At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

2. Furioso, IV.1 (Winter 1949), a little magazine published in Minnesota, contained poems by John Ashbery and Weldon Kees.

3. Weldon Kees and the Midcentuiy Generation: Letters, 1935-1955, edited, and with Commentary, by Robert E. Knoll (University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1986), p. 125.

Edward Lucie-Smith, "An Interview with Frank O'Hara" in Standing Still and Walking in New York, Editor: Donald Alien (Grey Fox Press, San Francisco. 1975:1983) pp. 3-26. Note: The interview was conducted in October 1965.

4. An erstwhile "whole surface" man, Clem

Plucked himself off at the stem,

And sent out the word

To the avant-garde herd:

"All-over: is over;

It's finished; moreover,

DeKooning does not

In a word, 'hit the spot.'

And that's the new gospel, pro tern."

Written in December, 1951, the limerick appears in Weldon Kees and the Midcentuiy Generation: Letters, 1935-1955, Edited, and with a Commentary, by Robert E. Knoll (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1986), pp. 162-163. Kees is poking fun at Greenberg, who once championed "allover" painting, but was predicting that important painting would no longer be "all-over" but would be "focal" or have a center of attention.

5. Published after his death, In Memory of My Feelings, A Selection of Poems by Frank O'Hara, Edited by Bill Berkson (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967) contained' "original decorations" by thirty artists, a Preface by Rene d'Harnoncourt and an Afterword by Bill Berkson. Among the artists contributing work were Norman Bluhm, Willem de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, and Larry Rivers.

6. Robert E. Knoll, Edited, and with Commentary, by, Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters 19351955, (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1986) p. 117. The reference is to Hans Hofmann (18801966), an influential teacher and painter, whom Kees met in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

7. Ibid., p. 82.

8. Charles Henri Ford, Edited by, with a Foreword by Paul Bowles, Compiled by Catrina Nieman and Paul Nathan, Introduction by Catrina Nieman, View. Parade of the Avant-Carde 1940-1947 (Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, 1991), pp. 274-275 (see Index to View: 1940-1947, Compiled by Judith Young Malin, pp. 271-282).

9. Kees dedicated his poem "Turtle" to his friend William Baziotes. See Collected Poems, p. 150.

10. The last line of the poem "January," which was published in Poems 1947-1948. See CP, p. 150.

11. Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters (George Braziller, New York, 1977), p. 135.

12. Letters, 1935-1955, p. 64.

13. Perloff, p. 69.