At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

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

O'Hara, however, is more exuberant and wild than Kees in his use of verbs. One could say that Kees, who worked on newsreels, is employing a documentary visual style, while O'Hara is using a disorienting, animating style.

The poet (and the reader) see the porchlight coming on, see a raked pile of dead leaves, hear (and see) the wicker swing, hear the phonograph; an atmosphere of order and loneliness permeates Kees's few telling images. Without leaving the present we (the poet and reader) are thrust into the past. Within this context, the "porchlight" becomes a sign of safety and security; it is his home and we suspect it is not enough. From the porchlight that opens the poem literally and figuratively, the poet shifts in the second stanza to "an orange moon," and then just as abruptly Kees declares "I see the lives/Of neighbors, mapped and marred ..." His neighbors are doomed to suffer awful fates: one dies insane, the other has his throat cut or he has cut his own throat. There is no escape; the future is fatal.

Kees is returning to a subject he explored in "For My Daughter," which is about a parent's inability to protect his child from the future and mortality. Only this time, one might say that he is the unprotected child. The third stanza begins: "I did not know them then." It is only later, after disasters have befallen all his neighbors, whom Kees never mentions by name, that he learns something about them. He also recognizes something about himself and his future.

In his use of discontinous, self-contained images, and in his repetition of the first line as the last line, Kees has absorbed lessons not only from cinema, but also from the Abstract-Expressionists, particularly their use of shifting and/or multiple perspectives. The poem doesn't unfold according to linear time. Rather, Kees has collapsed present and past together, in effect creating a time warp where the past keeps repeating itself in the present, and the "porchlight" comes on again and again; and each time it does so, it offers less and less hope because, in real time, he is further and further away from that moment.

If the typical autobiographical poem of the 19505 utilizes a circular structure of present-past-return to the present with renewed insight, as Marjorie Perloff suggests,11 Kees reveals no affinity for this structure in the 19403, nearly a decade before O'Hara writes his first memorable poems. In "1926," the "I" only now understands something about this past world, particularly his neighbors, which it didn't before: "I did not know them then." The present "I" sees beyond the surfaces the past "I" saw, and which are now surfacing in the poet's consciousness. And yet, it is the past ("the porchlight") that dominates. Memory and pessimism haunt Kees and he seems not to be able to find his way out of the labyrinth they construct around him.

The "I" in Kees's poem observes fragments of the world in the first stanza. In the second stanza, the observation goes from the outside world of dead leaves and the moon to the interiors of the houses lining his neighborhood ("I see the lives/ Of neighbors, mapped and marred . . ."). But this observation is made by Kees the poet, and not the adolescent boy in the poem walking home one night after the movies. The adolescent boy is still enthralled by the surface of movies, by images, while the adult "I" is painfully aware of the raw substance of people's lives. The "I" of the poem is fragmented; it lives in different time periods, past and present, without being able to reconcile them.