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POETRY FLASH CELEBRATES KENNETH PATCHEN

I am so happy to tell you about this great event, and not just because friend and fellow-poet Florence Miller is a part of the celebration, but because Patchen is an icon of what was happening in the world of poetry and jazz and art in the 1950s and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Kudos to Poetry Flash for sponsoring this event. If you are in the Bay Area, don’t miss it, and for all you folks up here in the Reno area, what better excuse for a weekend in the Bay Area. – BWS

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland presents another installment of the always excellent Poetry Flash in celebration of the publication of Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection on Sunday, October 23rd at 3pm. The poets and scholars scheduled to read include Willis Barnstone, Florence Miller, Jack Marshall, David Meltzer, GP Skratz, and the book’s publisher, Bart Schneider.

Kenneth Patchen, one of the twentieth century’s leading experimentalist writers of poetry and prose, gained widespread attention through such books as The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941). His readings of poetry and jazz were a phenomenon in the 1950s, and almost forty years after his death, Patchen’s works continue to intrigue and inspire lovers of modern literature worldwide. Born in 1911 in the Ohio steel-mill town of Niles, he lived and wrote mainly on the East Coast until 1950, when he and his wife, Miriam, moved to San Francisco. Living in North Beach, he created his well-known “painted books” and performed poetry-jazz in the City’s avant-garde clubs.Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection features poems, drawings, paintings, and painting-poems, some reproduced for the first time in color, from one of the most intriguing figures in American modernism.

— From Poetry Flash

Location:  5433 College Ave, Oakland, California

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