At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

The opening juxtaposition of opposites ("summer's heat, the winter's cold") suggests that Kees was familiar with surrealist poetry and art by the late 1940's. In a letter dated June 1943, Kees mentions that the recent issue of View magazine has "eight poems by e.e. cummings."? Edited by Charles Henri Ford and published in New York, View was a lively journal of the arts. In contrast to other little magazines of the period, the primary focus of View, both in literature and art, was surrealism. It had covers by Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, and included reproductions of paintings by Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, and Pavel Tchelitchev, and other Europeans who moved to America during the War.

The particular issue of View Kees mentions is No. 2: June ig43.8 The cover was by the American artist, Man Ray, and, in addition to cummings's contribution, it contained a translation of an essay, "Magic: The Flesh and Blood of Poetry," by the French surrealist poet, Benjamin Peret; a review of Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens by Harold Rosenberg, who later became an influential art critic and who coined the term, "action painting"; and the first publication of poems by the precocious American surrealist poet, Philip Lamantia.

Kees also published his poem, "The Furies," in The Tiger's Eye, another little magazine that focused on literature and art. Like View, the editorial policy of The Tiger's Eye was favorably disposed to surrealism and members of the Abstract Expressionist generation; it reproduced work by Louise Bourgeois and William Baziotes, among others, and was one of the first American magazines to publish the writings of Antonin Artaud.

Hans Hofmann, who asked Kees to write the poem, was a highly influential artist and teacher, whose students included Larry Rivers, Paul Resika, Paul Georges, and Jane Freilicher. River and Freilicher became close friends of Frank O'Hara. In his poem, Kees has utilized his awareness of Hofmann's theory of push-pull to create a poem where the reader's attention is constantly being shifted from image to image, from "summer's heat" to "winter's cold." Neither Hofmann's paintings nor this particular poem of Kees's make an attempt at realism. Rather, it is "the look of harbors and the trees" that the artist traces; it is this "shared world" that he enlarges and enriches.

Throughout the poem, Kees evokes the different kinds of weather that he and Hofmann have experienced while living and working in Provincetown during the summer. It's out of this matrix that the poem is created. And yet, while the poem (and presumably also the painting) owes something to the natural world, it doesn't become a picturesque scene. Kees's discontinuous images don't add up to either an imagist postcard or a story. There are abrupt shifts in visual detail, which the poet underscores with line breaks, such as the one that takes place between "burning scrutiny" and "Like fog-lamps on a rotten night."

Kees's metaphor, "Like fog-lamps on a rotten night," serves a dual function; it returns our attention to "winter's cold, the look of harbors and the trees," as well as inverts our expectation. There is something jarring in the parallel Kees establishes between the pairing of "shared world" and "burning scrutiny" with a "rotten night" examined by a "fog-lamp." The causal world is no longer central to painting or to writing. "The scraps/Of living shift and change. Because of you," Kees writes in the following lines, again raising the reader's expectations, as well as using a conditional statement to connect what precedes it with what follows. "Because of you/The light bums sharper in how many rooms." Kees believes the artist is able to both shape and synthesize the light of the world and of seeing (fog lamp, burning scrutiny) into a "new identity." What the artist transforms, and what Kees parallels in the poem, is light. The poem moves from "summer's heat" to "winter's cold" to "burning scrutiny" to "fog-lamp" to "light" to "a rainbow" which possesses animistic properties; it sleeps and wakes.