Dana Gioia tries to get at it.

The stark and searing poetry viewed against the doomed and nihilistic life that produced it.

Jay Robinson tries to get at it.

Injecting his own personal darkness into villanelles, sonnets and sestinas.

The many contemporary poets who revere Weldon Kees try to get at why they revere him. Why his poetry is beautiful and thrilling and inspirational.

And nihilistic.

Kees died, age 45, in 1955. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. No one much knew about him when he died, and no one much knows about him now, except for a lot of poets who recognize his artistic greatness and who therefore study his verses with care.

Let’s consider a few of his verses and see what we can see.

Start with two that are kind of similar.

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Late Evening Song

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.

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A strange love song, yes? The poet looks at his lover, maybe in bed, more likely (“across the warm room”) in the living room. He responds – with effort – to her smile, a shameless sexual smile in a sensual warm candle-lit room… This is a let’s fuck face – or a we just fucked and we both enjoyed it face… the sort of face only possible, says the poet, at night, alone with one’s lover. And it should be quite a pleasant thing, quite an easy thing — even maybe a smug thing, making this face.

But here there’s effort involved; it’s not natural or automatic for the poet to make the face. Those pulled-back, weary, minimalist lines, stabs in the dark, convey repression and reluctance. For the poet, that face has a long history, and a bitter one, and the poet at this late date very consciously makes the face in the hope that it will “be enough.”

Be enough? Is this about avoiding sex with one’s lover, and hoping that an enthusiastic smutty sort of mug will do to keep her happy? Or is this about a now-cynical man, wounded or wounding in past fervent love affairs, hoping against hope that the passion he’s rigged up with this latest lover might be authentic?

In any case there are bright fires, and there is the dark, and this terse poem plays them, bright and dark, against one another in a very tight balance, with very close or exact rhymes. Though a sad one, this is a song.

There is past and present passion, past passion and the present effortful gesture toward passion, and that’d be the fire (the word flame suggests itself somehow in the word shame, and in the warmth and the candles of the setting). Fires of past passion “grown dead, grown gray” would be the darkness, and the poet mainly resides in darkness, for effort goes into his smile. He looks at his lover through both of these things, the fire and the dark, through what’s left of the fire of passion in him, and through, mainly, the darkness that’s settled in him like ash as those earlier passions flamed out.

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The Smiles Of The Bathers

The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow and old:
The pilot’s relief on landing is no release.
These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect and public endings–
Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are involved.

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The ecstasy of unearthly selflessness — afloat, or in the throes of sexual passion, or lost in thought or flight –is transient, a brief interruption of our corporeal, bestial, life in the world. Not coitus but post-coital tristesse; not the silent glorious swim but the chilly dripping aftermath as you regain your embodied self and the selves of others… It’s the same aftermathy feel the first poem has — the late-stage smile, the smile gotten up with difficulty long after perfect and private smiles have faded.

Without the great writing, this poem would, thinks UD, be an immature, whiny sort of expression. Why was I cast out of Eden sort of thing… Bitter late-Romantic… A cliché like that guy Richard in the Joni Mitchell song.  But what’s great about the writing, as in the earlier poem, is its stoical control, the way the aesthetic intelligence keeps things steady and observant and true rather than emotional.  No death for you.  You are involved, in the world, in the belly of the beast, as long as you are alive, and the world has its claims on you, its claws in you.  The best you can hope for, so long as you are alive,  is, let’s say, the small death, la petite mort, of orgasmic experience.

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Hold on.  I’ll look at two other Kees poems in a bit.