While Kenneth Patchen has nearly disappeared from academic radar in the last few decades, he was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the mid-century. The author of over forty volumes in many forms (concrete and sound poetry, prose poems and picture poems, anti-novels, absurdist tales and fables, and experimental drama), Patchen was well known as a "protest poet" and an experimentalist, a love poet and an important precursor to the Beats.  Ironically, this populist poet ended his life in relative obscurity in the 1970s. The man who pioneered the Jazz and Poetry movement, who traveled across the States and Canada performing with jazz combos, spent much of the last decade of his life bedridden and in chronic pain due to a disabling back injury.  It was during these final years in the early 1970s that Patchen produced his most important work, a series of over 150 poems-paintings, texts which synthesize word and image into a "total work" in the tradition of one of his heroes, William Blake. Patchen had been producing visual poetry, concrete poetry, and hand-painted book covers since the 1940s, and these final arresting poems are the culmination of his life's work. My paper will examine the bizarre counter world created in these works, a world in which his personal pain and the public ills of war, greed, and environmental devastation converge. I will be concerned with several questions: What do these poems have to tell us about the shape and direction of Patchen's career? What opportunities do they offer for reconsidering his work? What is the relationship between his physical body and the very palpable body of this visual work?