At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

His circular forms are not oranges or abstractions of oranges, heads or abstractions of heads; his rectangles, blots, blurs and brushstrokes assert nothing but their own existence, their own identity and individuality. They are objects from their own world, and that world is the world of paint. Motherwell's insistence upon this concentration and definition is as fierce as Celine's insistence of hell on earth or the insistence of the air on its own transparency. (Letters, 1935-1955, p. 109)

In light of his apparent suicide, Kees's linking of Motherwell's "circular forms" with "Celine's insistence of hell on earth" tells us more about the poet than the artist. But it should also be noted that he understands that paint can be paint, and thus is open to the idea of words being words.

About Motherwell's series of paintings, "Elegy to the Spanish Republic," O'Hara writes:

And always there is an absolute belief in the reality of the schema, executed with such force that individual paintings of the series have been variously interpreted as male verticals and female ovoids, as bulls' tails and testicles hung side by side on the wall of the arena after the fight, and as purist formal juxtapositions of rectangular and curvilinear forms. As with the great recent painting Africa, the possibility of the schema's arousing such a broad range of associations, depending on the emotional vocabulary of the viewer, is a sign of its power to communicate in a truly abstract way, while never losing its identity as a pictorial statement. (Robert Motherwell, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965, p. 19)

Whether O'Hara had Kees's review in mind when he wrote his essay is not the issue. Clearly, both poets were able to look at painting in a non-literary way. They didn't need narrative or recognizable images to be convinced of its seriousness. That they both understood that in America in the late i94o's, beginning with the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock, painting could successfully shed all of these historical aspects and be about paint, is central to an understanding of their poetry. For while Kees and O'Hara were attracted to literary forms, villanelles and sestinas in Kees's case, and odes and elegies in O'Hara's, they also wrote poetry that was open and non-literary. The difference is that O'Hara did it in a sustained and innovative way, and Kees did not.

Like other poets of their respective generations, Kees and O'Hara began their careers exploring various literary forms, but in sharp contrast to many of their peers, they became deeply engaged by modernist painting. Their involvement made them realize that the sources of poetry extended beyond literary tradition to include seemingly banal things and ordinary events of daily life. In their attempt to bring American speech into poetry, Kees and O'Hara not only implicitly acknowledge the influence of William Carlos Williams, but they also became interested in an open-ended poem.

Kees and O'Hara derived their subjects from popular culture, and from the world they inhabited. They wrote about an urban landscape that was defined as much by the media (cheap novels, movies, and art) as by its denizens. Kees's first book, The Last Man, for example, contains the poem, "The Scene of the Crime," which derives its subject from the tabloids. Again in contrast to their contemporaries, Kees and O'Hara were to varying degrees able to shed the linear narrative governing a poem. On November 27, 1948, Kees wrote in a letter to Norris Getty: "Hofmann asked me to write a poem for the catalog of his Paris show."6 "A Salvo for Bans Hofmann," the largely unrhymed poem that Kees wrote, marks a change in his approach to poetry. In contrast to the airtight argument of "For My Daughter," the images function in a less direct, more abstract way.