After a hiatus, the Kenneth Patchen Award for writing is being revived. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2011, the Award will be reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and will honor the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.

Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.

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The suicides and untimely deaths of friends and family have been piling up the last ten years. I had a close friend when I lived in Florida who was a city utilities worker. He was into kung fu movies and karate and beach volleyball and very unlucky with women. He met a woman after he was diagnosed with leukemia, and they married, but it must have been hard to be married to a terminally ill person, and she left him in the end, but before the end. It seemed unexcusable to me that she left him before the end, but then she was the one who was changing the bedsheets and holding his head over the toilet and watching him turn skeletal and lose teeth. READ MORE >

Over at CNN they are publishing the poetry of the Arizona shooter. Here is the first poem, titled “Meat Head.”

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