In our late teens we would quote with wry approval two lines of tight-lipped weariness from 'Street Corner College', in the old Grey Walls Press selection:

                 cold stars watch us, chum
                 cold stars and the whores.

The cynical-melancholy mood was appealing, yet Kenneth Patchen seemed then no more than a turgid, bewildering writer with a certain anarchic energy—and no flair for saying anything memorable or attractive which he didn't immediately mess up. We certainly didn't guess that he would turn out to be not only an eccentric link with the Dadaism of the Twenties but also a portent: one precursor of all that inflated, meandering, soft-centred rhetoric that came in with the Beats (though he didn't have the egocentric mysticism).

To read the new Selected Poems is to mourn for the submergence of a talent by an attitude. Underneath the incoherent gestures, just salvageable from all the...