The famous boating party

The Concord library has a bunch of very old Patchen books and I love borrowing them even though I have the complete Patchen poems. I like seeing how these smaller collections were arranged, and I like that they are all old and are slim hardbacks. The book layouts are always nice to look at too.

As usual, I love this Patchen book. I've been obsessed with Patchen since I found out about him over the summer (Thanks American Poetry Review!) His poems are creative and surprising. They always feel super sincere to me. I just like his attitude. Diane DiPrima described it as "tender silliness," which sounds exactly right to me.

These are all prose poems. My least favorite part of the book is the two poems done in a series. I didn't think they were as compelling as the rest. It felt like they were broken into pieces, and should have been just put together instead of separated into different poems.

The titles are usually interesting and often are the first half of the first sentence of the poem.

My favorites in the book:
Delighting in Bluepink

Sturdy Legs, That (It is actually on the next page down. I can't figure out how to get it to point at the right page. I wasn't going to include it because of the weird link, but it is probably my favorite.)

Evidence? What Evidence?

In Order To