3 entertainments

3 Entertainments brings together three works for film and television by the American poet Weldon Kees, whose work was introduced to the United Kingdom by Michael Hofmann and Simon Armitage in the 1990s and published by Faber & Faber. A champion of film noir and B-pictures, Kees collaborated on two screen stories in the early 1950s, ‘Assignment to Peril,’ a Cold War thriller set in Istanbul, and ‘Gadabout,’ which hints darkly of the CIA’s LSD doping project, MKUltra. The latter, which is only a fragment, also includes a transcript of a tape on which Kees brainstorms the plot and characters. ‘The Waiting Room,’ a stage play adapted for television, is likely Kees’s last work before he disappeared from the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1955. With an introduction and notes by Kees’s biographer, James Reidel, 3 Entertainments fills a void in Kees’s opus and reveals his ‘third way’ of reconciling a life of art in the inhospitable and desolate culture of postwar America. Besides these moving poems, Weldon Kees left behind an excellent play of the type now most successful off-Broadway, called ‘The Waiting Room.’ I hope his heirs will make it available soon. Like his poems, it was a few years too early. —Kenneth Rexroth