Hallelujah Anyway

This is a book to delight the mind and the eye - the first collection of the poet Kenneth Patchen's unique and remarkable "picture-poems." As a creative form, the Patchen picture-poem is descended from the "illuminated printing" of William Blake. Blake devised an etching process for his pages of hand-lettered poems; but Patchen works more freely with watercolor, casein, inks, and other media, as he blends word and image in intricate but always visually compelling patterns of shape, color, and meaning. The fusion of two arts in Hallelujah Anyway gives us an intensification and an enlargement of the poetic process - an extra dimension - not in the limited sense of an "illustrated" poem (Patchen does not write a poem and then simply draw a picture to go with it), but as a new kind of simultaneous creativity.