Weldon Kees

On October 23, 2012, Kathleen Rooney's novel-in-poems Robinson Alone was released, of which Donna Seaman from Booklist wrote:

During the 1980s and 1990s, a volume of Kees's correspondence appeared, Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935–1955 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) and the poets Dana Gioia and James Reidel reclaimed and drew attention to Kees's fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. Gioia edited The Ceremony and other stories (Port Townsend, WA: Graywolf Press, 1984) and Reidel edited selection of Kees's critical writings in Reviews and Essays: 1936-1955 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) and the novel Fall Quarter (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1990). Reidel eventually produced a biography of Kees, Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Books and articles about Kees continue to appear. His paintings and collages have also been shown in two major retrospectives.

The reputation of Weldon Kees has seen as much neglect as it has keen attention. Weeks before his disappearance, a young poet in Florida, Donald Justice, attempted to write Kees a letter of admiration and to send him a sestina he had written since Kees excelled in that form. His letter found its way to Kees's father, John, who eventually gave Justice permission to compile and edit The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Iowa City, IA: The Stone Wall Press, 1959), which was subsequently released as a trade paperback in the 1960s. Kees's work attracted the attention of other younger poets and his work gradually became anthologized and received critical attention.

Despite how much energy he put into this venture, which he hoped would bring him some commercial success, Kees found time to produce a fine series of collages. He even had two more one-man shows in New York as well as shows in San Francisco, including an impressive installation at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. He had also exchanged his film camera for a still camera, and began taking the photographs that would illustrate the book Nonverbal Communication (Berkeley:, University of California Press, 1956), which he wrote with Jurgen Ruesch, psychiatrist and semiotician. Many of these photographs would qualify as art photography as well as scientific data.

Although Poets Follies earned Kees much notoriety, his other projects did not find the same kind of support. A film company ended in a lawsuit. His collaborations with Helm, Lester, and other musicians, although professionally satisfying, did not produce any hit records. A permanent home for the Poets Follies, the Showplace, a large building Kees leased on Folsom Street in the Mission District, was closed by the fire marshal in late May 1955, just days before the premiere of a serious one-act play, The Waiting Room, which Kees had written for three actress friends.

Kees returned to his home in the Marina District on the evening of July 17, 1955. What he did the following day is a mystery. He took a call from Grieg, who told Kees of a possible job offer. Kees also telephoned a friend, the memoirist Janet Richards, seeking her company. On July 19, 1955, Kees's car was found deserted on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

In 1954, Kees separated from his wife Ann, whose alcoholism led to a psychotic episode triggered by watching the Army–McCarthy hearings on television. After having her institutionalized, Kees divorced her around the time that his last book appeared, Poems, 1947–1954 (San Francisco, Adrian Wilson, 1954). He then focused on organizing a musical revue, Pick Up the Pieces, which eventually became a much more elaborate venue of literary burlesque, titled Poets Follies, which premiered in January 1955 and featured a stripper reading the poetry of Sarah Teasdale [sic].

Restless and often estranged from his poetry, Kees began to collaborate with the jazz clarinetist Bob Helm in 1953 on ballads and torch songs (some written for the singer Ketty Lester). Helm had played with Lu Watters and Turk Murphy, both prominent figures in the San Francisco's New Orleans Revival Movement, which Kees preferred over Bebop.

Renting an apartment in nearby Point Richmond, California, Kees took a job at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked alongside the anthropologist Gregory Bateson making data films for a study of nonverbal communication. Kees also continued to paint and write poems—and use his film camera to make experimental movies, as well as scoring a film, The Adventures of Jimmy (1951), directed by the poet and filmmaker James Broughton.

From 1951 to 1954, Kees also made many new contacts as well as renewed old ones in the San Francisco Renaissance, among them Kenneth Rexroth and the founder of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Kees's poetry, however, did not embrace the kind dionysiac character and became increasingly sardonic and confessional in poems such as "1926."

During the summer of 1949, Kees established a cultural symposium series at Provincetown (Forum 49). He also became involved with the so-called the Irascibles, a group of controversial artists led by Robert Motherwell and other prominent Abstract Expressionists who boycotted a modern art exhibit sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kees, though quite active in protesting the conservative jury's selection in his Nation column, became estranged with both the cultural scene in New York and many of its figures. Although invited to pose in Life magazine's famous group photo of the Irascible 18, Kees and his wife Ann had already driven cross-country to San Francisco in late 1950.

In 1948, Weldon and Ann Kees began summering at the artist colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. In the autumn of that year, Kees had his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery and one of his paintings was included in a group show of established and rising artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite these initial successes, Kees's work only had very modest sales.

With his first book of poems, The Last Man (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1943), Kees quickly established his reputation and his poems began to appear regularly in The New Yorker (which published his first Robinson persona poems, which pathologize the urban man), Poetry, and The Partisan Review. By the time his second book appeared, The Fall of Magicians (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), Kees had already been painting for more than a year and had befriended a number of Abstract Expressionism artists, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, as well as the critic Clement Greenberg—whose column Kees took over at The Nation from 1948 to 1950.

In early 1941, Kees signed a provisional contract with Alfred A. Knopf for a novel, Fall Quarter, an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college. Fall Quarter, part surreal, part social commentary, was rejected by Knopf in the days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the declaration of war having changed publishing contingencies for war books. A farce about a dystopic heartland would look unpatriotic on Knopf's 1942 list. From this point on, Kees turned from fiction to writing only poetry.

While working for the Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, Nebraska, and after having suffered the rejection of several novels, Kees turned to writing poetry—and, for a time, engaged in union organizing and considered himself a communist. In 1937, Kees moved to Colorado to earn a degree in library science at the University of Denver, which included working as a librarian at the Denver Public Library.

Kees's worldview and writing were shaped by the Jazz Age and his early adulthood during the Great Depression. By the time he graduated from high school in 1931, he rejected entering the family business and, while at Doane College, decided to become a novelist. He transferred to the University of Missouri, which had a writing program, and then to the University of Nebraska, where he was mentored by the founding editor of the literary journal Prairie Schooner, Lowery C. Wimberley. By the time Kees graduated in 1935, he had already written and published short stories in that journal as well as other literary magazines such as Horizon and Rocky Mountain Review.

Harry Weldon Kees (February 24, 1914 – disappeared July 18, 1955) was an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, playwright, jazz pianist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Despite his brief career, Kees is considered an important mid-twentieth-century poet of the same generation as John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. His work has been immensely influential on subsequent generations of poets writing in English and other languages and his collected poems have been included in many anthologies. Harold Bloom lists the publication of Kees's first book The Last Man (1943) as an important event in the chronology of his textbook Modern American Poetry as well as a book worthy of his Western Canon.