I’ve finished the middle third of Patchen’s Selected Poems, and generally I find that I react very much the way I reacted to the first third of the book. I don’t like most of the poems, but I continue to read because I find a few poems that I like very much.
Here’s an example of the kind of poem that I generally don’t like, though this is actually my favorite of this genre:
THE LIONS OF FIRE SHALL HAVE THEIR HUNTING
The lions of fire
Shall have their hunting in this black land
Their teeth shall tear at your soft throats
Their claws kill
O the lions of fire shall awake
And the valleys steam with their fury
Because you are sick with the dirt of your money
Because you are pigs rooting in the swill of your war
Because you are mean and sly and full of the pus of your pious murder
Because you have turned your faces from God
Because you have spread your filth everywhere
O the lions of fire
Wait in the crawling shadows of your world
And their terrible eyes are watching you.
I don’t really disagree with much of what Patchen says; I agree that money, greed, too often seems the root of our problems rather than the answer to them. You know I’m tired of pious wars. Right? That should be a given by now.
I suppose what I object to most is the tying of God to the “Lions of Fire” and the general apocalyptic tone of the poem. Filth and pus strike me as far too hysterical to be effective.
And this is the best of these types of poems. Many lack even the restraint shown here, and are reminiscent of Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
About the time that you decide you really don’t need to read any further, you find a gem like this one:
THE ORANGE BEARS
The Orange bears with soft friendly eyes
Who played with me when I was ten,
Christ, before I’d left home they’d had
Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs
Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting
Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped
Out, and I went down through the woods
To the smelly crick with Whitman
In the Haldeman-Julius edition,
And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail
Into the cover—What did he know about
Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal
And the National Guard coming over
From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates
With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers?
I remember you would put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they’d be so covered with soot
You couldn’t tell what they were anymore.
A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!
The anger’s obviously still there, but here it’s been channeled better, and the ideas driven home by their very understatement. What a beautiful contrast between Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and a world where the daisies are covered in soot in a single night.
What kind of world do we live in where the gentlest people are crushed by an economic system that puts profit before lives?