'Weldon Kees: The Disappearing Poet'

 Dana Gioia has written, produced and posted a much-needed video about the curious life and work of the American poet Weldon Kees. Wait for the cameo appearance of Boris Dralyuk.

'To Notice, to Wonder, to Marvel, to Be Astonished'

In his Notebooks, 1922-86, Michael Oakeshott titles an entry from March 1955 “The True Believer”: 

“Before he became a member of the Party he felt himself to be merely an isolated individual, lonely & lost, tormented, helpless, vindictive, but quite incapable of forming judgments either about himself or about the affairs of the world. He held no standard of values; he felt himself to be a pariah. All he knew for certain was that he was not a man at peace with himself & and could not be at peace with other men. He sought an authority to obey; in the party he found release.”

 

Oakeshott sounds remarkably like the American “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer (1902-83). His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular his first, The True Believer (1951). Compare Oakeshott’s observation with a passage (Sec. 2, Chap. 10) from that book:

 

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.

This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat.”

 

The busybody, in other words, is a sad soul, empty and likely without mature values. He dwells in a state of eternal childhood: If you don’t like Daddy, find a new Daddy, one who will hold your hand and lead you down the path to righteousness. The type brings to mind conversion to the more rabid forms of religious practice.

 

What moved me about Hoffer’s work, and what still moves me, were his commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, his support for Israel and his working-class origins. Not that I could have identified many of those qualities when I was fifteen. Apart from my teachers and doctors, I knew no one who had gone to college. I grew up knowing that autodidacticism was the essence of true education. Degrees still mean little to me. Hoffer seemed like a guy I could talk to. Oakeshott returns to these themes and their alternatives throughout his Notebooks:

 

“A man incapable of being happily resigned to being a nobody is never likely to be a somebody.”

 

“To notice, to wonder, to marvel, to be astonished, perhaps to be dismayed—la chase--& then what? To understand that one never completely understands.”

 

“Some people take everything for granted; to others, everything is wonderful and mysterious. What else is there to do with the mystery of human life but to fall in love with it!”

'Try to Make Something New'

Almost the only thing I ever write down so I don’t forget it is the grocery list. Sporadically I kept a diary when younger but each time the essential tedium of recording quotidian events defeated me. I discovered that most of my own life, the practical stuff that consumes so much of my time, is too trivial to preserve. And I didn’t reread these ghastly transcripts of the day’s events and my precious reflections anyway. Some things are meant to be forgotten. I no longer keep a commonplace book. I find that my memory of what I have read remains fairly reliable. Kay Ryan speaks for me in her essay “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks”: 

“We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories. For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed.”

 

Ryan’s ruthlessness I’ve always found refreshing. As a poet she combines a drily comic tone with philosophical heft and a well-oiled bullshit detector. She defies us to take her seriously, when we’d rather laugh her out of the room. She continues:

“For of course it is only within the context of loss that anything can be said to be found. That seems ridiculously obvious, and yet we struggle against it. And isn't finding, the moment of finding, our supreme thrill? We call it discovery and make much of it, forgetting that it is the gift of loss.

 

“Still, it is as dangerous to cultivate loss as it is to try to stop it through the keeping of notebooks; we are a self-regarding creature and we will watch ourselves losing and become bewitched by our own affecting actions. We are so moved by ourselves. This is natural, but it is distracting. What can we do?” 

 

A young man asks why I write. I write to keep myself amused, not to document my life. Even I don’t care much about that. If others share my enjoyment, I’m happy and take it as an endorsement. I like pleasing people and getting a morale boost as much as the next guy. But if I stopped finding pleasure in playing with words, I would give it up without guilt or remorse. I think Ryan is brilliant and she is one of my mentors, though I’ll never be a poet. Here’s how she closes the first section of her essay:

 

“I think we should try to do something, try to make something new, try very hard to write a poem, say; desire very much to articulate something that doesn't yet exist, something we don't yet know; try so hard that currents are created in the electric broth of what is not lost but not kept either, currents which draw to the mind the bits of the not lost and not kept that join together through the application of great mental force, extreme mental force, in some new and inevitable sequence appropriate to the new realm of the neither lost nor kept. It is incredibly stable when done right.”

 

[Ryan’s essay was originally published in Parnassus in 1998 and collected in Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (2020).]

'But in Them There Is a Different Look'

Berating people seldom works. Mostly it keeps the berater amused. Few of us revise our thinking or behavior because someone tells us we should. Rather, over time, we come to see there might be a better way to go about things. As Dr. Johnson puts it in The Idler: “Let those who desire to reform us, shew the benefits of the change proposed.” The most efficient way is to embody the suggested changes, live the virtues you wish to encourage, don’t preach. In 1955, in his “Year in Poetry” feature in Harper’s, Randall Jarrell wrote: 

“Sometimes when I can’t go to sleep at night I see the family of the future. Dressed in three-toned shorts-and-shirt sets of disposable Papersilk, they sit before the television wall of their apartment, only their eyes moving. After I’ve looked a while I always see—otherwise I’d die—a pigheaded soul over in the corner with a book; only his eyes are moving, but in them there is a different look.”

 

Jarrell is probably best known for his put-downs. He was the wittiest of critics. Consider his dismissal of the South African poet Roy Campbell: “If the damned, blown willy-nilly around the windy circle of hell, enjoyed it and were proud of being there, they would sound very much as he sounds.” And about Ezra Pound: “Many writers have felt, like Pound: Why not invent an art form that will permit me to put all my life, all my thoughts and feelings about the universe, directly into a work of art? But the trouble is, when they’ve invented it it isn’t an art form.”

 

Yet Jarrell is one of the great critical celebrators. Read again his reviews and essays on Kipling, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Robert Frost and Marianne Moore, among others. Above he celebrates the “pigheaded soul,” the stubborn, lonely reader of the future that has now arrived. I assume most readers of Anecdotal Evidence are just that – readers, soon as vanished a species as the passenger pigeon. Berating and nagging the majority among whom we live, the non-readers, is presumptuous and futile.  

 

Less than three months before his death in 1965, Jarrell published “Speaking of Books,” ostensibly a traditional list of suggestions for summer reading, in The New York Times Book Review. The essay, in fact, is a distillation of a life’s engagement with books. Read with the knowledge of Jarrell’s imminent death, it’s a poignant human document but we shouldn’t allow poignancy to diminish its worth as a paean to passionate reading:

 

“May I finish by recommending -- in no tone -- some books for summer reading? Giradoux' Electra; Bemelman’s Hotel Splendide; Kim; Saint-Simon’s Memoirs; Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South; the new edition of A.L. Kroeber's textbook of anthropology, and Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man; Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches; Colette’s Julie de Carneilhan and The Last of Cheri; Pirandello’s Henry IV; Freud’s Collected Papers; Peter Taylor’s The Widows of Thornton; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; Goethe’s aphorisms; Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Letters to Robert Bridges; Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, and Chekhov’s plays, stories, letters -- anything.”

'A Line or Two Worth Keeping All Too Rare'

The superb American poet X.J. Kennedy died this morning at age ninety-six. Dana Gioia writes in an email:

“I don’t have to tell any of you how much Joe did for American poetry as a writer, editor, and mentor. I always thought of him as the godfather of New Formalism. He played a positive role for so many of us individually, and he was a constant supporter of us collectively at West Chester and the short-lived Teaching Poetry conference in Sonoma County. He also reached millions of students with his many textbooks and anthologies.”

 

I remember as a teenager reading Kennedy’s first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), and marveling that so funny a poet could be so deadly serious. How many contemporary writers can you name who have supplied pleasure and strength to endure for more than sixty years? Take “On Being Accused of Wit” from Dark Horses (1992):

 

“Not so. I’m witless. Often in despair

At long-worked botches I must throw away,

A line or two worth keeping all too rare.

Blind chance not wit entices words to stay

And recognizing luck is artifice

That comes unlearned. The rest is taking pride

In daily labor. This and only this.

On keyboards sweat alone makes fingers glide.

 

“Witless, that juggler rich in discipline

Who brought the Christchild all he had for gift,

Flat on his back with beatific grin

Keeping six slow-revolving balls aloft;

Witless, La Tour, that painter none too bright,

His draftsman’s compass waiting in the wings,

Measuring how a lantern stages light

Until a dark room overflows with rings.”

 

Kennedy’s gift was always versatile. Gravity and wit, he proves, are compatible, as they were in Herbert and Donne. I reviewed Kennedy’s last collection, That Swing: Poems, 2008–2016, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

'Under the Same Architrave'

Architrave entered English in Shakespeare’s day by way of Latin and Italian. It describes the bottom portion of an entablature, the horizontal lintel resting on columns or a wall in classical architecture, below the frieze and cornice. Think of it as a beam, a load-bearing member. Milton uses the word in Paradise Lost -- “Built like a temple, where pilasters round / Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave” – when describing Satan’s palace in Pandemonium. A synonym is epistyle.

 

With time, the word took on a secondary meaning, strictly ornamental: the molding that surrounds a doorway or window. Walter Savage Landor uses the word in an untitled epigram, probably in the original sense:

 

“The gates of fame and of the grave

Stand under the same architrave.”

 

During his lifetime, Landor was better known for his prose work Imaginary Conversations (1823-29) than for his poetry. His “fame” was limited and I suspect he is hardly read today. Landor is one of numerous writers in need of literary resuscitation. His epigrams are the stylistic link in English between Ben Jonson and J.V. Cunningham. He wrote as a classicist, including verse in Latin, and much of his poetry is tart and “load-bearing,” not ornamental. Here is another epigram, a sort of revengeful love poem:

 

“Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak

Four not exempt from pride some future day.

Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek

Over my open volume you will say,

‘This man loved me!’ then rise and trip away.”

 

Landor was born on this date, January 30, in 1775 and died in 1864 at age eighty-nine.

'The Morning Sun Discovers an Opossum'

Our dog has gotten too old to catch opossums. In his prime he could charge across the backyard, leap and grab the marsupial crawling along the top of the wooden fence. It was less like gymnastics than ballet, the way he would land already running, opossum in his jaws, shaking it like a ragdoll – one grand fluid motion.

If my mental tally is correct, he has captured sixteen opossums that way. Once I saw him lift the animal from the lawn by its head and shake it violently until I heard bones crack. All his prey but one played opossum and survived. I would go out in the backyard well after sundown and look for corpses. The mouth of the single fatality was open and I could count the pointed, perfect teeth. I lifted him by the hairless tail and put him in the trash bin.

 

Here is Timothy Steele’s “Didelphis Virginiana” (Toward the Winter Solstice: New Poems, 2006):

 

“The morning sun discovers an opossum

Run over at 18th and Robertson.

A mash of bloody organs, bone, and fur,

Distinguishable by its long bare tail,

It lies ironically in the crosswalk,

While traffic, two lanes each way, thunders past.

When the light turns, I hustle out, and scrape

And scoop it from the asphalt with a shovel;

In greedy expectation of the signal’s

Changing again, cars gun their engines at me.

 

“Many such creatures perish daily, nothing

In evolution having readied them

Against machinery: grief seems absurd.

Nature herself, ever pragmatic, is

Blithely indifferent to her child’s departure.

Even as I inter it in the garden,

Dew-drenched calendulas and larkspur glisten;

A squirrel sniffs its way along a phone line,

Apparently examining for flaws

An argument the cable’s carrying;

Having dropped anchor in the strawberries,

A mockingbird displays his wings, like someone

Opening the panels of an overcoat

To show he’s come unarmed and should be trusted.

 

“But our nocturnal forager is dead—

Native marsupial, nemesis of snails.”

 

Luke seems to have accepted his infirmity. At fifteen, the arthritis in his rear end – the pain, the weakness, the loss of youthful confidence – leave him indifferent to the presence of formerly easy prey. He pretends not to see them.

'The Old and New Imperatives of Wit''

“[P]erhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers.” 

The speaker is the narrator in Vol. 2, Chapter XIX of George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876. The person in question is the title character, who has rescued from suicide by drowning a young Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, an event that leads to Deronda discovering his own Jewish identity. He is given to helping others, even though his altruism often results in difficulties for himself. Deronda is a romantic by nature. The narrator continues:

 

“How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?”

 

Timothy Steele has published a sonnet, “Memorial Service,” at The Sonneteer. He dedicates the poem “For Nancy Huddleston Packer, 28 December 2025.” Packer was a writer who taught at Stanford. She died last year at age ninety-nine:

 

“The speakers well evoke the teacher, mother,

Friend, and grandmother. Thus, her life is closed,

As in the fine short stories she composed.

We rise and, with refreshments, greet each other

And talk about sports, politics, and art

Or fumble as our piece of cheddar slips

Off of its cracker inches from our lips.

Then, trading hugs and fist bumps, we depart.

 

“And bear, as she would, in our homeward traveling

The old and new imperatives of wit:

Be kind and truthful. Though it seems unraveling,

Defend the State: stand up to Trump and ICE.

Read all the novels of George Eliot

And Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda twice.”

 

Steele cites the two greatest English novels of the nineteenth century. In The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books, 2009), Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:

 

“Daniel Deronda is an enduring presence in the ​‘Great Tradition’ of the novel--and an enduring contribution as well to the age-old Jewish question. Many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away, becoming the transient fancies of earlier times and lesser minds. Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”

'It Is Common to the Whole Country'

Like most middle-class Americans I have lived a sheltered life. My needs and many of my wants have been satisfied. I was in a few fist fights as a kid but was seldom a bully or bullied. I don’t know if I’m a physical coward. I don’t know how I would react in combat. Every boy imagines himself a hero but that’s fantasy and probably will remain untested.

The most frightened I have ever been came on May 4, 1971, the first anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. I was at the center of a crowd-cum-mob in Bowling Green, Ohio, a freshman at the university. Students were protesting the war, President Nixon, the National Guard killings at Kent State, Mommy and Daddy, and nothing in particular. I went along mostly out of curiosity and, I’m ashamed to say, because I didn’t want to be judged a reactionary party-pooper by some of my friends. I’ve never liked crowds.

Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power (trans. Carol Stewart, 1962): “In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own power. He has a sense of relief . . .” I have never felt that way. Rallies and rock concerts always left me feeling exhausted with anxiety. My vision of hell is an angry, single-minded crowd.

The mood of the mob as we marched downtown from campus was at first festive. It was a beautiful spring day. As the chanting grew louder and the bullhorns shrieked, the crowd turned surly. I remember two guys trying to tear down a stop sign. Girls were screaming and people started throwing bottles and anything else they could grab at the police, who seemed frightened and confused. I was witnessing for the first time the herd-mind in action. Individuals who on their own were polite and civilized surrendered their will and good judgment to the mob. It gave them license to behave badly. A writer in the nineteenth century describes the phenomenon like this:

“[T]here is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.”

Abraham Lincoln is speaking to the Young Man’s Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., on January 27, 1838. He is a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer. The Civil War is still twenty-three years away. Lincoln continues:

“They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana;--they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter;--they are not the creature of climate-- neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or the non-slave- holding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.--Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”