At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

The third stanza brings us back to the past, where the adolescent boy has finished walking home: "My airedale scratches at the door/And I am back from seeing Milton Sills/And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old." But this memory of innocence is now thoroughly tainted by what Kees has learned about his neighbors in the intervening years. He draws no sustenance from it, no joy. The porchlight that illuminated his home, like a lighthouse beacon, has become remote, more so now that the poet is remembering it. He will in effect never be able to reach it; he will only be able to see it coming on again and again. And with that memory comes the knowledge of what happened to his neighbors.

As both the first and last line in the poem, "the porchlight coming on again" underscores the impossibility of reaching sanctuary; becoming an adult means to be exiled from home. Kees's memories reify a feeling, which is part of his consciousness. Suffusing through the poem is an air of cosmic fatalism, which is suggested most intensely in the phrase, "mapped and marred." His neighbors' future and by implication his own are doomed from the start. The terse precision of Kees's language recalls the clipped sentences of Raymond Chandler, whose novels he liked very much.12 A short story writer before he became a poet, Kees had a novelist's eye for telling details.

While Kees's use of a fragmented, observant "I," his reference to minor Hollywood stars, and the cinematic verité of his images, can be said to have prefigured O'Hara's poetry, one must also take into account the impact the Abstract-Expressionists had on both these poets. Both Kees and O'Hara were members of a milieu in which artists were feverishly reassessing subject matter. Kees and O'Hara were early, sympathetic witnesses who on their own had embraced popular culture, particularly as it was manifested in the movies and in jazz. They were iconoclasts who thought the notion of high culture was suspect.

In terms of historical events, the difference is that Kees was part of the art scene near the beginning, when artists were starting to strip away narrative, the picturesque, and subject matter. He participated in their move towards abstraction, but he didn't ever get comfortably beyond the literary. O'Hara entered the scene a few years later, when the art scene had started to change. Modern art was still frowned upon by many, but its advocates now included such institutions as the prestigious Museum of Modem Art, where O'Hara would work as a curator. He was not only sympathetic to older artists, such as de Kooning and Franz Kline, but also to younger artists, such as Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher, both of whom worked in a figurative mode, and to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were the originators of Pop art.

The other difference is that O'Hara is far more radical in his writing than Kees. Early on, O'Hara found inspiration in Whitman, whereas Kees seems to have come to him rather late in his short career, particularly in his long (for him) poem, "Travels In North America" which was written after Kees and his wife, Ann, drove from New York City to California in the fall of 1950. However, Kees never wrote anything as long or as wild as O'Hara's "Second Avenue," which was written in 1953.13 Kees's catalogue of places and people does not have the same range as one finds in even the most documentary passages of "second Avenue."