At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

The pacing is cinematic; the poet doesn't allow any detail to become the focus of the reader's attention. Like a movie by the Russians Vertov or Eisenstein, the poem is a montage of images, which shifts without pause from "coldest of winds" to "seaweed snarled" to "night's slow poison." Parading the images by at a stately but relentless pace, Kees uses what could be called a jump-cut to evoke the unalterable course of his imagination. The accumulation of details transforms the daughter from "the innocence of morning flesh" to "the cruel/ Bride of a syphilitic or a fool..."

Although conventional in its use of rhyme, and relaxed in its tone, the poem is unconventional in its challenge of the reader's notions of redemption and hope. It's the very quietness of the voice animating the poem that one finds so disturbing. Kees isn't trying to convince the reader that the world is bleak; he does nothing to hector us into agreeing with him. There are neither the bold, expansive declarations one finds in Ginsberg's "Howl" or the self-lacerating, self-pitying disclosures one finds in Lowell's Life Studies, both of which Kees's first book of poetry preceded by more than a decade. Rather, by using a subject the reader is inclined to associate with the themes of transcendence and redemption, Kees inverts all expectations.

If Kees's poem suggests how cut offhe was from both hope and others, O'Hara's early poem, "Autobiographia Literaria," also evokes a vision of isolation. However, O'Hara's seclusion is neither as total nor as final as Kees's. For O'Hara, there is redemption in poetry itself, even if it is only temporary.

When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out "I am

an orphan."

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

(Collected Poems, p. 11)

O'Hara has divided the poem into four unrhymed quatrains, with each of first three consisting of one self-contained sentence. O'Hara uses the line breaks to break up the sinuous fluidity of each sentence, shifting it from one direction to another. Through his use of overstatement ("I hated dolls") and exaggeration ("birds/flew away"), O'Hara details a poignant, yet self-mocking vision of a lonely childhood.

O'Hara uses irony to confront a familiar stereotype of homosexuality, particularly in the 19505: "I hated dolls." His dismissal calls into question our presumption of how a young boy is supposed to behave. If we expect young boys to hate dolls and other toys associated with being a girl, what does it mean when a male poet finds it necessary to make what should be an obvious statement? Like Kees, O'Hara expects no sympathy from the reader. Why should he? when he is "the / center of all beauty!/writing these poems!"

Beyond their rejection of the reader's sympathy, the other affinity that O'Hara shares with Kees is his ability to invert the reader's expectations. In the poem's third stanza, O'Hara has by this time set the stage for the poet as a child who played by himself in the corner of a schoolyard, and been ostracized by his schoolmates and by animals. The third stanza opens with someone looking for the poet, who, instead of welcoming human contact, hides behind a tree and cries out: "I am/an orphan." By exaggerating his feelings of isolation, O'Hara uses the surrealist technique of an extreme and disjunctive comparison to deflect any sympathy we might have for his isolation. Instead, he announces his total social isolation. The line break interrupts the poet's declaration, as well as reinforces the jolt we get when we realize the poet is making a statement of self-sufficiency. O'Hara is not only mocking himself, but he is also mocking the reader.