Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955, which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared.  His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with  no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years. 


James Reidel's book Vanished Act: the Life and Art of Weldon Kees, is a more traditional biography which restates the (much more interesting and fuller) material Knoll used, but is worth your time as well. I'll finish it soon and have more to say, most likely.


Kees published stories and poems easily, and in the best journals, though his novels weren't published in his lifetime. He's still a recognized, that is, canonical poet for a single poem, For my Daughter, which most of you have read, I'm sure, or can find online easily enough, so I won't bother posting it. Kees painted as well, wrote documentary films, played barrelhouse piano, and took photographs of professional or show quality. But we know him for his poems, which are dark and odd and unlike his contemporaries.

The Coming of the Plague

BY WELDON KEES

September was when it began.

Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs

Silent, moving like shadows on a wall;

And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind

We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths;

Badgers and snakes, abandoning

Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten;

Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods

Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors

Rising from the earth - all these,

And more began that fall. Ravens flew round

The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,

We could hear the sound of beating clothes

All through the night. We could not count

All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.

And one day in a field I saw

A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,

Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,

Huddled together, silent, ominous,

And heard the sound of rushing wind.

Kees' disappearance in 1955 contributes to what Dana Gioia calls his cult following, but I'd like to think there are more people out there reading his work and finding pleasure in its singular creepiness and the slow overtaking of your heart rate as a reader, something amply pushed by his pacing in this poem and in many others.

One person I know who's reading Kees is Kathleen Rooney, of Rose Metal Press. Her chapbook of Robinson poems (Kees' New Yorker poems featured a persona he called Robinson) will be out from Greying Ghost Press, and in her book of essays, For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs, she hunts down Kees' haunts and habitations in New York City. Those poems and essays are all well worth your time and money. So there's Kathy and me. Anybody else out there reading Kees? Why?