years Patchen lived out the final years of his life with his wife in their modest home on 2340 Sierra Court, in Palo Alto, where Patchen created many of his distinctive painted poems, produced while confined to his bed after his disastrous 1959 surgery inadvertently damaged his spine. He died in Palo Alto, on January 8, 1972. His wife, Miriam, died in March 2000, also in Palo Alto. Career Writing Patchen's first book of poetry, Before the Brave, was published by Random House in 1936. His earliest collections of poetry were his most political and led to his being championed, in the 1930s, as a "proletariat poet". This description, which Patchen rejected, never stuck, since his work varied widely in subject, style and form. As his career progressed, he continued to push himself into more and more experimental styles and forms, developing, along with writers such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth, what came to be known as jazz poetry. He also experimented with his childlike "painted poems," many of which were published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us. After the appearance of his first book, he and Miriam traveled to the Southwest and then moved to Hollywood in 1938, where he tried, unsuccessfully, writing film scripts and worked for the WPA. His next book of poems, First Will and Testament, drew the attention of James Laughlin, who was then launching New Directions Publishing as a student at Harvard. Laughlin's decision to publish Patchen's work started a relationship that would last for the remainder of both men's careers. For a short time, in 1939, Patchen even took an office job working for New Directions. In addition to their professional relationship, Patchen and Laughlin also became good friends. Patchen pioneered the "drawing-and-poem form" as well as the painting-and-poem form and produced over a thousand "painted books", special copies of his own works with original paintings on the covers. His many hundreds of drawings and paintings have been described as being reminiscent of those of Blake and Klee. During the course of a long and varied career, he also tried his hand at writing experimental novels, such as The Journal of Albion Moonlight and The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, and the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. Patchen's Collected Poems was first published in 1969, just a few years before his death. Peers One