Collected Poems of Weldon Kees

by Weldon Kees

Introduces and grapples with notions of ethical principles and practices, and how these may be applied in a diverse and challenging local context. This book provides relevant South African examples to demonstrate the applicability of theoretical frameworks.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

338 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1975

About the author

Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Nebraska, on February 24, 1914. His father, John Kees, owned a hardware store. As a boy, Kees had an interest in music, art, and writing. He also published his own movie magazine. In 1935, he graduated from the University of Nebraska with a B.A. degree. While still in college, Kees began to publish fiction in many mid-western literary magazines.

Kees began to write and publish poems shortly after college. His first job was working for the Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, Nebraska. Through the 1930s Kees mostly wrote short stories, placing them in the little magazines and intellectual quarterlies (Prairie Schoone, Horizon, Rocky Mountain Review). He continued to write fiction after leaving the Federal Writers Project for a job as a librarian in Denver. In October 1937 at the age of 24, he married Ann Swan. His reputation as a writer of fiction continued to grow. A novel, Fall Quarter, was completed in 1941, but its whimsical tale of a young professor who battles the dreariness of staid Nebraskan college life was thought by publishers to be too droll for a year in which war seemed imminent (eventually published in 1990). In 1943, the couple moved to New York City, where Kees wrote for Time magazine and published reviews in national magazines and newspapers such as The Nation and The New Republic. Kees's first collection of poems, The Last Man, was published in 1943. His second collection, The Fall of Magicians, first appeared in 1947.

In the mid-forties, he also began to paint; he had one-man shows at galleries including the Peridot Gallery. His painting was often shown with and compared to abstract expressionists such as William de Kooning. Between 1934 and 1945, he published more than thirty stories.

In 1951 Kees moved to San Francisco. In California, he began to study and play jazz piano, while continuing his painting. His jobs included writing film reviews for radio, writing for a theater review entitled Poets Follies, and working on screenplays. Much of this writing is collected in the volume Reviews and Essays, 1936-1955 (1988).

In the mid 1950s, Kees became increasingly depressed. His wife became seriously alcoholic and then mentally ill; the two separated in 1954 and were divorced. His final book, Poems 1947-1954, was published in 1954.

On July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. He had told a friend that he wanted, like Hart Crane, to start a new life in Mexico. He had also suggested that he might kill himself. His disappearance has been treated as a presumed suicide.

Five years after his disappearance and presumed suicide, Kees's Collected Poems was first published. In his introduction to that volume, Donald Justice called Kees among the three or four best of his generation. Justice went on to note that Kees is original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice which we have never heard before. Kees's Collected Poems have since been reprinted twice. His collection of fiction, Ceremony and Other Stories, first appeared in 1983.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

During his forty-first year, Weldon Kees’ depression deepened. He had institutionalized Ann, his wife of sixteen years, when a mammoth drinking binge (plus her compulsive TV viewing of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings) precipitated a psychotic episode; her failure to stay in treatment afterward led to their separation and divorce. Then his new book Poems: 1947-1954, debuted, and—like his two previous books—it received respectable notices but did not sell. Kees spoke to friends about running away to Mexico, about starting a whole new life, but he often spoke about suicide too. On July 19, 1955, the police discovered his 1954 Plymouth Savoy abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge, with the keys in the ignition. Weldon Kees was never seen or heard from again.

The biography of his early years makes him sound like a smaller-than-life Orson Welles. An only child, born in Beatrice, Nebraska, the darling of wealthy parents, he rejected the family business (agricultural hardware) and became an artist, a socialist and a pacifist, dabbling a bit in many arts: he wrote criticism, novels, poetry, plays, painted in oil, made collages, took photographs, and even played a little trad jazz piano. He also became acquainted with many of the artists and intellects of his day, first on the East Coast (W. C. Williams, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Willem de Kooning. Robert Motherwell) and then on the West (Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti). He was fiercely busy, ominpresent, seemingly engaged, and yet he seemed somehow apart, a man inhabiting a melancholy all his own.

His poems capture both the activity and the melancholy. They are crowded with characters and personae who exist in an arid cosmopolitan world. They remind one of the people one encounters in Eliot’s Wasteland—obviously an influence—yet Kees characters are even more hopeless. In Eliot, one senses that redemption, though remote, is always possible, whereas Kees’ people seem fixed in a hell they not only deserve but also choose for themselves, their antic movements captured in the vivid snapshots of his verse.

There is little in Kees poetry that is perfect, but much that is memorable. Many of these poems—especially those written immediately prior to his disappearance—are too long, and some end with less power than when they began. Still, each of them has value, and the cumulative effect of their collective despair is palpable.

There are, however. three dozen or so poems in this book that are close to perfect. I have included three of them below (one from each of the collections Kees published in his lifetime):

FOR MY DAUGHTER

Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read
Beneath the innocence of morning flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen
That may be hers appear: four, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of other’s agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.


CRIME CLUB

No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.
No eccentric aunjt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.

Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scatter with check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note “To be killed this way is quite alright with me.”

Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is made, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.



THE DARKNESS

I have seen it in the green tree
For a long time now,
In the shapes on pavements, oiled

And streaked with rain, and where
Hands have touched at doors.
Over the roofs and streets,

On face after passing face
I have watched it spread,
At the edge of the sky at noon

Until it stains the dead
Weeds in some empty place
And saturates the sun

—As though one had pulled a string
in an unfamiliar house
of a dim light, darkening.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest I picked up this book up because of the photograph on the front cover. i thought ' what a stylish man.' i also liked the image in the back of him - which looked like an announcement for a painting show. He was also a painter among other things. But it is a poet that we are here now.

I imagine if Cornell Woolrich wrote poetry and he was fascinated with the downfall of life in general -you would have the poetry of Kees. What is remarkable about his work is that he's like a master surgeon operating with a very sharp knife on a dead body of text. There is something very removed and distance about his work. He doesn't work from an area of warmth. More with a distant eye describing a major misery of some sort.

The fact that he disappeared somewhere below the Golden Gate Bridge may not be a surprise, yet the poetry is not suicidal. An exceptional poet, and I am looking forward to reading his short fiction. He was also a photographer, painter, and a jazz player. Actually sounds like my type of writer.

[Ryon · Rating 3 out of 5]

IF THIS ROOM IS OUR WORLD

If this room is our world, then let
This world be damned. Open this roof
For one last monstrous flood
To sweep away this floor, these chairs,
This bed that takes me to no sleep.
Under the black sky of our circumstance,
Mumbling of wet barometers, I stare
At citied dust that soils the glass
While thunder perishes. The heroes perish
Miles from here. Their blood runs heavy in the grass,
Sweet, restless, clotted, sickening,
Runs to the rivers and the seas, the seas
That are the source of that devouring flood
That I await, that I must perish by.

-Page 174

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weldon Kees vanished into the American night mysteriously at just the right time. Had he not disappeared, he probably would've been vanquished anyway, as genius often tends to be, drowned in a sea of glut and mediocrity. As it stands, he still hasn't gotten the late appreciation that he deserves. I consider him the mid-century Blake, chronicler of the dark, weird angles of our nature, but with a fine sense of humor about him. Highly recommended.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

A narrow master but still a master. If the world actually published my poetry (only if!), I'd suspect people would assume Kees was an influence but really I've come to him quite late in my life. It's unfortunate that his apparent suicide and disappearance is better known than his poems. His influence on me (and maybe other "younger" poets?) probably can be traced to his influence on Frederick Seidel, but it's hard for me to place Kees in a proper lineage. At his weakest, Eliot clearly had an influence; but as I was reading the Robinson poems, I thought maybe Kees' real source of inspiration was the overlooked master, Edwin Arlington Robinson? Robinson ultimately has more love and compassion for his American losers and suicides, but both poets populate their poems with similar characters and in similar lonely American towns and suburbs. Kees is probably closer to noirish writers like Nathaniel West or Raymond Chandler, just Kees is a poet. This is a collection I'll return to and expect it won't lose its uncompromising power and devastating tone.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you wear a web over your wasted worth?
I wear a web.

Do you fear the keyhole's splintered eye?
I fear the eye.

Can you hear the worthless morning's mirth?
I hear it.

The broken braying from whitening skies?
Yes I hear it yes.

To spend the end and feed the fire
Is day's insistence, night's demand:
To pay the unrequested fare
And wave the wavering wand.

The streets are full of broken glass,
Sparkling in this frenzied noon.
With naked feet and banaged eyes
You'll walk them - not just now, but soon.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have lots of feelings about this collection of all the poems by Kees (or at least as many as you ever get). Kees is, and I mean this in the best way, kind of a one-note poet, one obsessed with documenting, over and over, the decline of civilization and how terrible we are for letting it happen... I just re-read "Barbarous Coast" by John MacDonald, another book that I'd connect to this one for the way it is more certain than suspicious modernity is a mistake. For MacDonald, it's the image making of Hollywood, though it's harder to trace just what it is for Kees; there are references to the nuclear bomb, but it also feels like it's a temperamental thing. It does put Kees' (likely) suicide in a light that makes it feel inevitable.

But the poems: mostly short, where the average length is maybe twenty lines, though he does like to string several of them together to make longer poems of 100 or so lines. They are image heavy-- lots of cats, lots of fog, some furniture. The lines sometimes rhyme in a formal pattern (there are some sestinas, some vilanelles), and sometimes don't. In the earliest poems here, the images surprise, on the border of the surreal. Later, they are more prosey and rooted in the real world as Kees documents the emptiness behind everything.

Good poems, but maybe not the revelation I was looking for.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like many others, I found my way to Weldon Kees (1914 - 1955) via Donald Justice, who almost single-handedly rescued Kees from obscurity. Don Paterson (in his anthology, 101 Sonnets) called Kees one of the "most unremittingly bleak poets ever to wield the pen." Or in the image of Justice, "The wall cracks; the stain spreads; he does not budge from his chair."

Kees was a man of many talents — not only as a poet, but as an abstract expressionist painter, an art critic, a jazz musician, an organizer of aleatoric happenings, and a novelist. But essentially, he is a man of mystery, disappearing in 1955, presumably one of those inscrutable suicides whose last step was off the orange steel cables of the Golden Gate bridge. James Reidel, in his recent biography Vanished Act, illuminates but does not resolve the mystery. If you want an immediate introduction, check out Dana Gioia's excellent essay "The Cult of Weldon Kees." [http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekees...]

Kees was a formalist, of sorts. His poetry has a stern, almost classical polish, but is deliberately destabilized by his subversive technique. His sonnet "For My Daughter" paints a shattering picture of horror and renunciation in 14 lines. And like almost everyone else who knows his poetry, I'm drawn to his terrifying "Robinson" poems, which convey the desperate, discriminating, highly-strung spirit of the man. Here's one of my favorites:

Aspects of Robinson

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin: a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.

Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times.
Robinson
Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.

Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.

Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike most others, I came upon Weldon Kees, not through the usual Donald Justice way, but, in the book drop of the Berkeley Public library when I was still working there. I picked up the tattered paperback and loved it on the spot. Weldon Kees is a much under-appreciated poet/renaissance man. True, he's as gloomy as T. S. Eliot and Auden, but what an original voice. You should really check him out, especially those of us who have a more pessimistic/realistic sensibility.

Here's my poem from my book, Zero Summer, for him:

SUICIDE NOTE FOR WELDON KEES

slim thicket
of abandoned chapbooks

my words will recollect
rake-gathered
measured for the heights of crowns
or hooks

eyes grown accustomed to city lights

my jaundiced flame
inexplicable
somehow
oxygen was enough for me

a gasp
an accent: I wasn’t local

on the Golden Gate Bridge
car left behind
feet stepping in air
my sun-seeking vines


-Andrew Demcak

[Rauan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't read any Kees in a couple of years but remember loving it.
so carefully written. delicate. and bleak. damned bleak.

[Marcella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as a compliment to Kathleen Rooney’s Robinson Alone (which I loved). That was a novel in poetry, a structure I really liked. And unfairly I was expecting the same. But this is a book of poems not following a single plot. I still enjoyed them but (unfairly) ran into an expectation gap.

These poems are prose and sad. Well written but bleak and bitter and depressed. Evocative and quick. At times, perturbing. I liked when his poems were a bit more free form or cantos. I liked them less when they stuck to formal forms like the Villanelle.

A few of my favorites:
* White Collar Ballad
* June 1940
* The Smiles of the Bathers
* Eight Variations
* Sestina: Travel Notes
* Poem Instead of a Letter
* Girl at Midnight
* The Hourglass
* Saratoga Ending
* Travels in North America
* The Locusts, the Plaza, the Room
* Aspects of Robinson
* January
* Place of Execution
* Covering Two Years
* Late Evening Song
* A Musician’s Wife

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robinson

The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

Which is all of the room--walls, curtains,

Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson's first wife,
Rugs, vases panatelas in a humidor.
They would fill the room if Robinson came in.

The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.

All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.


Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.

[Stevefk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of the 2470 books I have finished (thanks Goodreads for keeping track), a very small percentage are poetry. So, in 2020, I am reading more books of poems, trying to appreciate, or even like the stuff. So far it seems the latter is perhaps too grandiose an asperation for a simple fella like me. So can I appreciate something I do not like? Can I appreciate the waste of an entire afternoon on boring gobbledygook? Such utterly pretentious nonsense! I am not giving up yet, though. Sappho, Gary Snyder, and now Weldon Kees have conspired to shut down my enthusiasm for this year's poetry attempt, but on I will go, at least for awhile. Years back I read some poets that I loved: Al Purdy, Tony Hoagland, Irving Layton, and a few others. I know more good stuff must be out there! Can I find it?

[Cub Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

None are bad, many are quite good, and a significant number are incredible. I think this bridges the intensities and wild, sublime visions of the Romantics with the passions of the modern era with all it's post-war bitterness, desolation and existential horror. Something else that's extremely pleasurable for me is the use of out-of-fashion, pre-20th century strict formats and rhyming schemes that give his work a sometimes chanting, often haunting lyricism linked with a long past. Damn, what a poet.

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinarily beautiful. And some of the scariest poems of the 20th century.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very bleak in tone, similar to The Waste Land, but with some good turns of phrase.

[Bradthad Codgeroger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me 30 years to get these poems ("get" being a relative term). Twentieth century American life was dark--don't let Tom Hanks fool you.

[CHRIS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weldon Kees name deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. I see a lot of myself in Kees so maybe I am bias. Kees was a true poet.

[Georgina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore the poetry of Weldon Kees, the Robinson poems in particular: "He wakes in sweat to the terrible moonlight and what might be silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs, and the long curtains blow into the room." Weldon Kees vanished in 1955, leaving his car parked near the Golden Gate Bridge. A man of mystery ... and genius.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Justice saved this poet from obscurity. Kees remains an enigma. The man simply disappeared. His car was found near the Golden Gate. Many assume suicide. I loved his collected poems. Mr. Justice did the world a service worthy of his surname by giving this volume the attention it deserves.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharp, imagistic, cynical, dark--and a strong influence on the much better known poetry of Donald Justice. Justice worked hard to keep Kees's name before the reading public and hopefully his efforts will have born fruit.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite little collections of modern American poetry. He's just a little outside of it all, at every moment. I love to read this every couple of years.

[Brendan Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read bits and pieces of this--odd that he's not really read very widely anymore, I think he could really jive with contemporary poets.

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

dark but beautiful

[Saul · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...all covering his sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf."

[Ross Cohen]

If Eliot wrote short poems with the form and focus of Elizabeth Bishop and the thematic tendencies of Elmore Leonard, he'd be something like Weldon Kees (But probably not as cool).

[R.L. Swihart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier poems are echoes of Eliot. Not all of the poems are great, but there are certainly enough gems to keep you reading (and wanting more).

[Matt Morris]

Read my review of this & other books at http://miscmss.blogspot.com/2015/04/f...