 Poetry: December 23, 2009 Issue [#3457] |
  Poetry
This week: Weldon Kees Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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This is poetry from the minds and the hearts of poets on Writing.Com. The poems I am going to be exposing throughout this newsletter are ones that I have found to be, very visual, mood setting and uniquely done. Stormy Lady
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Late Evening Song
by Weldon Kees
For a while
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
Across the warm room
Shared in candlelight,
This look beyond shame,
Possible now, at night,
Goes out to yours.
Hidden by day
And shaped by fires
Grown dead, gone gray,
That burned in other rooms I knew
Too long ago to mark,
It forms again. I look at you
Across those fires and the dark.
On February 24, 1914, John Kees and his wife Sarah welcomed Weldon Kees into their family. The Kees family lived in Beatrice, Nebraska where John Kees owned a hardware store. Even as a young child Kees was extremely interested in the arts, he enjoyed music, art and writing. Kees went to several colleges before finally receiving his B.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1935. Kees first writings were published in several different magazines while he was in college.
After graduation Kees started working for the Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, Nebraska. While working in Nebraska Kees continued publishing his short stories in different magazines. In 1936 he left his job to become a librarian in Denver, Colorado. At the age of 23 Kees met Ann Swan. The two were married in October 1937. Kees finished his novel Fall Quarter in 1941, but it wasn't published until 1990. In 1943 Kees moved his family to New York City.
In New York City, Kees wrote for Time magazine and published reviews in The Nation and The New Republic. It was that same year he published his first collection of poems The Last Man followed by The Fall of Magicians in 1947. During this time Kees began painting. His paintings were apart of his one-man show that travelled to several galleries, such as the Peridot Gallery. In 1951 Kees moved to San Francisco, California. It was there that Kees started doing film reviews for the radio and wrote for a theatre review, Poets Follies. He also started writing screen plays. In the mid 1950's depression started to take control of Kees's life. Sarah, Kees wife became an alcoholic and the two divorced in 1954. His finally book Poems 1947-1954 was published in 1954.
On July 18, 1955, Kees car was found abandoned by the Golden Gate Bridge. There were many rumors that circled once his car was found, one that he went to Mexico another that he wanted to kill himself. With no real evidence his disappearance was treated as a suicide. In 1960 Kees's Collected Poems were first published, it has since been republished twice. His collection of fiction, Ceremony and Other Stories was published in 1983. Most of his other writings were published in Reviews and Essays, 1936-1955 in 1988.
A Musician's Wife
by Weldon Kees
Between the visits to the shock ward
The doctors used to let you play
On the old upright Baldwin
Donated by a former patient
Who is said to be quite stable now.
And all day long you played Chopin,
Badly and hauntingly, when you weren't
Screaming on the porch that looked
Like an enormous birdcage. Or sat
In your room and stared out at the sky.
You never looked at me at all.
I used to walk down to where the bus stopped
Over the hill where the eucalyptus trees
Moved in the fog, and stared down
At the lights coming on, in the white rooms.
And always, when I came back to my sister's
I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now.
Now, sometimes I wake in the night
And hear the sound of dead leaves
against the shutters. And then a distant
Music starts, a music out of an abyss,
And it is dawn before I sleep again.
Year's End
by Weldon Kees
The state cracked where they left your breath
No longer instrument. Along the shore
The sand ripped up, and the newer blood
Streaked like a vein to every monument.
The empty smoke that drifted near the guns
Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud
Had the smell of a hundred burned-out suns.
The ceiling of your sky went dark.
A year ago today they cracked your bones.
So rot in a closet in the ground
For the bad trumpets and the capitol's
Long seasonable grief. Rot for its guests,
Alive, that step away from death. Yet you,
A year cold, come more living to this room
Than these intruders, vertical and warm.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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