Clueless About Kees
Dan Schneider, of Cosmoetica, wrote a laudatory essay on Weldon Kees a few years ago, which I stumbled on the other day. Nice that someone - there are not so many - knows Kees, and defends him. Curiously clueless about some things though:
The Scene of the Crime
There should have been some witness there, accusing -
Women with angry mouths and burning eyes
To fill the house with unforgiving cries;
But there was only silence for abuse.
There should have been exposure - more than curtains
Drawn, the stairway coiling to the floor
Where no one walked, the sheeted furniture,
And one thin line of light beneath the door.
Walking the stairs to reach that room, a pool
Of blood swam in his thoughts, a hideous guide
That led him on and vanished in the hall.
There should have been damnation. But, inside,
Only an old man clawed the bed, and drooled,
Whispering, "Murderer!" before he died.
It's pretty obvious the "murderer" accused here is the Universe, or God - the "crime", the terms upon which life is proferred to mortal man. But Schneider misses all this…perhaps because he has phobias about death, disease and ageing evident elsewhere in his otherwise interesting critiques. (Schneider can't abide the fact that Thom Gunn wrote about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.)
BTW the poem above helps explain some of Kee's problems with the critics: it teeters on light verse - despite its evident skill - with a "gotcha" ending. Much the same could be said for another Kees effort, an untitled villanelle, with a cumulative "gotcha":
The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
It’s mildly cheering to recall
That every building has it’s little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.
Here in the kitchen drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
And though there’s no one here at all,
One searches every room because,
The crack is moving down the wall.
Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The sort of thing which gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
You may have gathered Kees was a death-obsessed poet (the best kind of poet). Similarly with another "gotcha" piece:
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: foul, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others' agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.
The "gotchas" are both amusing, and annoying, and the real case for Kees appears when he transcends such cleverness and romps in sheer despair:
The Beach in August
The day the fat woman
In the bright blue bathing suit
Walked into the water and died,
I thought about the human
Condition. Pieces of old fruit
Came in and were left by the tide.
What I thought about the human
Condition was this: old fruit
Comes in and is left, and dries
In the sun. Another fat woman
In a dull green bathing suit
Dives into the water and dies.
The pulmotors glisten. It is noon.
We dry and die in the sun
While the seascape arranges old fruit,
Coming in with the tide glistening
At noon. A woman, moderately stout,
In a nondescript bathing suit,
Swims to a pier. A tall woman
Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human
Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.
and
Farrago
The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide for a punctured god.
We killed and roasted one. And now he haunts the air,
Invisible, creates the world again, lights the bright star
And hurls the thunderbolt. His body and his blood
Hurries the harvest. Through the tall grain,
Toward nightfall, these cold tears of his come down like rain,
Spotting and darkening.— I sit in a bar
On Tenth Street writing down these lies
In the worst winter of my life. A damp snow
Falls against the pane. When everything dies
The days all end alike. The sound
Of breaking goes on faintly all around
Outside and inside. Where I go,
The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide. Dance in the snow.
The first is a better "beat" poem than any name Beat ever wrote, and the latter is a better Confessionalist poem than anyone has written since.
Continued:
The Scene of the Crime
There should have been some witness there, accusing -
Women with angry mouths and burning eyes
To fill the house with unforgiving cries;
But there was only silence for abuse.
There should have been exposure - more than curtains
Drawn, the stairway coiling to the floor
Where no one walked, the sheeted furniture,
And one thin line of light beneath the door.
Walking the stairs to reach that room, a pool
Of blood swam in his thoughts, a hideous guide
That led him on and vanished in the hall.
There should have been damnation. But, inside,
Only an old man clawed the bed, and drooled,
Whispering, "Murderer!" before he died.
It's pretty obvious the "murderer" accused here is the Universe, or God - the "crime", the terms upon which life is proferred to mortal man. But Schneider misses all this…perhaps because he has phobias about death, disease and ageing evident elsewhere in his otherwise interesting critiques. (Schneider can't abide the fact that Thom Gunn wrote about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.)
BTW the poem above helps explain some of Kee's problems with the critics: it teeters on light verse - despite its evident skill - with a "gotcha" ending. Much the same could be said for another Kees effort, an untitled villanelle, with a cumulative "gotcha":
The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
It’s mildly cheering to recall
That every building has it’s little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.
Here in the kitchen drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
And though there’s no one here at all,
One searches every room because,
The crack is moving down the wall.
Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The sort of thing which gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.
You may have gathered Kees was a death-obsessed poet (the best kind of poet). Similarly with another "gotcha" piece:
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: foul, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others' agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.
The "gotchas" are both amusing, and annoying, and the real case for Kees appears when he transcends such cleverness and romps in sheer despair:
The Beach in August
The day the fat woman
In the bright blue bathing suit
Walked into the water and died,
I thought about the human
Condition. Pieces of old fruit
Came in and were left by the tide.
What I thought about the human
Condition was this: old fruit
Comes in and is left, and dries
In the sun. Another fat woman
In a dull green bathing suit
Dives into the water and dies.
The pulmotors glisten. It is noon.
We dry and die in the sun
While the seascape arranges old fruit,
Coming in with the tide glistening
At noon. A woman, moderately stout,
In a nondescript bathing suit,
Swims to a pier. A tall woman
Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human
Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.
and
Farrago
The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide for a punctured god.
We killed and roasted one. And now he haunts the air,
Invisible, creates the world again, lights the bright star
And hurls the thunderbolt. His body and his blood
Hurries the harvest. Through the tall grain,
Toward nightfall, these cold tears of his come down like rain,
Spotting and darkening.— I sit in a bar
On Tenth Street writing down these lies
In the worst winter of my life. A damp snow
Falls against the pane. When everything dies
The days all end alike. The sound
Of breaking goes on faintly all around
Outside and inside. Where I go,
The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide. Dance in the snow.
The first is a better "beat" poem than any name Beat ever wrote, and the latter is a better Confessionalist poem than anyone has written since.
Continued:
posted by Mr. Finch at 9:16 AM
1 Comments:
Interesting interpretation of the poem by Kees, but mostly it's filled with imbuement. There is no evidence to support your claim of Immortal culpability.
However, in the piece you wrote of, by me, I do state:
'We then get this absolutely GREAT line: ‘There should have been damnation. But, inside’. Why is it great? 1st off- the enjambment allows 2 different dramatic readings. 1st it can mean that the percipient should have been damned by the cosmos, or Fate, etc. Yet, then he looks in the room. It can also mean that there should have been a much more damnable scene inside the room, OR- most appropriately (given the enjambment) the line can mean that the percipient should have been feeling damnation of himself, from inside himself (probably for his own morbid curiosity & desire for the worst).'
I acknowledge there's the possibility of an outer narrative, but only in that specific line. One of the major problems with criticism- film, poetry, fiction, is that, as you have done, you are nopt dealing with the poem, but what yopu feel it should be. There is a world of difference there.
And where do you get the silly notion that 'Schneider can't abide the fact that Thom Gunn wrote about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.'
In the piece on Gunn-
http://www.cosmoetica.com/TOP94-DES91.htm
-there is nothing but a denuding of a bad poem. I can abide even bad poetry. But I critically expose it. Anything else is your own bias, misinterpretation, and paranoia.
'TG has often been lauded as ‘courageous’, or ‘brave’- especially in the last decades when AIDS reared its ugly head. But, what. may I ask, is courageous or brave about poems like this- or this in particular? I am reminded of the poetry of teenagers I would run across in cafés- whose every fear was the spur for an opus, whose every insecurity was muse for a classic.'
To try to wrangle an anti-gay sentiment out of criticism like that bespeaks more of the wrangler than the writer.
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