Rating: - Kees Continues To Attract Scholars
This is a handsome volume timed to coincide with the new Kees biography "VANISHED ACT." The editor, Daniel A. Siedell, has contacted seven scholars (and himself) and gotten them to write what amount to quite insightful essays. The book could have been less skimpy and might have trawled its net a little wider, how many times do we have to hear from Gioia and Reidel again, for example? However what each of them writes is good, although reading Reidel's article about the place of film in Kees' life is a bit of deja vu since everything he says in it (or almost) is said better in the biography. Gioia contributes a nice straightforward account of the mysteries and revelations of Weldon Kees' posthumous reputation. A lovely touch to the book was its display (in black and white alas) of many of Kees' paintings and drawings, which go far towards confirming the idea that some people have that he is a painter more interesting than many in his New York group, the Irascibles. B H Friedman cites Kees as an example of a "polyartist," one who is good at more than one thing (and the things have to be from different disciplines, not just someone who can writer both poetry and fiction). All in all, it's a creditable survey of Kees' work in several fields, and places at least his artwork in context of other contemporary practitioners. More could have been done to help explain the ways in which his poetry differs from that of, say, Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell, two poets to whom Kees kind of lost the race for fame. But in a way, moving to San Francisco rather sealed his fate, didn't it? All of a sudden he was out in the sticks, gone provincial, and it seems to a certain extent he had sort of left poetry behind to become more of an all-around showman in films and theater. Who knows what would have happened next had he not mysteriously vanished one night, apparently a suicide in 1955, jumping from our beautiful and melancholy Golden Gate Bridge?