The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

The Possibility Of Weldon Kees

The Possibility Of Weldon Kees Though he was featured at the John Natsoulas Gallery’s 2002 Conference on the Beat Generation, Weldon Kees (1914-1955) was no “beatnik”; he was, however, part of the fabric of his time, as painter, poet, critic, fiction writer, composer, even entertainer. His very successful “Poets Follies” was a kind of poetry cabaret for which Kees composed songs and played piano. The poet’s presumed suicide on July 18, 1955 (his car was discovered near the Golden Gate Bridge but the body was never found) gives his work a tragic dimension and propels him into myth. It was with this in mind that a number of us agreed to join a critical seminar on Kees held at the tenth annual West Chester University Poetry Conference. Weldon Kees responded deeply to various currents, political (left wing/pacifist) and popular. He admired Fats Waller before Fats Waller was widely admired; he insisted that films were “art” at a time when they were regarded as mere “entertainment.” (Film critic Pauline Kael was one of Kees’ younger friends; they appeared together on Berkeley radio station KPFA.) One might call Kees a “poet noir,” in some ways similar to Kenneth Fearing—a popular but equally paranoid, alcoholic poet whose work Kees read. Like Fearing’s, Kees’ poems are often frightening. Other influences include W.H. Auden and James Joyce: Kees wrote “Variations on a Theme by Joyce” (“The war is in words and the wood is the world”), and in “Five Villanelles” he criticizes a publisher who personally “turned down Joyce.” Kees was admired by Kenneth Rexroth, who hosted the Six Gallery reading (though Kees died a few months before that reading took place). I think Kees’ work, with its considerable bleakness, its sense of “a permanent and hopeless apocalypse” (in Rexroth’s phrase), hovers between personal depression and an intense commentary on the world around him—surely a bleak, frightening, sometimes nostalgic world: 73 74 The Dancer and the Dance When The Lease Is Up Walk the horses down the hill Through the darkening groves; Pat their rumps and leave the stall; Even the eyeless cat perceives Things are not going well. Fasten the lock on the drawingroom door, Cover the tables with sheets: This is the end of the swollen year When even the sound of the rain repeats: The lease is up, the time is near. Pull the curtains to the sill, Darken the rooms, cut all the wires. Crush the embers as they fall From the dying fires: Things are not going well. In American Poetry in the Twentieth Century Rexroth connects Kees to “a definite school of American verse—Robert Lowell,Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, James Wright, John Berryman, and a number of others whom [critics] call the Confessional School, poets who have recorded profound psychological conflicts or mental breakdown . . . [For Kees] the horrors of The Waste Land, or W.H. Auden’s ruined England in a new Dark Ages . . . were not literary conventions, but ever present reality, alive and malignant.” Kees’ considerable intelligence (the phrase “the mind” appears frequently in his work, and he praises “the mind / That moves towards meaning”), his interest in form, and his ability—which he shared with Fearing—to write at a level at which the personal is present only in an indirect way keep his poems from dissolving into mere self-pity, though self-pity is an aspect of many of them: Much cry and little wool: I have come back As empty-handed as I went. Poet Dana Gioia’s essay, “The Loneliness of Weldon Kees” (in Can Poetry Matter?) is one of the best pieces ever written on Kees. Kees, Gioia writes, transformed the alienation and vacuity of contemporary life into lyric poetry. He does not offer readers comfort or escape. He did not transcend the problems of his century with a religious or political faith. He did not elude the vulgarization of public culture by immigrating to an aesthetic realm. What he offered was uncompromising honesty, the transforming shock of recognition. “All a poet can do today is warn” . . . He presented only the choices history offered his generation, and none of them were attractive. In what remains of this essay, I want to examine a particular poem by Kees. The poem is not exactly “representative,” but I think it goes to the heart of his enterprise. This is “To a Contemporary.” It appears...