At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

III.

Kees's voice is quiet and intimate; he is full of despair but he refuses to complain. Rather, he makes chilling observations: "Sleep is too short a death."10 For him, the movies provide an ironic contrast to life; they represent an unattainable fairy-tale world. Thus, in one of his late poems, "1926," Kees writes:

The porchlight coming on again,

Early November, the dead leaves

Raked in piles, the wicker swing

Creaking. Across the lots

A phonograph is playingJo-Do.

An orange moon. I see the lives

Of neighbors, mapped and marred

Like all the wars ahead, and R.

Insane, B. with his throat cut,

Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I didn't know them then.

My airedale scratches at the door.

And I am back from seeing Milton Sills

And Doris Kenyon. Twelve years old.

The porchlight coming on again.

(CP, p. 104)

The poem collapses present and past, knowledge and innocence. Memory, like the cycle of time the poem evokes (seasons, night, and moon), is inescapable; it can displace the individual, make him feel intensely isolated. In "1926," the past rises to the surface of the poet's consciousness in the form of distinct images. Out of these images emerges a memory; the poet is twelve and coming home from a movie starring "Milton Sills and Doris Kenyon."

Kees tells nothing more about either the film or the stars; he presumes that the reader knows who they are. And yet Sills and Kenyon are figures from the world of Hollywood, not ones found in literature or myth. They were well-known silent film stars who were married and who often starred in adventure romances together. In this regard, they are emblematic of the ideal in which art and life are synonymous. But, while they were famous in their time, Sills and Kenyon are barely remembered now. However, to a twelve year old on the brink of puberty, this dashing young couple is as powerful as the gods, which is the point Kees makes. And these gods, like all the others Kees alludes to in his poems, ultimately fail to deliver what they promise. For Kees, art and life never merge and become one.

Beginning with "The porchlight coming on again," Kees describes a scene in which someone (we later learn it is a twelve year old boy) sees and hears rather banal aspects of the world around him with a heightened consciousness. In their cinematic self-sufficiency, the images evoke the loneliness and vulnerability of someone walking through a deserted neighborhood at night; everything is ominous. The poet isn't remembering the past so much as being invaded by it. The poem registers the present tense of memory.

The poem moves swiftly from image to image, like a movie camera. Porchlight, leaves, wicker swing-everything is either changing, still, or moving. The world is in flux, which suggests that any sense of order one might have is not to be trusted. The discontinuous, cinematic fragments are simultaneously complete and incomplete. The steady tumble of images parallels the poet's consciousness; the memories are surfacing one after another, and he is unable to stop and contemplate them. At no point does his attention linger; he is, after all, walking home late at night. It should be noted here that Kees's discontinuities and shifting angles of perspective anticipates O'Hara, particularly in poems such as "On the Way to the San Remo," which begins: