About Kenneth Fearing
Kenneth Fearing, born July 28, 1902, in Oak Park and died June 26, 1961, in Manhattan, was an American poet and novelist and one of the original editors of the Partisan Review. Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him “the chief poet of the Great Depression.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Kenneth Fearing published regularly in The New Yorker and helped found the Partisan Review. At the same time, he worked in editorials, as a journalist and speechwriter, producing a considerable amount of pulp fiction, often published under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff.He published several poetry collections, including “Angel Arms” (1929), “Dead Reckoning” (1938), “Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems” (1943), and “Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems” (1948). He also authored seven novels, including “The Big Clock” (1946), which was adapted for film twice. A selection of his poems was published as part of the Library of America's American Poets Project. His complete works, introduced by Robert M. Ryley, were published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1994.
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The idea underlying my poetry is that it must be exciting; otherwise it is valueless. To this end it seemed to me necessary to discard the entire bag of conventions and codes usually associated with poetry and to create instead more exacting forms which are based on the material being written about.
