the kind that would, to our demise, crack a syllable to a weak falsetto in a conversation. We avoid looking at each other, instead lingering on our feet. I wind the laces tightly around my ankles. Cy wears the boots loose, almost to the point of untied.

Our high school washes us over in its size. The web felt smaller. Tumblr, in particular, allows me to weave images, text, and sound into a skin. I learn how to socialize through webbed skin, how to present myself in stitches without a shaky voice or eyes that can’t look up, making me feel less awkward and ugly.  My blog appeared on Cy’s tumblr dashboard months after I approach them.  They send me a message after finding me. I beam in the dark of my room that evening. In the spectrum of teenage emotion, I reach a new threshold caught in the net of Cy’s feed.






From class to class, they carry the Journal of Albion Moonlight. It is a novel only in material form. If you try to read it like a novel, the text transmogrifies into image. On one page, the letters descend until they become a noose for a stick figure’s death. Sooty books with oranged pages, filmy covers. We want to look like the books. We don’t close read. It is something else. Through years of classrooms I lose touch with the way we read them. But I remember the flush of holding the books and watching the lines of poems scatter. The words vibrate in my chest. They feel palpable. They are pieces of clay, but only in the light of you.






Arched and tall like a wind-shaped tree. Their body a hand reaching high fruit and their eyes a nod to the ground. Cy has a forever silence to them, a neutrality and focus. Cy names themself after Twombly. Twombly, the hand, and the eye. The scrawl of a journal, the pressure and weightlessness of writing. Can I call this all a sentimental poem?

In a green field, theater kids roll watermelons down the hills surrounding us. Cy is leaving for college, and they read Kenneth to me.

I weep for the world

O I weep for the world and a yellow spider

Makes a web in my heart

I cry and say, “I don’t want to die.” Parting from them feels like a slow descent into unfeeling. In the teenage years of my life, I lived outside myself, dissolved in the internet, casting myself in a shadowplay. Being near Cy makes words weigh me down. I am convinced that left to my own devices, I would only ever feel with the slight touch a dream might lend me. What vibrates off Kenneth’s words that spells this grief? The yellow spider works away, spelling in his work.

Diane Seuss writes of her friend Mikel, dreaming him through Kenneth:

Memory returns to me our last encirclement, bones of Mikel’s back

beneath my hands. Did I scream all the way to the airport, Alan Martinez,

as you drove with virtuosic madness, and the top down, the old Fiat,

corkscrewed roads leading to the ludicrous interstate and the blue-edged

runway where machines roar as they’re forced to defy, again and again,

gravity? In my hands, the book Mikel gave me, my inheritance he said,

Kenneth Patchen. He’d read me a few lines before handing it over:

We shall not be there when death reaches out his sparkling hands

there are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death.

Patchen’s “sentimental love lyric,” as some critics loathsomely call it, makes friends cry at their parting. Sentimentality makes you feel picked clean. They call it a cathartic feeling, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Resolution, a shared language, a shameful agreement. I’m embarrassed as I write this, naive to still believe in heightened emotion. I feel like I’m walking into a party full of intellectuals, where to believe in anything with sincerity is humiliating.



III.

At twenty-one, I receive money from my college for an archive trip on Kenneth Patchen. Cy and I live in different states, and they agree to meet me in San Francisco, where Kenneth spent most of his creative years. Clean silent streets are not even echoes of a past. I stare at his ephemera blankly in the clinical light of libraries. I don’t know how to take notes.






We sit down and the archivist hands us a slim hardcover book, thickened by pastel swirls. The texture makes the book chalky and softened, as if it can be crushed in our hands. We each hold the book with one hand, as if we are different sides of the same body. The book stares back up at us. Death reaches out his sparkling hands. Patchen gnashes at the door.

At night I will dream that boxes are crashing on top of our bed. I wake up and grab Cy as they struggle to stay in bed, pulling me back into the covers. I wrest myself from their hands and run to the edge of the room, bracing myself for Cy’s crushing. Nothing happens, the boxes are gone, and I feel alone with my sputtering mind. Cy tells me they thought I was falling in a sandpit when I grabbed them, and they were trying to pull me out of it.

In the morning, Cy finds two sticks: a long staff and a duck-shaped stick. Smooth sculptures, pretend sea drift. We go to a green field encircled by cobbled rocks, and the playing feels stilted. We crawl on all fours, laugh at ourselves, I am winded and heaving, Cy sighs. It’s as if the trip is building towards the crescendo of play, the power of kid minds that can take two people to an elsewhere forged by sticks and words. Knocking against a permanently closed door is our form of pleasure, circling around almost.