At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

Written a few months after Kees wrote his essay on Robert Motherwell, "A Salvo for Hans Hofmann" reveals how much he had absorbed from his friendship with various Abstract-Expressionists. In contrast to his earlier poems, Kees has written a non-narrative poem in which details are no longer paraded by, but instead are transformed from stanza to stanza, and from line to line. Kees's poem articulates a vision of constant metamorphosis. In its combination of disparate images, "A Salvo for Hans Hofmann" owes a debt to surrealism. At the same time, echoing the Abstract Expressionists' interest in non-hierarchical, all-over composition, each image in Kees's poem is of equal importance. Because "A Salvo for Hans Hofmann" is one of the few poems Kees wrote in response to an Abstract-Expressionist painting,9 one wonders why the poet didn't write more poems in this vein. Certainly, he was in the thick of things. But like much else he did in his short life, I think that the writing didn't satisfy some deep need in him. In this case, the subject (Hofmann's paintings) didn't allow him to register his pessimism.

Frank O'Hara wrote "Joseph Cornell" in 1955; it is shaped like two boxes, one above the other, in a deliberate allusion to Cornell's shadow boxes.

Into a sweeping meticulously

detailed disaster the violet

light pours. It's not a sky,

it's a room. And in the open

field a glass of absinthe is

fluttering its song of India.

Prairie winds circle mosques.

You are always a little too

young to understand. He is

bored with his sense of the

past, the artist. Out of the

prescient rock in his heart

he has spread a land without

flowers of near distances.

The first "box" is O'Hara's verbal equivalent of a Cornell box. The light doesn't come from the sky (the outside, natural world) but from the room itself. The metaphysical world it evokes is both American and exotic: "Prairie winds circle mosques." In contrast to Kees's "A Salvo for Hans Hofmann," O'Hara's lines are more self-sufficient, more surprising. At the same time, like Kees, O'Hara constantly shifts the focus, like someone moving between a telescope and a magnifying glass. "It's not a sky,/It's a room. And in the open/field a glass of absinthe is/fluttering its song of India." This shifting of perspective is O'Hara's equivalent to Cornell s boxes, which not only articulated an entire world, but also often contained astronomical maps and other references to a world that exists on the edge of the visible.

In the second box, O'Hara abruptly changes the focus from the box to the viewer. We, it seems, are "always a little too/young to understand" that an artist gets bored with the past, and must create new forms. O'Hara's emphasis on the new brings to mind Kees's "new identity." Whereas O'Hara believes the artist possesses the power to create new forms out of a barren world ("the land without/ flowers of near distance"), Kees didn't always believe one could transform the barrenness (or what Eliot called the "Wasteland") into art. For Kees, the world was bleak and irredeemable. In this regard, "A Salvo for Hans Hofmann" is one of the exceptions in Kees's deeply pessimistic oeuvre. And while the rainbow can be understood as a covenant made between the artist and nature, it also seems like a symbol; it is a literary intrusion in an otherwise non-literary poem. O'Hara had more faith in the transformative power of love and in art. As in his earlier poem, "Autobiographia Literaria," O'Hara believes that art makes redemption possible, and that in making art or writing poetry the individual finds temporary solace.