Kenneth Fearing

Kenneth Fearing Poems

Kenneth Fearing Biography

Kenneth Fearing (July 28 1902 - June 26, 1961) was an American poet, novelist, and founding editor of the Partisan Review. Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him "the chief poet of the American Depression." Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois. His parents divorced when he was a year old, and he was raised mainly by his aunt. After studying at the University of Wisconsin, Fearing moved to New York City where he began a career as a poet and was active in leftist politics. In the Twenties and Thirties, he published regularly in The New Yorker and helped found The Partisan Review, while also working as an editor, journalist, and speechwriter and turning out a good deal of pulp fiction. Some of Fearing's pulp fiction was soft-core pornography, often published under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. A selection of Fearing's poems has been published as part of the Library of America's American Poets Project. His complete poetic works, edited by Robert M. Ryley, were published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1994. Fearing published several collections of poetry including Angel Arms (1929), Dead Reckoning (1938), Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and other poems (1943), Stranger at Coney Island and other poems (1948), and seven novels including The Big Clock (1946). He is the father of poet Bruce Fearing.)

The Best Poem Of Kenneth Fearing

Evening Song

Sleep, McKade.
  Fold up the day. It was a bright scarf.
  Put it away.
  Take yourself to pieces like a house of cards.

It is time to be a grey mouse under a tall building.
  Go there. Go there now.
  Look at the huge nails. Run behind the pipes.
  Scamper in the walls.
  Crawl towards the beckoning girl, her breasts are warm.
  But here is a dead man. A murderer?
  Kill him with your pistol. Creep past him to the girl.

Sleep, McKade.
  Throw one arm across the bed. Wind your watch.
  You are a gentleman, and important.
  Yawn. Go to sleep.

The continent turning from the sun is quiet.
  Your ticker waits for tomorrow morning
  And you are alive now.
  It will be a long time before they put McKade under the sod.
  Sometime, but not now.
  Sometime, though. Sometime, for certain.

Take apart your brain,
  Close the mouths in it that have been hungry,
  They are fed for a while.
  Go to sleep, you are a gentleman. McKade, alive and sane.
  A gentleman of position.

Tip your hat to the lady.
  Speak to the mayor.
  You are a personal friend of the mayor's, are you not?
  True. A friend of the mayor's.
  And you met the Queen of Roumania. True.

Then go to sleep.
  Be a dog sleeping in the old sun.
  Be a poodle drowsing in the old sun, by the Appian Way.
  Be a dog lying the meadow watching soldiers pass on the road.
  Chase after the woman who beckons.
  Run from the policeman with the dagger. It will split your bones.
  Be terrified.
  Curl up and drowse on the pavement of Fifth Avenue in the old sun.
  Sleep, McKade.
  Yawn.
  Go to sleep.

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