The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

Aspects of Weldon Kees

Aspects of Weldon Kees Relative to his peers, Weldon Kees possessed an extraordinary visual as well as aural sensibility. He liked ideas and thinking critically. He had an attractive speaking voice and loved conversation . He also had a strong sense of the world around him and a need to know how it operated. He saw himself very much a part of his historical time. Kees’ compulsion for expression was unusually intense. During the sixteen or so years that he was active in literary and artistic circles, he wrote not only poetry, short stories, and novels, but also essays and reviews (on literature, painting, and music) for the most prestigious magazines of the time. For the University of California Press, he and the psychologist Jurgen Ruesch produced Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations, which Kees edited and for which he contributed droll captions that tempered its clinical tone (he also gave the book its cultural agenda and wrote a chapter on schizophrenic art). Kees made and exhibited paintings, worked on documentary and art films, took photographs (most of the photographs in Nonverbal Communication are his), wrote, staged and participated in plays and “revues,” and composed and played jazz. At the end of his life, he had plans to collaborate on a screenplay with Hugh Kenner. The relationship between the various genres Kees worked in would be a study in itself; so would an explanation of how Kees’ techniques and strategies in one art form affected what he did in others. The transpositional use of techniques and strategies of other verbal and visual genres into the making of a poem is, in fact, what gives Kees’ poetry its enduring distinction. Sometimes a Kees poem uses the knowledge, thinking, and language of a critical essay or review; other times a poem contains visual 99 descriptions that have the impact of verbal photographs. Poems (and parts of poems) have the compositional “feel” of an abstract verbal design (at times effectuated, further, by the adept use of a “given form”—a sonnet, a villanelle, a sestina). Juxtapositions of imagery, planes of perception, and vocal play and sound patterns provide Kees’ poems with a sense of compressed moving script. Every Kees poem includes a voice or voices nuanced by tone, shaped by strict or variable meter and (often) rhyme, intended to be heard on the page. These qualities define the matrix—the “field”—of Kees’ poetic imagination ; Kees blends and layers them stylistically into every poem, a style that seemed preternaturally mature. “Statement with Rhymes,” one of his earliest poems, is dated 1938. Kees was twenty-four. Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the baseball scores, storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn the pages of a thousand books to read the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendahl, Andre Gide, Ouspenski; note the terns: obscurantism, factorize, fagaceous, endocarp; descend the nervous stairs to hear the broken ends of songs that float through city air. In Osnabrück and Ogden, on the Passamaquoddy Bay, in Ahmednagar, Waco (Neb.), in Sante Fé, propelled by zeros, zinc, and zephyrs, always I’m pursued by thoughts of what I am, authority, remembrance, food, the letter on the mezzanine, the unemployed, dogs’ lonely faces, pianos and decay. Plurality is all. I sympathize, but cannot grieve too long for those who wear their dialectics on their sleeves. The pattern’s one I sometimes rather like; there’s really nothing wrong with it for some. But I should add: It doesn’t wear for long, before I push the elevator bell and quickly leave. 100 What remains most impressive about the poem (after sixty years) is how its irregular rhyme scheme, variable lineation, spatial , temporal, and substantive juxtapositions, and densely layered meanings shape the poem’s conversational tones into the poem’s “form.” Observation, emotion, and thought are—as you read the poem—made into a visible object on the page. This idea of a poem (present in Kees’ poetry from the beginning) is similar to what Louis Zukofsky later referred to as the combination of “sight, sound, and intellection” into “objectified emotion .” Look at and listen to, for example, the visual and vocal dimensions integrated into “For H.V (1901–1927),” another...