S18-DES12
Weldon Kees’ Music Of The Motive
Copyright Ó
by Dan Schneider, 12/5/03
The world of
Poetry is filled with suicides: take your pick of the Romantics, Sylvia Plath,
Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman- just to name a few of the
better known, & better, poets. It’s also been filled with its share of
wackos- from Goethe’s sorcery, Blake’s visions, Millay’s sex addiction to
Moore’s general eccentricities, Jeffers’ hermitry, Ginsberg’s pedophilia,
& on. But in the cranny between both of these extremes lies a now almost
forgotten poet named Weldon Kees. WK was a strikingly good poet who verged on
greatness with his taut little poems filled with emotional depth & crackling
with fresh & striking imagery & word choices. Although he was a
contemporary of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Kenneth Patchen,
Kenneth Rexroth, Theodore Roethke, & Elizabeth Bishop, & in many regards
a superior poet to all, he has a poetic Q factor far below any of the
aforementioned. Why?
Probably
because he lived his life in almost predetermined obscurity, & vanished
without a trace. People assume he committed suicide, but nothing has ever backed
up that hypothesis. Before I hit some of his better poems for analysis, let me
beforehand sketch out the life that was WK’s & after the poems, opine on
that life & the poems that girded it.
WK was 1 of
the 3 great 20th Century poets the Cornhusker state would produced.
He nestles in neatly between the lives of the great epic bard of the West- John
G. Neihardt (most famed for his book Black Elk Speaks),
& the great contemporary expatriate poet James A. Emanuel. He
was born in a small Nebraska farm town called Beatrice on 2/24/14 as Harry
Weldon Kees. He did not grow up impoverished, however, as his father- John Kees-
owned a small hardware factory & store. His mother Sarah was by most
accounts a doting mother- indulging the young WK’s interests in the arts. At a
young age WK started to write stories & poems, learned to play the piano- a
love 2nd only to poetry throughout his life, & filled many
sketchbooks with his drawings. WK was also rapt by the movies that came in to
town. He started to make his own movie fan magazines for the silent screen stars
of the day. He would sell these at his school. The magazines were filled with
articles on whatever star or starlet had a new release, hand drawn pictures of
the stars, & occasional poems of praise. While he never made any money from
his early ventures the template of WK’s life was set in the artistic
direction.
A childhood
friend of WK’s was a boy named Spangler Brugh. SB grew up & became a solid
B actor in the middle of the 20th Century under the name of Robert
Taylor. Both boys went to a local college together & stayed in intermittent
contact throughout their lives. Dissatisfied with ‘small town life’ WK set
out for larger pastures & attended the University of Missouri. Still
restive, he transferred to the University of Nebraska, where he fell in with the
local literati headed by an English professor named Lowry Wimberly. LW edited
the then-influential magazine Prairie Schooner. Upon graduating in 1935,
with a BA degree, WK decided to write the stereotypical Great American Novel.
He idolized the icons of the era: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Faulkner. But
novelry was not in the cards for WK. In his lifetime he wrote several
unpublished novels, but all were rejected not for lack of quality, but because
their subject matter was too graphic & gauche. They also tended to be too
dark- something not appreciated in the late 1930s-WW2 era. He did publish many
short stories in some mainstream, but mostly genre, magazines of the day- nearly
50 in the decade or so between the mid 1930s-40s.
Stung over
his ‘failure’ to be the next novelist admitted to the ‘canon’ WK decided
to return to his childhood love of poetry. He found he could actually get paid
for writing poems in those heady days of the Federal Writers Project. He 1st
joined the project in Lincoln, Nebraska & there met noted scientist &
writer Loren Eiseley. The 2 were social friends, but WK soon
struck up a deep friendship with an aspiring writer named Norris Getty. NG had
little talent as a writer but proved to be a sharp critic & editor for the
FWP. The 2 remained friends even as WK moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1937, to
become a librarian. NG’s suggestions & excoriations of WK’s poems aided
his development into excellence far quicker than even WK thought he could
progress. By 1938 WK’s 1st poems were being published by
publications funded by the FWP. In his 6 years in Denver WK published dozens of
poems & was regularly reviewed in major magazines, by name critics of the
day. His years in Colorado also proved beneficial in WK’s personal life, as he
met, fell in love with, & married an aspiring writer named Ann Swan in
10/37, who soon joined NG as 1 of the 2 main critics & shapers of WK’s
poetic corpus until his death. WK had boosters such as Edmund Wilson, Allen
Tate, Horace Gregory, & Dwight MacDonald at lofty literary establishments
such as New Directions press & the Partisan Review. For a time
WK thought his latest (& ultimately last) novel, Fall Quarter, would
be published via these insiders’ props. But after rejection by New Directions,
then Alfred A. Knopf, WK never wrote prose fiction again. A ½ century later- in
1990, the novel actually saw print.
In 1943 the
Keeses moved to New York City. They lived in Manhattan & Brooklyn for the
next 7 years. That same year his 1st book of poems saw light- The Last Man.
It got generally good reviews. WK became a regular writer for the Paramount
newsreels, & prestigious magazines like Time, The Nation, New
Republic, Poetry, & did book reviews for the New York Times.
He also returned to another childhood art form he loved- painting. He even had
several well reviewed 1 Man Exhibitions of his paintings. Yet, poetry still was
his main art, & under the thrall of the reigning Abstract Expressionist
movement of the day WK sought to translate such to his poetry. Fortunately, for
lovers of poetry, he failed. His poems actually improved & gained strength
& coherence, even as AB Ex painters lost their way artistically, despite
intense fame. The Fall of the Magician, his 2nd book of poems,
came out in 1947. By 1949, he even replaced the influential Clement Greenberg as
art critic for The Nation. As for his poetry, WK began a new direction by
attempting to abstract the life of a ‘typical’ New Yorker WK started a
series of poems about 1 called Robinson. These poems would be highly acclaimed
in their day, & anyone recalling WK today likely does so in connection to
those poems, or that name. I’ll examine these poems later- but WK’s life
takes precedence.
Despite a
relative level of ‘success’- no real financial woes, a good marriage,
publication in magazines & 2 books of poetry, recognition, vacations to art
colonies, etc., WK was dissatisfied. At the end of 1950 the Keeses abruptly left
New York & moved to San Francisco. WK started intellectually flailing- he
joined weird ‘movements’, started searching for ‘meaning’, worked on
anthropologically-based sci fi films, co-authored a psychology book called Nonverbal
Communication: Notes On The Visual Perception Of Human Relations (1953),
with head shrinker Jurgen Ruesch. In short, WK was going through what would a
couple of decades later be termed ‘a midlife crisis’. Not unexpectedly, the
Keeses divorced in the summer of 1954- mostly due to WK’s increasingly bizarre
behavior & lifestyle, although Ann also had a nervous breakdown & became
an alcoholic. 1954 also saw the final book in his lifetime, Poems 1947-1954,
released. By now, WK was addicted to alcohol & amphetamines. He became
sexually adventurous- hearsay accounts of wild parties & multiple partners
(of both sexes) became literary scuttlebutt- this was San Francisco, after all!
In the last few years of his life he seemed to reach for any artistic life
preserver he could find. He took up photography for local newspapers. He became
a radio film critic for KPFA- giving the soon to be renowned Pauline Kael her 1st
break as a regular contributor to his show. He penned an ongoing cabaret show
called Poets Follies, wrote unproduced plays, wrote increasingly bizarre essays,
took photographs of increasingly morbid subjects (prefiguring Mondo Cane
by a couple of decades), researched famous suicides & the best ways to
commit suicide, helped restore a dilapidated theater, played blues & jazz
piano at local hot spots, wrote songs & submitted them by the dozens to
back-of-magazine song publishing companies, & declaimed poetry from street
corners. To most he was a man losing his grip on reality.
He started
fantasizing he was Hart Crane- a childhood poetic hero of his- & longed to
fake his death & move to Mexico to live the life of a beach comber. But
bouts of manic depression, + his addictions, prevented him from ever working up
the gumption to take the plunge- so to speak! He told friends he would fake his
death by pretending to have jumped off a bridge. On July 18th, 1955
his car was found, with the keys locked inside, near the Golden Gate Bridge. No
trace of the man was ever found. Officially. WK was listed a presumed suicide,
but acquaintances long maintained he, indeed, finally indulged his fantasy.
After his disappearance WK’s reputation grew for a short time, until
the Confessional wave of the 1960s tossed him to obscurity. Only a devoted band
of poetic followers kept his name & work alive. Several editors- notably
Donald Justice, who championed a Collected Poems in 1960, & the 1970
anthology Naked Poetry, edited by Stephen Berg & Robert Mezey-
attempted to thrust WK’s poetry back into the ring, but with little success.
WK’s other artistic ventures met with similar, or worse, fates. In 1983
Columbia University released some of WK’s prose fiction. Political quagmirist
& poetaster Dana Gioia also edited a book of his fiction. DG also has
written a few essays on WK’s life & work. Unfortunately, their lack of
insight, & generally misguided hermeneusis did little to advance the worthy
cause. 1986 & 1988 saw respective editions of WK’s selected letters &
essays released, but still no revival would occur. America- or at least its
Academics, it would seem- would only yawn at anything with the WK imprimatur.
Europe, however, holds WK in higher regard. Several documentaries have
been made of his life & work, including a prestigious 1993 airing on the BBC
of Looking For Robinson. In it a British scholar retraces WK’s
crosscountry life in travelogue fashion. Not surprisingly, WK’s name- Kees is
Dutch for ‘cheese’- is well-known in the Netherlands. Several, as yet
unpubished biographies, are also in the works. Still, more young poets know of a
T.S. Eliot, or a Nikki Giovanni, over Weldon Kees. On to better thoughts.
The few critics who have remarked on WK’s corpus have generally dismissed it as bleak (although singular in its bleakness), modern (but lacking Modernist beauty), & generally as an interesting oddity, at best. The most common complaints are that, unlike a T.S. Eliot (to whom is work is bizarrely most compared) his dark landscapes are all in descent. Hope is not present, nor was it ever. Even the characters he sketches are thought of as self-flagellating wretches who lack even dreams. On the other hand, some have decried his lack of consistent tone- both from poem-to-poem & within a poem. I will show these to be convictions of lazy readings, & nothing more. WK can slowly build scenes, & then lash out with a furious description. There are also poems that only WK could have written. The essence of singularity in art is almost always the hallmark of a great artist. Here is an excerpt from my 10th essay On American Poetry Criticism, about the New Critics:
Maximal Minutiae
Last tenet (#5, if you’re still counting): Every part of the text
contributes to the meaning of the text. I.e.- everything in a poem matters- Duh!
[Deux!] What the NCs meant was that they wanted a justification for
every iota in a poem. While not a bad suggestion, off the top, there is 1
serious drawback that any great artist will recognize: it kills the element of
‘magic’- for lack of a better word. There is that alchemical reaction that
all great art produces, a synergy beyond description, that 1 just has to accept,
lest fall into a delirium of explicative froth that says nothing & lasts
little longer than the second it takes to read it. 1 can decode all the sources
& meanings, but- ultimately- there will be that bit of ineffable oomph that
separates the technically excellent from the flat-out great.
Let’s examine a terrific poem by
1 of the most underrated, but probably great, American poets of the last
century- Weldon Kees. Let’s see its relation to this tenet- if any:
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.
This poem uses clichés- & inverts them & then its narrative pulls the rug out from under the sympathizing reader. In a sense this poem does contribute everything of itself in service to the poem. But, not in the way NCs would recognize. As example- the objective correlatives of the assorted clichés are totally subverted. This declichés the clichés, but also de-objectifies the correlative. Ah, the conundrum! Again, we see how simple-minded & poor NC is in relation to serious criticism of poetry. The great endline- which cements the poem’s very greatness, however, also would- technically- work against the poem in a NC’s view, for the very reason that nothing in the poem prepares us for it. I would argue, that that fact actually is in keeping with the NC ‘purpose’ of having all parts of the text contribute. But a strict NC would not.
In my
original piece I focused on that particular poem’s relation to New Critical
beliefs. Let me add a few thoughts about it, just as an excellent poem.
Important to note that the poem, despite totally pulling a 180° shift on the
reader, narratively, it does not slow down 1 iota in its dramatic force. Even
though we find out that the whole poem has been a mordant ‘speculation’, the
imagery (& its presentation) are so forceful that a reader of any salt
actually enjoys the gutpunch at the poem’s end. Why? Because, while the ending
is still embittered (as might be expected) the expected bitterness is wholly
different from what turns out to be the speaker’s actual bitterness. &
here’s 1 final thought: too often poets are pigeon-holed. A Sylvia Plath is
called humorless by those lacking an appreciation for her black wit, or a
Wallace Stevens is called too cerebral, even though his poetry rivals the best
of a Pablo Neruda in sensuality. The reason these stereotypes come about is that
a poet gets fame for 2 or 3 poems that set the stage, & lazy critics go no
further to attempt to see beyond the moniker that’s already been established.
As example, let’s re-look at this poem’s ending. WK has been derided as a
poet whose characters are hopeless, self-pitying wretches. But REALLY read this
poem & 1 can see that the poem is a ‘positive’ statement. How? Think of
it. The speaker lures the reader in to believing that his/her own child is
basically doomed to cruel existence with the rest of us. That’s a sad thing.
BUT, then we find out that the speaker has no daughter, & furthermore
desires none. This is a positive statement. The speaker presages alot of the
ideals of the ‘Population Explosion’ mindset of affluent intellectuals in
the late 1960s & 1970s. Granted, the poem is not upbeat in a classic sense.
But, it IS a positive statement- there’s no denying it. Especially when the
spare last line is contrasted with the highly descriptive horrors that come
before in the rest of the sonnet. This is where so much of criticism of poetry
fails. A critic sets up his/her own little tenets of what constitutes
good/positive/uplifting/dense- or any other thing deemed the marker of
excellence- & anything that deviates from that (no matter how manifestly it
promotes its own notions of good/positive/uplifting/dense, etc.) is
simple-mindedly deemed not good.
Granted, the
last 2 decades have seen even this practice slip into desuetude, as critics
refrain from almost all hints of reproval. However, in the few examples of
passive/aggressive reviewing that pass for negative criticism, it is almost
always this sort of narrow-mindedness that is the template for the slight
negativity. Occasionally the negativity is correct, but usually the poet is bad
in totally different ways than the critics’ flaying. That said, there’s
little question that this gem- which is the equal of the best ever penned by any
published 20th Century poet- has never gotten the respect it
deserves- for the very reasons I point out.
Let me now
turn to another sonnet that is almost flawless, yet is not even well known
amongst WK devotees. Here ‘tis:
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.
As in For My Daughter WK masterfully declichés clichés. Let’s
start with the title, then go line by line. The title seems rather banal. We are
led to believe this might be some Dragnet-like Joe Friday blunt
recitation of a crime scene. Or, the poet might abstract the poem in to some
greater milieu, to make the crime scene itself a metaphor for some larger human
concern. WK does neither, does both, & does both & neither in unexpected
ways.
Line 1 starts us off on a musically understated poem- music is not this
poem’s reason, nor its strength, yet the subtle rime structure is enough to
remind of its tautness, while allowing for its prosaic (faux factual) rhythm to
let readers feel like we know where we are going. The 1st line is
also not ‘true’. We are led to the speaker’s own exasperation right off
the bat. The scene is off- i.e.- this is not how a crime scene would play out in
the movies, or a crime novel. The next 2 lines extrapolate on line 1. Line 4 is
very important. Dramatically, it can be read that the violence which led up to
the soon to be described crime was never dealt with previously, or it can be
seen that the very house was a passive participant in some sort of evil by
mocking its inhabitants with its own silence. Either way, a reader knows that by
the end of stanza 1 they are not in the Kansas of most contemporary poets. The 2nd
stanza calls out for more ‘should haves’- again, from either the characters
(who’ve yet to appear), or the house itself. Instead, at this juncture readers
are given classic horror film images- a sense of foreboding- only to end with a
very ambiguous single ‘thin line of
light beneath the door’. The scene, so far, seems out of some morality play,
yet it’s a ‘ghost’ morality play where the dramatis personae are not as
important as the setting itself. Also, note how the clichés such as angry
mouths, burning eyes, & curtains drawn are merely pieces
of scenery setting to be negated. They are used precisely BECAUSE they are clichés.
The last stanza starts off with more horror film imagery. We know
something lurks at stair’s ending. Then we get another declichéd cliché- the
‘pool of blood’, which is only imagined, or expected by both percipient
& reader. The percipient (different from the speaker & the readers’
personae) is drawn to this morbid thought- which then abruptly ceases. 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). Then
we get the actual poetic denouement: a pathetic victim whispers ‘Murderer’
& dies. Is he telling the percipient he has, indeed, been murdered- to live
up to the ghoul’s worst fears (or joys?), or is the victim accusing the
percipient of being his murderer- therefore returning to ‘the scene of the
crime’ of the title? If so, the poem’s opening line becomes prophetic, as
the old man does hurl an accusation. If so, the poem can be read as the personal
catharsis of a murderer coming to grips with his crime. In the handful of other
critical engagements of the poem I’ve never seen this rather obvious reading
explored. But it IS there. Go ahead, reread it.
This poem is so great
because it does lend itself to so many interpretations, especially after
suckering the reader in with its seemingly banal premise. Like For My
Daughter, this poem totally pulls the rug out from under a reader’s
expectations, although far more subtly. Subtlety is something, however, that WK-
along with positivity- was accused of lacking. So far, I’ve shown that 2 of
the major strikes held against this poet have been based on the flaws of the
critics, not the poet. Let me see if I can dig up some more misreadings of WK.
Ah, here is a fairly
well-known poem from WK which most have granted as being a technically solid
poem, yet suffering from excessive WK morbidity, in that what should be an idyll
descends into more violence. The criticism is true, on a superficial level- but
not if you read a little deeper. That act is something few published critics do.
Here’s the poem, 1 I also examined in an essay on Sharon Olds:
1926
The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.
An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.
I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am back from seeing Milton Sills
And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.
The porchlight coming on again.
On the surface the poem depicts WK enjoying an autumn evening on North
5th Street in Beatrice, Nebraska, only to realize that portents of doom abound.
Stanza 1 starts with an almost stage direction-like cue. It ends by panning away
from the percipient to give us a larger view of the peaceable surrounds. A moon
then begins the turn away from idyll. The looming wars of the 30s & 40s, 1
person goes insane, another is attacked, if not dead, by 1941. By the 3rd
stanza we get the percipient’s acknowledgement of distance from the events.
But why the digression? The present- his dog. Now, here’s where some of the
misreadings take off. The percipient claims to have returned from the past. We
had the dip into horror. But the last 2 people named are just named. No horror-
we know absolutely nothing of them, nor what befell them. They &/or the
percipient are 12, in recall. Then we get the same stage direction. Does this
suggest repetition, a nightmare? This is the most often stated interpretation,
just as Milton Sills & Doris Kenyon are often taken to be markers of
depravity to the percipient. But nowhere is that stated, nor even implied. The
poem really is a ‘lift’ from horror’ into rote observation. There is
uplift at the relief from horror. The porchlight can just as easily represent
relief from the darkness, as well as perhaps re-descent. My point is that the
negative interpretation is not necessarily wrong, just that a more positive spin
has never been posited. I attribute this to critical shorthand. Once a ‘morbid
wretch’, always a ‘morbid wretch’. The ongoing misinterpretation of WK,
& his poems, owes as much (or more) to critical sloth as it does to actual
morbidity on WK’s part.
Yet, even when being morbid, WK does it so well, he makes it almost
beautiful. Note how taut & cliché-free this poem is:
The Beach
Squat, unshaven, full of gas,
In sanctuary, out of reach,
When drops first fell at six o'clock,
He takes an object from his coat
This poem is
even tighter than 1926- due to its formalism- but there’s no misreading this
poem’s narrative. This is a description of suicide. An unemployed person has
reached his end. There are a few questionable phrases- fading
light, empty
beach, streaking rain, & endless sand- but, given the
milieu & the understated speaker- a reader can just as easily accept the
cliches as actually being literally true. So, while I’d’ve preferred
different modifiers I can live with the description. But, note how the simple
title, which sets in motion the whole poem’s tone, clashes so wonderfully with
the last line. This is not a great poem- but it’s good. Here, form (taut 8
syllable abba rimes help & mirror the emotional state of the speaker- who at
once seems blasé in describing the scene, but also curiously hurried) presages
function. It works.
WK has also
been accused of being more interested in situations than characters. Again, I
think this has been to broad an indictment. Many WK poems contain piquant
philosophical nuggets. Here’s a brief poem. Read it & I’ll opine:
The Smiles Of The Bathers
The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
I’d not
have started the poem by recapping the title. But this- the poem’s biggest
weakness- is gotten rid of early. The poem then summons strength with each word.
Line 1 ends with the sadness of comfort’s passage. We then get the same
emotion drawn through a different lens. By line 3 we have a different situation.
Comfort has turned to a bit of dread. Critics rail that WK is doing it again.
The 4th line gives us an even greater stretch from the beginning. We
get tension- the lack of release at something’s end. The 1st 4
lines have given us scenes that can be replayed. Line 5 turns the poem’s
direction inward & outward, simultaneously. We go in to deeper emotions,
even as the speaker tries to universalize the thought. The 4 aforementioned
scenes may be imperfect & confining (it’s arguable, but we can afford to
go where the speaker is taking us), but have only become public via the
speaker’s mention of them. We then turn around again, to get summations of
more things, things which are key to the earlier actions in the scenes 1st
described. The speaker goes on to declaim about the whole world. This is a
grandiosity which seems a bit odd. Why is the speaker so impassioned & not
as philosophical about these things? The last line is the key to the poem. The
world (so descriptively alive) is impassive, portrayed as waiting for those who
cannot elude. Then the speaker breaks the 4th wall (directly,
although rhetorically it also refers to the mass of humanity alluded to earlier)
& states that the reader is different because of involvement. What kind of
involvement? The only direct involvement that can logically be posited for all
readers of the poem (given that many individuals could be involved
in life in differing ways) is the act of reading itself- definitely not a
passive act. So, we get the unique summation that reading- or, more generally, the
act of ideation- is greater than all the aforementioned acts (& by
implication the unmentioned daily acts that are similar) because it can contain
all others. This is a very Emily Dickensian sentiment- that the mind is greater
than the cosmos because it can contain the cosmos. Both the poem’s statement
& its ancillary statements are quite profound, & much abounds in so
short a poem. Here, the situation(s) in this poem exist only to serve the idea-
a point very few critics of WK acknowledge.
Now, on to my
explaining this essay’s title. The music of the motive refers to how
well-constructed WK’s poems always are, & how they both have movement into
& from ideas, situations & images (are motive) while also having true
purpose. Again, WK has been called an emotionally barren poet- with nothing but
self-pitying characters. I’ve shown this to be false. The poems also have
‘true purpose’, as it is, in that they seek to illustrate ideas beyond being
shallow, morbid character studies. Here’s another misread poem- that is
misread when it’s ever actually been read:
Year’s End
The state cracked where they left your breath
So rot in a closet in the ground
Solidly
constructed- with several standout lines & images (go detect them yourself),
but the few critics who have opined on this poem have generally read it as
simply a poem stating that death beats life, ho-hum. I disagree. Yes, the poem
can mean just that if a shallow level is all you are willing to read at. We do
not know to whom this poem is addressed to, but the dead person suffered at the
hands of some government, or its agency, & is dead a year. The shallow
reading of the poem comes from the almost encomial opening of stanza 2, &
the ending- which is seen as a sort of huzzah to the fallen hero. It is, at that
level, BUT it also can be read as a disinterment of the hero. Why else is the
coming to a room? It’s not a tumulus, because tombs are not generally referred
to as rooms. So the fallen is probably in a place where most year-dead corpses
are not. The metaphorical, in this case, does not succeed the actual. The title
can therefore refer to the end of burial, or secrecy- which ties back to the
‘state, & the ‘they’ in line 1. Even in a poem as seemingly
transparent as this 1, a poem whose exterior sentiment has been done 100s of
times before, WK gives the reader more- her with just the difference of 1 word-
‘room’ for ‘tomb’.
Here is a
poem that also belies the idea of WK being cold & unfeeling. read it for its
depth of true sentiment, but also for how a change of deliberation affects the
poem (just as a difference of a single word adds depth to Year’s End):
The Upstairs Room
It must have been in March the rug wore through.
This is an
excellent poem- that should be obvious. If it’s not, struggle until you get
it. I present it here not to declaim its excellence but to highlight a
technique. The overall thrust is that the speaker recalls something vaguely,
then experiences ‘something’ emotional offstage of the poem (& it occurs
between line 1’s end & line 2’s start), which triggers memories. Note
the double meaning of the word stained- which implies beautifying the
wood &, as we read on, the aftermath of a gunshot wound to the head (itself
a nice technique). Then we get the speaker’s recall back to his initial state-
only now the time frame is not ‘It must have been in’, but ‘In’. That definity also occasions a change
in the state of the rug from being ‘worn through’ to being ‘ragged’. The
definity of the speaker’s recall seems to have been triggered by the offstage
‘event’ being remembered. This led to the implied horror of the suicide. But
what could that offstage ‘event’ be? It’s only because of the change in
definity that this is asked, because if the recap of the March time were
repeated as in line 1, we would, by the technique of repetition, think the
speaker is trying to bury the offstage ‘event’ by glossing over it, &
returning to the comfort of haziness. Instead, the clarity (real, or just the
speaker’s bravado- it does not matter to the reader the actual reason) points
directly offstage. That the speaker does not tell us directly what could have
been worse than the dredged up memory of a father’s suicide only strengthens
the poem’s mood, for a shadow doth loom over the whole poem. Given the
poem’s title, this colossus of an unspoken ‘event’ is even stronger, for
it’s all the more unexpected.
Let me
now
end this essay by addressing WK’s most famous poems- the Robinson
series (a brief 1 with only 4 movements). These are often thought of as being a
masque for WK himself. Whether this is true is irrelevant to a contemporary
reader, for they do give an interesting persona of an urban (& urbane)
denizen of mid-20th Century America. These poems gained renown via
their appearance in the New Yorker magazine, at a time when that
publication actually cared for good poetry. They, also, are often thought to be
expressions of disenchantment with the urban, & a desire to return to the
‘simpler life’. I will show that this is merely 1 interpretation, & the
obvious 1, that stunad critics seem loath to delve deeper into. Here is the 1st
poem:
Robinson
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Which is all of the room--walls, curtains,
The pages in the books are blank,
All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Okay, let’s parse this baby:
Robinson
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
Line 2 ends in a cliché, but that
is ameliorated by the febrile piano player (WK?). We sense an almost silent film
era chase is about to begin- with swelling piano/organ like bombast.
The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
The protagonist enters & we
sense how all-consuming he is, as well the links to nihility.
Which is all of the room--walls, curtains,
The egoism of the speaker makes
the reader wonder if the speaker is not Robinson, himself. This technique is a
very slick 1 employed by WK, for it forces a careful reader to examoine
everything said & not said. Also, it makes the very title read almost as if
a speaker’s cue, meaning the whole poem is, indeed, spoken by Robinson. Guess
what? This very manifest observation has never, to my knowledge, ever been
broached in the criticism of the poem.
The pages in the books are blank,
The same theme continues- who is
the speaker, & why the rhapsodizing (sardonically?)?
All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Now, taken narratively on a simple
level, this invalidates the ‘Robinson as speaker’ thesis. But, that opens up
the query as to why the puffery to make a reader think it might be Robinson?
Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
A
very odd end. Far more surrealistic than most ‘Surreal’ poems. Why? Back to
stanza 1. Robinson may be having a nightmare or nightmarish vision. Could he be
piano playing at his home/apartment? If so, then the lines ‘All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson /Calling. It never rings when he is here.’
are a lie told by the speaker- meaning the speaker may well be Robinson. So why
the subterfuge? I don’t care why. It makes for an excellent literary technique
& makes a seemingly banal bit of bragadoccio all the more interesting. Art
is not about what is said, as much as how it is
said. The art is in the technique- the message is 2ndary. As verboten as that
truth is in this PC era- it’s nonetheless true as it’s ever been. Robinson
is an exemplary example of this truism.
Robinson At Home
Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.
All winter long, it seemed, a darkening
Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street
Conspire and combine toward one community.
These are the rooms of Robinson.
Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though
All the blurred daybreaks of the spring
Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,
Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors
And moonlight of a different kind,
He might awake to hear the news at ten,
Which will be shocking, moderately.
This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire
to die like this had known a lessening.
Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear,
But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller,
Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave,
A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades,
A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué,
A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes—
All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns,
“There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—
This city—nightmare—black—“
He wakes in sweat
To the terrible moonlight and what might be
Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs,
And the long curtains blow into the room.
What a
depiction of stark lonesomeness. Sleep & insomnia, darkness & heat
(presumed because of the open doors & windows), as well the familiar blowing
curtains. Yet that image is not a cliché for everything that leads up to those
curtains suggests those curtains are actual- sometimes 1 must recall that clichés
become clichés because they are based in fact. Not only that, but if we read
the last sentence alone it can also be rad that the blowing curtains also drone
like the wires outside. This synaesthesia of sight & sound is important for
it suggests hypnopompia- which means, again- a Robinson poem has an unreliable
narrator. Forget how this affects what is read in this particular poem, but
plant that in your mind as a psychological technique used in 2 different, but
thematically related, poems- but achieved in different ways.
On to an even
more ‘clinical’ interpretation of the character:
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin: a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.
Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.
Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.
Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.
Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
Note that,
superficially, this poem resembles Robinson alot. But here the speaker
most probably is not Robinson, himself. Why? Because it lacks the conceit of the
1st poem, & the detached tone is not really like that of someone
surveying themselves as much as a documentarian, or scientist, trying to best
record their subject. There’s even a sort of snide condescension that reeks
from lines like ‘This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.’ It has a very
1950s documentary feel- with a hyper-forcedness in the reactions of the
described Robinson, & in the ‘above it all’ tone of the speaker
(narrator?). The central 3rd stanza especially reinforces the notion
that Robinson’s aspects are, indeed, up for study. We are almost forced to
think that what Robinson says may not be what he actually says but what the
narrator contemptuously is putting in to Robinson’s mouth. But why the
hostility? I don’t know, but again- the technique, itself, makes this
seemingly banal character deeply compelling. Why are all the speakers of the
poems interested in this character? That’s the central question- 1 that, to
WK’s credit, goes unanswered. The poem ends in what could have been a real
letdown line, but is saved by the insertion of the simple word ‘usual’. His
heat is not merely sad, but ‘sad and usual’. How utterly relatable-
even if his shallow life is not. The important ‘aspect’ of this poem,
however, is how the poem becomes more compelling because of its use of an
unreliable narrator- in this case the presumed ‘documentarian’ whose
contempt seems to make the ‘real’ Robinson from the other poems a buffoonish
caricature here.
On to the
last poem that makes up this ‘sequence’- or more properly ‘series’. Bear
in mind that these poems are not to be read 1-2-3-4 in any particular order,
they are mealy descriptive motes that filter in & out of the reader’s
light shaft. Their cumulative effect is what is important, not their order.
Here’s the remaining poem:
Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.
From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio
Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.
We were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street.
Under a sign for Natural Bloom Cigars,
While lights clicked softly in the dusk from red to green,
He stopped and gazed into a window
Where a plastic Venus, modeling a truss,
Looked out at Eastbound traffic. (But Robinson,
I knew, was out of town: he summers at a place in Maine,
Sometimes on Fire Island, sometimes the Cape,
Leaves town in June and comes back after Labor Day.)
And yet, I almost called out, “Robinson!”
There was no chance. Just as I passed,
Turning my head to search his face,
His own head turned with mine
And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes
That stopped my blood. His voice
Came at me like an echo in the dark.
“I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.
Kicked all night at a bolted door.
You must have followed me from Astor Place.
An empty paper floats down at the last.
And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs
Unrolled its horror on my face
Until it blocked—” Running in sweat
To reach the docks, I turned back
For a second glance. I had no certainty,
There in the dark, that it was Robinson
Or someone else.
The block was bare. The Venus,
Bathed in blue fluorescent light,
Stared toward the river. As I hurried West,
The lights across the bay were coming on.
The boats moved silently and the low whistles blew.
This is easily the most narratively & psychologically complex of the Robinson poems, so like Robinson, I’ll parse this bit-by-bit:
Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.
A seemingly banal setting- although twilight always carries with it the
poetic connotation that metamorphosis is coming- usually a not so good 1. Also,
right away we get the unreliable narrator- in fact, the narrator admits this in
line 3. Take note.
From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio
Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.
We were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street.
A song becomes a kite, which is a childhood instrument to lift 1’s head
up to dreams or grander schemes. Meanwhile, back on earth there is foreboding.
Under a sign for Natural Bloom Cigars,
While lights clicked softly in the dusk from red to green,
He stopped and gazed into a window
Where a plastic Venus, modeling a truss,
Looked out at Eastbound traffic. (But Robinson,
I knew, was out of town: he summers at a place in Maine,
Sometimes on Fire Island, sometimes the Cape,
Leaves town in June and comes back after Labor Day.)
And yet, I almost called out, “Robinson!”
The faux Robinson pauses, the narrator rationalizes that it cannot be
Robinson, & catches himself before a faux pas.
There was no chance. Just as I passed,
Turning my head to search his face,
His own head turned with mine
And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes
That stopped my blood. His voice
Came at me like an echo in the dark.
Now we get a character that could almost be Blakean. The scene reads
almost like something out of the later Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
The key line is the stanza’s 1st- ‘There was no chance.’ Why
this doom? Paranoia? The unreliability of the narrator. Recall, the poem is in
the past tense, so the narrator obviously made it through the episode to tell us
of it. The fear is revealed:
“I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.
Kicked all night at a bolted door.
You must have followed me from Astor Place.
An empty paper floats down at the last.
Obviously the non-Robinson is a wacko, if not psychotic. No wonder the
speaker’s fear.
And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs
Unrolled its horror on my face
Until it blocked—” Running in sweat
To reach the docks, I turned back
For a second glance. I had no certainty,
There in the dark, that it was Robinson
Or someone else.
The block was bare. The Venus,
Bathed in blue fluorescent light,
Stared toward the river. As I hurried West,
The lights across the bay were coming on.
The boats moved silently and the low whistles blew.
The italicized section is nonsensical, but horrific. Yet, the
unreliability of the narrator adds to the confusion. Most critics assume the
faux Robinson has taken off after the speaker. Yet we do not know if anyone has
taken after the speaker- it could just be his imagination. We, again, are told
by the speaker of his unreliability. We then have a coming down as the speaker
finds he is alone. Has he ever really had company? was the faux Robinson ever
really there? & why the need for the speaker to either misconstrue a
stranger as Robinson, or even concoct such a weird character. This indeterminacy
is key to the poem as a mood piece, & the speaker’s own admitted
unreliability only adds to the overall poem’s power & horror. What is more
terrifying than uncertainty (1’s own), especially at night?
The question that all 4 poems presents is this- is the speaker in all 4
the same person? If so, why this monomania with a figure that is so banal? Why
the ridicule, dismissal, allure? & if, as Robinson suggests, the
speaker in that poem is Robinson, is he the speaker in the other 3 poems? Or,
perhaps, is Robinson the same Robinson in all the poems? Personally, I don’t
think so on either count- but perhaps someone more familiar with mid-20th
Century America or WK, himself, might be able to find links to support this
notion. Still, even in these most celebrated poems of WK most critics have been
satisfied to pat summations & little backhanded compliments at best. As in
the previous poems, where I disproved the notions that WK was (among other
things) excessively morbid, lacking subtlety & emotional uplift, inept at
character development, & philosophically shallow (or, worse, sterile), the
notion that WK was technically timid, when compared to the Confessionalists
& Languagists that took over after his death, is pure bunkum. The 4 Robinson
poems show 4 wholly different ways to evoke the same technique (a technique’s
technique)- an unreliable narrator- for the purpose of reinvigorating the banal-
in this case the poetic portrait. This kind of innovation only occurs in the
best of poetic minds, & is a signal that greatness is probably an apt
modifier for the work & its creator. I’ve always been loath to label WK as
a great poet, but a close examination of his oeuvre supports that claim. In this
essay alone he has more poems that are great (for different reasons) than the
poet he’s almost always cast as being a pale imitation of- T.S. Eliot. TSE has
5 or 6 great poems- the important aspect of difference is that they were
influential because TSE had the luxury of being in the proverbial ‘right place
at the right time’ whilst WK did not. Also TSE was a relentless ham &
self-promoter, WK was a recluse who cut himself off from life in his later
years, just as his poetic gift took to wing. Another nail in WK’s corpus’s
tumulus was the fact that he was generally despised by the then-dominant New
Critics, who -despite being of similar age & backgrounds in the main- found
WK’s work to be objectionable on the grounds of its lack of ‘morality’ or
its immanent darkness. WK is a prime example of someone whose vision suffered
from the bias of his peers.
As this new century continues to unfold I hope I am only the 1st
critic of WK’s work who attempts to negate the slights, ignorance, &
misreadings of my predecessors. If not, poor WK may have to wait a few centuries
for some 23rd century poetic historian to pull an Edward Taylor on
his unsuspecting readership, who will doubtlessly shake their heads over the
ignorance of their forebears. I just want to beg them to put an asterisk next to
my name- as an enlightened dissenter to that mass. Thank you.
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