Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1911, and grew up in the steel towns of the Mahoning Valley, where his father worked in the mills. As a young man he worked in a factory himself, played football, and went briefly to college in Wisconsin before setting off across the country, writing as he went. His first published poem appeared in The New York Times in 1932, and his first book of poems, Before the Brave, in 1936.

In 1934 he married Miriam Oikemus, and the two were inseparable for the rest of his life. Many of his best poems are love poems for her, and they are as tender as anything an American poet wrote in those years.

The rest of his work was angrier. Patchen was a pacifist through the Second World War, and in 1941 he published The Journal of Albion Moonlight, a wild, sprawling anti-war novel that breaks every rule of the form: part journal, part dream, part sermon, with columns of text running side by side and pages that shout. No ordinary publisher would take it, so Patchen published it himself. It has been in print ever since.

In 1937 he injured his back, and for the rest of his life he lived with terrible pain, through operations that failed and long years largely bedridden. He kept working anyway. He made “picture-poems,” painting words and strange, funny creatures together on the page, and he became one of the first American poets to read his poems with jazz musicians, recording with bands in the 1950s. Henry Miller wrote an essay about him called “Patchen: Man of Anger and Light.”

The Beats who arrived in San Francisco in the 1950s found that Patchen had been there before them: experimental, political, mystical and broke. He lived his last years in Palo Alto, California, and died there in 1972.