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Rating:  - The Weldon Kees Sightings Club (From ahadada books)
Little did I know, when sitting in on some of Hugh Kenner's lectures at Johns Hopkins University decades ago, that I was in the presence of the most distinguished member of a very elite group of people: those who were dead certain that they had met Weldon Kees days after police found the poet's abandoned car at the Golden Gate Bridge on July 18th, 1955. According to James Reidel, the author of this excellent biography of this astonishingly gifted suicide, "When Hugh Kenner learned in August that Kees had vanished the month before, he too found it hard to believe. He was sure he had seen his friend in the Santa Barbara Library in late July....Kenner had not talked long in the library with Kees, who seemed preoccupied by something..."(Pg. 358). Preoccupied indeed! Kees, a painter, novelist, short story writer, musician, film maker, critic, and as major a poet as was ever to be considered minor, seems almost a walking embodiment of the post-modern muse. Both an admirer of Hart Crane and a student of the myth of Ambrose Bierce's self-elopement to Mexico, Kees' story draws to it urban myths as easily as iron filings slide towards a magnet. For today's poets he is the equivalent of the Vanishing Hitchhiker and Reidel makes that point again and again. (Perhaps a little too much.) His book opens with a key in the door of Kees' last apartment, a cop answering the persistent ringing of the telephone to report that no one was on the other end of the line (perhaps a ghostly echo of one of Kees' most famous "Robinson" poems), bafflement, lost hope and then despair among friends and family--except for Kees' estranged first wife Ann, who was certain Weldon had taken the high dive from the Golden Gate. If he did, (and this reviewer for one believes that he did), the loss continues. Who knows what Kees would have done if he had beaten his string of bad luck and disappointments and lived out his full term of years? Yet another interesting connection emerged for me in reading this book, and that was Kees' admiration for the poetry of Lindley Williams Hubbell, yet another near-unknown yet gifted writer (a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), who chose to end his own poetic career by traveling to Japan around the time of Kees' disappearance, also never to return. In addition, Reidel illuminates the connection between Kees and Rexroth (one I could never figure out), tells us of Kees' dislike of Kenneth Patchen, love of tough guy movies, immaculate grooming, fascination with the gay scene (as attested to by the poet James Broughton and others), his wicked wit and pacifism, and all things anyone would want to know about Weldon Kees.
Personally, I would have liked to have seen more pictures in this book, especially of Kees' art, and perhaps stills from his films. All in all, though, this is a very good volume to put next to Kees' Collected Poems on your bookself.
Rating:  - Kee's other "Vanished Art"
While I can't comment on this book or his poetry with any authority, I would like to point out another facet to Kees' creativity to those who are interested - he was also an amazingly accomplished painter. The artworks illustrated in recent book, "The Writer's Brush," were my first introduction to him, and they every bit as compelling and interesting as anything else being produced at that time, if not moreso.
Rating: - Que Viva James Reidel
Last night at the Cinematheque here in San Francisco, we watched a slew of Weldon Kees films. Guest curator Jenni Olson last year turned an elegaic tribute to a dead friend, Mark Finch, into a feature documentary called THE JOY OF LIFE, which spoke in a spare and moving way about people drawn to the Golden Gate Bridge, like Finch, to take their own lives. She told us that in the course of her research she came across the life, work and of course the disappearance of Weldon Kees, whose car was found on the north end of the bridge on July 18, 1955, and that she found herself drawn to his work as both poet and filmmakers in the early San Francisco film avant-garde. (Not much mention made of his painting.) Only Olson, with her myriad connections to a hundred archives, could have pulled together such a program, which was billed as the first retrospective of Kees' fugitive film work.
Since he completed only one film, the program was supplemented by other shorts on which he had contributed his many talents. James Broughton's classic ADVENTURES OF JIMMY began the show, a nice print with Kees' barrelhouse piano score. Broughton was in full Buster Keaton-Chaplin mode with this short, in which he leaves a rundown cabin in the wilderness and goes to San Francisco to find a wife, or possibly a boyfriend, or one of each perhaps. It's sort of coy, and Broughton's not a great silent film actor, but it's cute and the audience lapped it up. Olson followed this up with two of Weldon Kees' "data" films, both from 1952, HAND MOUTH COORDINATION and APPROACHES AND LEAVETAKINGS, also silent, in grainy black and white. Frankly, these left me a little mystified. Why on earth were they made? In HMC, we see a harried blonde mother go through an entire day taking care of an adorable boy who looks to be about 15 months old---feeding him, bathing him, putting on his diapers, while four older kids look on from the background and attempt to steal scenes from the baby. Kees and Gregory Bateson are sometimes shown in the corners of the apartment, cameras held up to their faces. But why? It seems so pointless and "Mass Observation." The second "anthropological film" was lensed by Kees with a camera hidden in his valise, and documented ordinary Oakland and Berkeley citizens saying hello and goodbye. Kees (presumably) supplies some winsome captions for each brief scenelet, some of them lasting only a few seconds. In one of the scenes, laid in front of UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall, an imposing professor walks across some steps with a brace of burly grad students, and a sharp-eyed member of our audience identified the faculty guy as George M. Stewart, the novelist (STORM) and author of the classic work on California's Loyalty Oath THE YEAR OF THE OATH (1950).
HOTEL APEX screened next, the only completed film Kees signed, a fascinating and beautiful poetic impression of a rundown boarding house badly in need of demolition. The camera glides and rises through the ruined space, stopping to dolly in here and there at odd-shaped remnants, a Dinah Washington poster, a scattering of beer caps, a soaked paperback copy of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's 1931 THE CAPE COD MYSTERY. We wonder about the people who once lived in these broken spaces, how they came to run out on their old possessions; the HOTEL APEX has some of the mystery of the Marie Celeste. Time heals everything, people say, but the displacement of the hotel remains, still, eerily vigorous, nearly a shriek.
Then we saw a color film, William Heick's THE BRIDGE, on which Kees acted as a cameraman. Bizarrely it's a series of impressive Wow! shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, swamped in fog, glittering in the sun, viewed from a bird's eye view above, sometimes from the great steel pilings at its base, while a "movie voice" from the period recites, really skips through, a lot of Hart Crane's poem THE BRIDGE. We see Kees scurrying down a steep slope balancing a tripod; it's spooky, the way he seems to risk tumbling into the rough white surf. I thought Hart Crane's verse really beautiful, but you could tell some people were having a hard time following it, especially the way it was enunciated, in these "You Are There" rapidfire sub-Gielgudisms. Finally the lights came halfway up and we listened to a KPFA broadcast of Weldon Kees' own radio show, which he co-hosted with a friend Michael Grieg. This episode was recorded shortly after Kees' disappearance, and Grieg puzzles it out over the air, playing a song ("Daybreak Blues") that Kees wrote, and reading one of Kees' longer, most interesting poems, "The Journey." Grieg's got a great voice, like Vincent Price crossed with sandpaper, and he made "The Journey" sound like a million bucks (funny thing, though, he pronounces "Formica" with a strange accent on the first syllable, as though along the lines of "fornicate.") And the grief and bewilderment of Kees' suicide you could eat with a spoon. It was very touching. Jenni Olson announced that she could never have begun compiling this program without the help of James Reidel's incredibly detailed 2003 biography, VANISHED ACT. I read VANISHED ACT shortly after its publication and to this day it remains, to my mind, the very model of a proper artistic biography. He makes huge claims for his man, but he's got the resources and the skills to back them up. You come away from his book thinking that, despite Dana Gioia, despite Donald Justice, whatever, Weldon Kees deserves all the scrutiny and commentary he's been getting. Maybe he wasn't the world's greatest filmmaker, but we have only these bits and pieces to ponder, like reading fortunes from tea leaves. Anything might have happened, and Reidel makes you feel that; he---Reidel---is a poet of endings and beginnings. Once you start reading it, be prepared to have it haunt you the rest of your born days.
Rating: - Neglected Genius
This is an entertaining and beautifully and lovingly written biography of a neglected but indelible American poet. Read the poems, and read this book, do yourself a favor.
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