Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America

Well, the first modern poet I ever heard of was Kenneth Patchen, when I was living in Greenwich Village in New York as a kid about 1939. And then again after the war in '46, '47, he was the first modern poet I ever ran across, and he and Kenneth Rexroth were the greatest political poets of the period after the second world war, and they were great love poets too. They are kind of the fathers of our generation [of poets]. He and Henry Miller were what you might call a 'dissident brotherhood.' They were a kind of dissident triumvirate to me and were saying things that no other poets or writers were saying. . . . --Lawrence Ferlinghetti