At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

They were both passionate about popular culture and their love for music extended across racial lines. Kees played jazz piano, wrote lyrics, composed tunes, and wrote an appreciation of Fats Waller for Time in 1943, when Waller was hardly fashionable. O'Hara studied classical music and played the piano. He wrote a moving elegy for the jazz singer Billie Holliday, "The Day Lady Died," as well as many poems in praise of Rachmaninoff. Kees was anti-heroic, while O'Hara was mockheroic. They could be darkly sardonic, though the difference between O'Hara's self-mockery and what Dana Gioia calls Kees's "cosmic pessimism" is finally telling.

As his early poem, "For My Daughter," makes evident, Kees couldn't find redemption in either poetry or life:

A fourteen-line poem that ends in a rhymed couplet, Kees's sonnet overturns one's expectations of what constitutes a sonnet. The poem begins-the reader innocently thinks-with a father looking at his young daughter and imagining her future; it is a traditional literary subject. However, what Kees's poem becomes is a list of the banal horrors that will befall his daughter ("Coldest of winds have blown this hair . . ."). "Certain war," Kees writes, convinced that doom awaits mankind. By this time, the reader has been pulled into a vision of utter hopelessness. The loss of innocence is not only inevitable, but it is also both traumatic and devastating.

As Kees methodically adds each grim speculation to the poem, he squeezes out any belief we might have about the goodness of the future until nothing but his grotesque imagining is left for us to ponder. A claustrophobic, all-encompassing atmosphere of utter darkness takes over the poem. Imagination, we learn at the end of the poem, not only leads the poet downward, but it also keeps him isolated from others. By the twelfth line ("Bride of a syphilitic or a fool,") Kees's imagination has reached a cul-de-sac, which leaves the reader wondering what more will befall the hapless young daughter. Kees has reached a point in his logic where he is bordering on parody, but refuses to enter that realm. Instead, the poet admits, "These speculations sour in the sun." At this point the reader thinks that the poem might begin to consider a better future. Instead, Kees concludes: "I have no daughter. I desire none." Instead of celebrating either fatherhood or the future, the poet betrays all our expectations with these two short, insistently declarative sentences. Beneath this betrayal, the reader senses that the poet is cut off from all other human beings, as well as from any hope that the future will be better.

Kees turns the sonnet's concluding statement into both a revelation and a rejection of a traditional literary subject. What comfort, his poem asks us, did we expect to find when reading this work? Even while the reader believes that the poem is about a father's inability to protect his daughter from the vagaries of life, there is still a sense that the poet is going to make a disclosure. But Kees's disclosure jars us; it's disquieting not only because of what it says but also because of its chilling, lifedenying glee.