The Stronghold by Phillips Kloss (review)

256 Western American Literature The West has always been usable sacred ground to Ferril. The poems of this volume illustrate his ability to recreate the human experience enacted in a particular western locale and made real on two levels at once, the literal and the mythic. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University The Stronghold. By Phillips Kloss. (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Sunstone Press, 1987. 101 pages, $10.95.) Besides liking quaintly traditional end-rhymed poems (he tells a bird in “Lazuli Bunting” that “thou knowest” and “thou goest,” for example), Taos resident Phillips Kloss likes—to the point of emulation—the long and seem­ ingly racked-out lines of Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers: i.e., those lines of poetry an editor must turn down and indent so they fit on the standard­ sized page. Well, Kloss likes to write such lengthy lines; here is one example, this one concerning D. H. Lawrence, as it appears on the page: Sterile sex-god. All his novels were repetitive extensions of his autobiographical Sons and Lovers, all of his women were the same woman perpetually frustrated, all his men the same himself perpetually frustrated. Unlike those of Whitman and Jeffers, however,virtually all of Kloss’slines lack power and depth. The citation above also exemplifies what Kloss isn’t writing: he isn’t writing poetry. Whatever else poetry might be said to be, it is certainly precise and imagistic language compressed into a form that both reflects and expresses its content. Kloss’s language isn’t that; it is prose wrenched into the look of—without being—poetry. Another essential weakness in Kloss’swriting —apparent in the passage above and in the other twenty-one expressions in this volume—is that, just as he is unwilling or unable to spend the necessary time and labor to craft his writing technically, he consistently depends upon vague abstractions to fill out his pages. Something else Kloss likes—to the point, I suspect,of readingobituariesof famous people to make sure he won’t get sued for slandering them—is acerbic, petty and tasteless rumor-mongering. For example, the line above about Lawrence comes from “The Woman Who Married an Indian,” a piece pri­ marily about Mabel Luhan, whom Kloss calls “a conspicuity seeker.” (He jabs at Luhan and Lawrence again in “Radium Springs.”) Yet this particular piece I have cited also offers the reader glimpses of Mabel Luhan and Frieda Lawrence fighting over, first, D. H. and, second, D. H.’s ashes; it offers glimpses of Mabel seducing Robinson Jeffers, of Una Jeffers becoming suicidally jealous and shooting herself, of Una dying of cancer, of Jeffers himself Reviews 257 then taking up with Judith Anderson, of various “Taos artists” getting divorces (all “instigated” by Mabel), and so on. Or there is “Lie Detector,” all about—according to Kloss—the laughably pathetic life of Leonarde Keeler (inventor of the lie detector) ;this one, again, isfat with prosaically presented, contemptuouslybiting gossip. No, Keeler never lived in Taos, as most of Kloss’s other victims did; but Keeler was raised in Berkeley where Kloss himself lived for a time while attending the university, and where Kloss must have become very familiar with the Keeler family (familiar enough, anyway, to know about a broken-legged kitten, a woman troubled by her impending hysterectomy, and much more). Taos artist Georgia O’Keeffe died recently, so I’d guess there is another “poem” by Kloss in the making. What there is in The Stronghold that isn’t venomous “thou [needn’t] knowest.” DAVID A. CARPENTER Eastern Illinois University Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation. Letters, 1935-1955. Edited and with Commentary by Robert E. Knoll. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. 253 pages, $19.95.) Weldon Kees was an extremely versatile artist—a poet, critic, essayist, playwright, and novelist; a painter; a photographer; a cinemast; a jazz musi­ cian—who somehow has missed the national recognition he sought. Originally from Nebraska, he became friends with the literary and artistic world of New York and the West Coast. Kees had a double nature, according to his editor. His poems reveal a world of darkness and dread, but his letters are “gay...