At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Yau, John

A Column

I.

WELDON KEES (1914-1955) WAS NEARLY a teenager living in Nebraska when Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) was born in Massachusetts. They both moved to Manhattan, and worked in the art world. Kees, however, ended up hating its winters and moved to California, while O'Hara, whose first book was A City Winter, and Other Poems (Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1952), is a central figure in the "New York School" of poets. New York was O'Hara's city more than any other postwar poet. Who else could so offhandedly transform the city skyline into a musical:

Although separated by more than a decade, and associated with different literary tendencies, Kees and O'Hara loved the movies, modern art, and all kinds of music. They found popular culture exciting and vivacious, and they hated pretense. Both died young.

Kees was forty-one when he left his car on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. His body was never found; and he was never heard from again. Because he vanished into thin air, rumors and sightings persisted for years, but nothing concrete was ever proven. Adrian Wilson had just published Kees's third and last book of poems, Poems 19471954 (1954) in San Francisco. But the bulk of his writing, including poems, plays, short stories, a novel, and numerous reviews of art, music, and literature remained either uncollected or unpublished the day he disappeared. It was July 18,1955, and The New Republic had just printed his review, "How to be Happy: Installment 1053."

Kees's suicide is consistent with his poetry. He had deep friendships, but, as his poems make dear, he always felt utterly alone. In his isolation, he found neither solace nor redemption. He was like a house with only three walls, constantly battered by the weather of his interior and exterior circumstances. Death became the only release from his otherwise intolerable situation. In this regard, Kees followed Hart Crane (1899-1932), and, in turn, was followed by Lew Welch (1926-1971). Crane jumped off the bow of the Orizaba, and Welch walked into the woods one day, disappearing without a trace. Life haunted these three men, and art couldn't save them. For different reasons, they didn't want their bodies to be found.

A little more than a decade after Kees vanished, Frank O'Hara was struck by a beach buggy on Fire Island. He died the following evening, on July 25, 1966, at the age of forty. A prolific poet who had published a few slim volumes during his lifetime, his posthumously published Collected Poems contains over five hundred poems, including a significant number of long poems. There are three selections of his criticism as well as a biography, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara by Brad Gooch (1993). By contrast, Kees's Collected Poems contains a little more than one hundred poems, almost all of them less than fifty lines. Both men wrote many letters, and carried on intense correspondences, but only Kees's have been published: Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 3935-1955 (Edited, and with Commentary, by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press, 1986). There is a biography, Vanished Act: The Life & Art of Weldon Kees by James Reidel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2003). A selection of Kees's critical writings is collected in Reviews and Essays: 1936-3955 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). There is a CD, Holiday Rag, which has seventeen songs by Kees, who plays the piano accompanied by his friend, Bob Helm, on clarinet and washboard (Berkeley: Badger Press/Bay Records, 1998). Finally, there are also Kees's abstract paintings and drawings, done in the early years of Abstract Expressionism. There is however no Catalogue Raisonne or monograph documenting his artwork. While it is clear that Kees was accomplished in many different art forms, including poetry, fiction, music, and painting, I don't think it was just evidence of his restless genius. I also think that none of these forms gave him the solace he needed, and that he felt that each had failed him in some profound way. Suicide is narcissistic.

Kees became a cult figure after he died; O'Hara was a cult figure during his lifetime. After the publication of his Collected Poems, O'Hara was reevaluated by academia and became the subject of a full-length biography. In death, the literary establishment accepted him, whereas in life he was routinely dismissed as a cult poet writing for a small, jaded audience.1 Part of this dismissal was predicated on the fact that O'Hara was insouciant, campy and openly gay.

Though Kees and O'Hara had much in common, I have found no evidence that the two men ever met. It is likely that O'Hara read Kees's poetry, but he never commented upon it publicly.2 And he wrote poems in praise of a number of poets of the previous generation, such as David Schubert and John Wheelwright, that few of his literary contemporaries read. Although from different generations, and for somewhat different reasons, they shared a strong dislike for the East Coast literary establishment, particularly as it revolved around Robert Lowell.3 They had much larger interests and neither was a careerist or an academic.