A conference, “Celebrate Weldon Kees,” was held in Kees’s
hometown of Beatrice Nebraska in October, 1988. Donald Justice, who had edited
Kees’s collected poems, was there, as was Dana Gioia, who edited some of the
short stories, and James Reidel, who eventually became Kees’s biographer. I was
there also, and these are the remarks I gave under the heading of “The Uses of
Weldon Kees”:
I want
to begin by talking not about influences on Weldon Kees but about his influence
on others, because that is what brought Bob Bourdette and me to Kees in the
first place. We were looking for poems for the anthology section of our
introductory poetry textbook, The Poem in
Question, and we came upon Donald Justice’s “Sestina on Six Words by Weldon
Kees.” That led us back to Kees and his “Sestina: Travel Notes,” because we
could not have included the Justice poem without the Kees poem as context. And
the Kees sestina is one of his poems that now has a crypto-biographical appeal
because it talks about vanishing “on some questioned voyage,” about crossing a
bridge that may be to somewhere or nowhere, a “deceptive voyage;” it seems to
look forward to the circumstances of Kees’s disappearance. Once we knew about
his work, it began to seem as if we were the last people in the western
hemisphere to have discovered it. My mother-in-law, Marian Weston, as it turns
out, grew up with Weldon Kees here in Beatrice; he lived next to her family’s
house on Fifth Street. The chairman of the department in New Orleans where I
used to teach, and where Bob still does, set the type for the first collected
edition of Kees’s poems, edited by Donald Justice.
For my
own part, I began to see Kees’s influence as something considerably larger than
his apparent fame. One example of that influence is Kees’s Robinson, a partial
representation of the author—a way of breaking up the private and enclosed self
into pieces that can take the poetry out of the obsessively autobiographical
“I” and may even teach the self about the self. I don’t think John Berryman
could have written the “Dream Songs” that feature Henry had Robinson not been a
model. I think also that the stoned dogs of Kees’s “The Contours of Fixation”
find their way into Robert Bly’s “Waking from Sleep.” I find the same sort of rhetorical
shock Kees used so well at the end of “For My Daughter” used again in James
Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota.” Such specific influence of poem on poem is also seen by Robert
Stock in a 1979 article; he finds Kees’s “Aunt Elizabeth” behind William
Stafford’s “The Farm on the Great Plains,” and “the germ of Berryman’s Henry
and Mr. Bones” not in the Robinson poems, but in “A Cornucopia for Daily Use.”
Kees’s
influence is evident here working on his contemporaries: Stafford, Berryman and
Kees were all born in 1914. More significant is the influence of Kees on
younger generations of poets. I only mentioned Kees one evening to Mark Jarman,
and he talked for an hour not only about the poetry but about Kees himself and
his family and even the hardware business in Beatrice and its peculiar
implements. It’s the only conversation I’ve ever had about calf
sucker-breakers.
Chris
Buckley was teaching with me at Murray State when Other Lives, his 1985 book containing a poem on Kees, was
published. “Kees at 90” begins from the last lines of “To Build a Quiet City in
His Mind,” lines that are themselves a witty turn on a couplet from Andrew
Marvell’s “The Garden.” Buckley imagines Kees in Mexico, having written for
years under a pseudonym in magazines “flourishing in barbershops / Omaha to
Iowa City,” a clever Keesian use of place names seeming arbitrary but in fact
pointing to a nexus between Kees’s home state and the city where many of these
young poets were trained. Buckley told me also about David Wojahn’s poem,
“Weldon Kees in Mexico,” that imagines the poet there ten years after his
disappearance.
But it
is influence on Kees that seems to be
almost everyone’s favorite topic. If you leaf through Jim Elledge’s 1985
collection of critical essays on Kees, you will not lack for names of people
who influenced his poetry. The American poets include Eliot, E. A Robinson,
Hart Crane (no one, interestingly, mentions the influence of Stephen Crane’s
“moral fables” and the pervasive tone of War
Is Kind), Williams, Stevens, Pound and Conrad Aiken. English poets
mentioned are Empson, Yeats, Auden, Beddoes, Browning and Wilfred Owen. Among
continental influences are Juvenal, Trakl from Austria, and Mallarmé, Rimbaud,
and Baudelaire. The influence of prose writers on Kees’s poetry is not
neglected, and the list has such names as Gregory Bateson, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Joyce, Céline, Defoe, and Dostoyevsky. Some of these writers have undeniably
affected Kees’s poetry, but if we were to take seriously all the names
suggested as possible influences, there would not be a line of a poem left as
original composition by the man himself.
Let me
play the game for a little and add to the list—easy to do—without even
confining myself to the direct influence of people. Robert Knoll points out the
importance of the movies in Kees’s imaginative makeup. Both Hugh Kenner and
Howard Nemerov talk about the collage
as an aggregative principle in Kees’s poetry. We could put these together and
cite the newsreel as a significant technical influence. Newsreels operated by
means of loosely-linked visual images, and sometime disparate subjects within
the same reel were given thematic linkages, although sometimes there were no
such links. Kees began writing continuity scripts for Paramount newsreels in
the fall of 1943 and worked there until the fall of 1947, when he quit. To cite
one example among many that might be chosen, in the last of Kees’s “Five
Villanelles,” “We Had the Notion It Was Dawn,” the structuring example of the newsreel
is probaby as evident in the poem as the sensibility of Wifred Owen.
Then,
too, there is the New Yorker
influence, especially on the Robinson poems, three of which were published by
that magazine. Kees has a tendency toward the circumstantial and material in
his style anyway, and that tendency gets most indulged in “Aspects of
Robinson,” where Manhattan familiarity is complemented by a shower of names
that has the effect of giving us a cultural time capsule: Toynbee, luminol,
glen plaid, oxford button downs, and so on. Dana Gioia points out the flurry of
proper nouns and brand names here, but as illustration of the alienating
materialism of Robinson’s world rather than as specific influence.
Finally
there are the animals. They are never very far away in Kees’s poems. They are
not always benign, frequently not lovable. In a dozen pages at the beginning of
Part Two of Poems 1947-1954 I find
locusts, turkeys, hogs, dead fish, a phoenix, a dove, an owl, dogs, an
elephant, and cats. But as a group the poems devoted wholly or largely to
animals have more relief in humor from their generally plangent tone than any
other group, even though their subjects may be lugubrious. Boris, the
revolutionary parrot, is memorialized in “Obituary.” Boris alternated slogans
such as “Down with tyranny, hate, and war!” with fatalistic quotations like
“Out, brief candle,” and “Like Eliot’s world, he went out with a whimper.” In
“The Cats” Kees asks the question that has occurred to everyone who has cats
and a job: what do they do all day while we are gone? In “Colloquy” the speaker
holds a conversation with a cat and plays the despairing romantic:
“I
bring,”
I
said, “besides this dish of liver, and an edge
Of
cheese, the customary torments,
And
the usual wonder why we live
At
all, and why the world thins out and perishes
As
it has done for me, sieved
As
I am toward silences. Where
Are
we now? Do we know anything?
The cat plays the realist: “’Give me the dish,’ he said.”
The self-deflation of that line suggests to me that animals may have been one
of the healthier influences operating on Kees. Another poem is a monologue
spoken entirely by a dog. The poem is a witty, if sad, turn on the idea that
humans name animals, which is not the same thing as knowing their names. This dog has had a number of names given by
humans, and now speaks of what happens “When midnight closes in and takes away
your name.” What was his name in the “cultured home” uptown, where “they threw
great bones out on the balcony”? Was it Ginger, Rex, Rover, Laddie, Prince?
These poems reveal for me lived influences rather than literary ones, and I
think they may have been the most enduring ones, from the Airedale that is
mentioned as belonging to the speaker when he was twelve, in “1926,” to
Lonesome the cat, who was Weldon Kees’s only companion at the last we know of
him.
But such
influences differ from the effect of other writers. Kees’s citations of other
poets’ phrases, styles, or world views are so measured, so knowing, and so deliberate
that I hesitate to call them influences at all. What I want to call them is use. The word is Kees’s own, from a
description of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party:
“he uses everything, and uses
everything badly.” Kees is withering on the subject of Eliot’s play, but it is
not the use he condemns, but the choices Eliot makes (Chesterton, Shaw, and
Evelyn Waugh instead of the Elizabethans as in The Waste Land) and the fact that he uses them badly.
Kees
uses a lot of people in his poetry, but I don’t think he uses them badly. And
he certainly does not use them slavishly. T. S. Eliot is the poet most
frequently mentioned in Kees’s letters, for example, but Kees has a perspective
on Eliot noticeably devoid of awe. He answers Eliot’s nostalgia for an age of
integrated sensibility in an early poem, “The Speakers”: “you / Should know
Elizabethans had / Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.” As early as 1935 he had
pigeonholed Eliot as “the poet who sings the song of Oswald Spengler, that’s
rather evident,” and he parodies Eliot—and perhaps Wallace Stevens as well—in a
poem entitled “Sunday Morning” in a 1937 letter; Kees is a skilled parodist who
can capture Hemingway’s prose or Truman Capote’s speech in a few devastating
lines. Ezra Pound is not sacred for him either: after a visit to the Washington
hospital where Pound was interned, Kees writes a letter describing the way
Pound would begin a story and then suddenly shift to something unrelated. “Just
the method of the Cantos, I guess” is his comment. Kees moves easily among the
poets of previous generations, and what he does not select whole he adapts. “If
this room is our world,” he writes, turning Donne’s “The Good-Morrow” into a
last good-bye, “then let / This world be damned.” In “Dog,” which I’ve already
mentioned, Kees takes Yeats’s line about “slouching toward Bethlehem” and has
his more benign beast “snuffling…toward identity.” None of this confesses
Kees’s capture by the writers behind him, or his slavish imitation of them. He uses everything, and he uses everything
well.
