The recent experiments in the new poetry-and-jazz movement seen by some as part of the "San Francisco Renaissance" have been as popular as they are notorious.
"It might well start a craze like swallowing goldfish or pee-wee golf", wrote Kenneth Rexroth in an explanatory note in the Evergreen Review, and he may have been right.

Under the general heading "poetry-and-jazz" widely divergent experiments have been carried out.
Lawrence Ferlenghetti and Bruce Lippincott have concentrated on writing a new poetry for reading with jazz that is very closely related to both the musical forms of jazz, and the vocabulary of the musician.
Even musicians themselves have taken to writing poetry.
(Judy Tristano now has poems as well as ballads written for her.
)

But the best known exploiters of the new medium are Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen.
Rexroth and Patchen are far apart musically and poetically in their experiments.
Rexroth is a longtime jazz buff, a name-dropper of jazz heroes, and a student of traditional as well as modern jazz.
In San Francisco he has worked with Brew Moore, Charlie Mingus, and other "swinging" musicians of secure reputation, thus placing himself within established jazz traditions, in addition to being a part of the San Francisco "School".

Although Patchen has given previous evidence of an interest in jazz, the musical group that he works with, the Chamber Jazz Sextet, is often ignored by jazz critics.
(Downbeat did not mention the Los Angeles appearance of Patchen and the Sextet, although the engagement lasted over two months.
) The stated goal of the CJS is the synthesis of jazz and "serious" music.
Patchen's musicians are outsiders in established jazz circles, and Patchen himself has remained outside the San Francisco poetry group, maintaining a self-imposed isolation, even though his conversion to poetry-and-jazz is not as extreme or as sudden as it may first appear.
He had read his poetry with musicians as early as 1951, and his entire career has been characterized by radical experiments with the form and presentation of his poetry.
However, his subject matter and basic themes have remained surprisingly consistent, and these, together with certain key poetic images, may be traced through all his work, including the new jazz experiments.

From the beginning of his career, Patchen has adopted an anti-intellectual approach to poetry.
His first book, Before The Brave (1936), is a collection of poems that are almost all Communistic, but after publication of this book he rejected Communism, and advocated a pacifistic anarchy, though retaining his revolutionary idiom.
He spoke for a "proletariat" that included "all the lost and sick and hunted of the earth".
Patchen believes that the world is being destroyed by power-hungry and money-hungry people.
Running counter to the destroying forces in the world are all the virtues that are innate in man, the capacity for love and brotherhood, the ability to appreciate beauty.
Beauty as well as love is redemptive, and Patchen preaches a kind of moral salvation.
This salvation does not take the form of a Christian Heaven.
In Patchen's eyes, organized churches are as odious as organized governments, and Christian symbols, having been taken over by the moneyed classes, are now agents of corruption.
Patchen envisions a Dark Kingdom which "stands above the waters as a sentinel warning man of danger from his own kind".
The Dark Kingdom sends Angels of Death and other fateful messengers down to us with stern tenderness.
Actually Heaven and the Dark Kingdom overlap;
they form two aspects of heavenly life after death.

Patchen has almost never used strict poetic forms;
he has experimented instead with personal myth-making.
Much of his earlier work was conceived in terms of a "pseudo-anthropological" myth reference, which is concerned with imaginary places and beings described in grandiloquent and travelogue-like language.

These early experiments were evidently not altogether satisfying to Patchen.
Beginning in Cloth Of The Tempest (1943) he experimented in merging poetry and visual art, using drawings to carry long narrative segments of a story, as in Sleepers Awake, and constructing elaborate "poems-in-drawing-and-type" in which it is impossible to distinguish between the "art" and the poetry.
Art "makings" or pseudo-anthropological myths did not meet all of Patchen's requirements for a poetic frame of reference.
Many of his poems purported to be exactly contemporary and political;
so during the period approximately from 1941 to 1946, Patchen often used private detective stories as a myth reference, and the "private eye" as a myth hero.
Speaking in terms of sociological stereotype, the "private eye" might appeal to the poet in search of a myth for many reasons.
The private detective (at least in the minds of listeners and readers all over the country) is an individual hero fighting injustice.
He is usually something of an underdog, he must battle the organized police force as well as recognized criminals.
The private detective must rely, as the Youngest Son or Trickster Hero does in primitive myth, on his wits.
The private detective is militant against injustice, a humorous and ironic explorer of the underworld;
most important to Patchen, he was a non-literary hero, and very contemporary.
In 1945, probably almost every American not only knew who Sam Spade was, but had some kind of emotional feeling about him.
In The Memoirs Of A Shy Pornographer (1945) Patchen exploited this national sentiment by making his hero, Albert Budd, a private detective.

But since 1945, Sam Spade has undergone a metamorphosis;
he has become Friday on Dragnet, a mouthpiece of arbitrary police authority.
He has, like so many other secular and religious culture symbols, gone over to the side of the ruling classes.
Obviously, the "private eye" can have no more appeal for Patchen.
To fill the job of contemporary hero in 1955, Patchen needed someone else.

It was logical that he would come up with the figure of the modern jazz musician.
The revolution in jazz that took place around 1949, the evolution from the "bebop" school of Dizzy Gillespie to the "cool" sound of Miles Davis and Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and the whole legend of Charlie Parker, had made an impression on many academic and literary men.
The differentiation between the East Coast and West Coast schools of jazz, the differences between the "hard bop" school of Rollins, and the "cerebral" experiments of Tristano, Konitz and Marsh, the general differences in the mores of white and Negro musicians, all had become fairly well known to certain segments of the public.
The immense amount of interest that the new jazz had for the younger generation must have impressed him, and he began working toward the merger of jazz and poetry, as he had previously attempted the union of graphic art and poetry.
In addition to his experiments in reading poetry to jazz, Patchen is beginning to use the figure of the modern jazz musician as a myth hero in the same way he used the figure of the private detective a decade ago.
In this respect, his approach to poetry-and-jazz is in marked contrast to Kenneth Rexroth's.
Rexroth uses many of his early poems when he reads to jazz, including many of his Chinese and Japanese translations;
he usually draws some kind of comparison with the jazz tradition and the poem he is reading -- for instance, he draws the parallel between a poem he reads about an Oriental courtesan waiting for the man she loves, and who never comes, and the old blues chants of Ma Rainy and other Negro singers -- but usually the comparison is specious.
Rexroth may sometimes achieve an effective juxtaposition, but he rarely makes any effort to capture any jazz "feeling" in the text of his poems, relying on his very competent musicians to supply this feeling.

Patchen does read some of his earlier works to music, but he has written an entire book of short poems which seem to be especially suited for reading with jazz.
These new poems have only a few direct references to jazz and jazz musicians, but they show changes in Patchen's approach to his poetry, for he has tried to enter into and understand the emotional attitude of the jazz musician.

It is difficult to draw the line between stereotype and the reality of the jazz musician.
Everyone knows that private detectives in real life are not like Sam Spade and Pat Novak, but the real and the imaginary musician are closely linked.
Seen by the public, the musician is the underdog par excellence.
He is forced to play for little money, and must often take another job to live.
His approach to music is highly individualistic;
the accent is on improvisation rather than arrangements.
While he is worldly, the musician often cultivates public attitudes of childlike astonishment and naivete.
The musician is non-intellectual and non-verbal;
he is far from being a literary hero, yet is a creative artist.
Many of these aspects will be seen as comparable to those of the ideal detective, but where the detective is active and militant, the jazz musician is passive, almost a victim of society.
In order to write with authority either about musicians, or as a musician, Patchen would have to soft pedal his characteristically outspoken anger, and change (at least for the purposes of this poetry) from a revolutionary to a victim.
He must become one who knows all about the injustice in the world, but who declines doing anything about it.

This involves a shift in Patchen's attitude and it is a first step toward writing a new jazz poetry.
He has shown considerable ingenuity in adapting his earliest symbols and devices to the new work, and the fact that he has kept a body of constant symbols through all of his experiments gives an unexpected continuity to his poetry.
Perhaps tracing some of these more important symbols through the body of his work will show that Patchen's new poetry is well thought out, and remains within the mainstream of his work, while being suited to a new form.

Henry Miller characterized Patchen as a "man of anger and light".
His revolutionary anger is apparent in most of his early poems.
The following passage from "The Hangman's Great Hands" illustrates the directness of this anger.
"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".

This angry and exasperated stance which Patchen has maintained in his poetry for almost fifteen years has been successfully modulated into a kind of woe that is as effective as anger and still expresses his disapproval of the modern world.
In his recent book, Hurray For Anything (1957), one of the most important short poems -- and it is the title poem for one of the long jazz arrangements -- is written for recital with jazz.
Although it does not follow the metrical rules for a blues to be sung, the phrases themselves carry a blues feeling.
"I went to the city And there I did Weep, Men a-crowing like asses, And living like sheep.
Oh, can't hold the han' of my love!
Can't hold her little white han'!
Yes, I went to the city, And there I did bitterly cry, Men out of touch with the earth, And with never a glance at the sky.
Oh, can't hold the han' of my love!
Can't hold her pure little han'!"
Patchen is still the rebel, but he writes in a doleful, mournful tone.
Neither of these poems is an aberration;
each is so typical that it represents a prominent trend in the poet's development.

Patchen is repeatedly preoccupied with death.
In many of his poems, death comes by train: a strongly evocative visual image.
Perhaps Patchen was once involved in a train accident, and this passage from First Will And Testament may have been how the accident appeared to the poet when he first saw it -- if he did:

"Lord, love us, look at all the disconnected limbs floating hereabouts, like bloody feathers at that -- and all the eyes are talking and all the hair are moving and all the tongue are in all the cheek.