Weldon Kees, the great poet – one of the “minors” who Ashbery made, by a magisterially shy stroke, his predecessors – was an art critic for the Nation, succeeding the ever surly Clement Greenburg. He did his bit, and then left NYC, like many an other, in 1950. The New York City scene, he wrote, was trauma-torn, soot-ridden and neurosis-nagged.” To my mind, this is high praise – my retired boho heart leaks nostalgic gravy over those words! – but Kees, apparently, could only take so much of the atmosphere Gaddis chronicles in The Recognitions. Before the tribe of Kerouacs descended on San Francisco, Kees planted himself there. James Reidel, the Kees biographer (the biography had the spoilers title, Vanished Act) had the fun idea of tracing the poet’s peripeteia, which ended, as is well known, either in a leap from the Golden Gate bridge or a lifelong fugue to Mexico – depending on who you believe.
Here’s a fun fact for those who like the snake-eyes thrown up by the American dice: Weldon Kees played the piano and helped produce a cabaret-vaudeville-burlesque called "The Poets Follies," along with, among others, a guy named Lawrence Ferling, who poeticized his name to Ferlinghetti. They rented space at 1725 Washington Street in a “beautiful Maybeck building” and advertised for actors and actresses, attracting a Sausalito housewife who’d been bitten by the showbiz bug. Her name: Phyllis Diller. In my youth, Phyllis Diller was a complete cornball act on late night TV, a puzzle to me – why did adults find her funny? But life likes its little jokes, and Weldon Kees was instrumental in making that Sausalito housewife’s dream come true.
The American cross-grain. I love it.
One of the gags of the cabaret was a reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – or on some tellings, one of the Four Quartets – by a stripper named Lyn Ayers. Ha ha, the boys all laughed. This was long before it was recognized that strippers are, on the whole, more erudite than your average Silicon Valley tech bro-gul. In any case, Kees and Lyn Ayers were photographed together for the poster advertising the place.
According to Reidel, Ayers didn’t like the gig, which she did gratis. Cheapskate poets, she said. She was even forced to buy a copy of Kees’s poetry book.
From whence this poem for the New Year.
THAT WINTER
Cold ground and colder stone
Unearthed in ruined passageways,
The parodies of buildings in the snow –
Snow tossed and raging through a world
It imitates, that drives forever north
To what is rumored to be Spring.
To see the faces you had thought were put away
Forever, swept like leaves among the crowd,
Is to be drawn like them, on winter afternoons,
To avenues you saw demolished years before.
The houses still remain like monuments,
Their windows cracked, For sale signs on the lawns.
Then grass upon those lawns again!-and dogs
In fashion twenty years ago, the streets mysterious
Through summer shade, the marvelous worlds
Within the world, each opening like a hand
And promising a constant course.-You see yourself,
A fool with smiles, one you thought dead.
And snow is raging, raging, in a darker world.
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