Two more Weldon Kees poems this morning (I looked at an earlier pair here).

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Covering Two Years

This nothingness that feeds upon itself:
Pencils that turn to water in the hand,
Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air,
Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass,
Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world
Whitened the world that I was silenced by.

There were two years of that. Slowly,
Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides
To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned
And flickered to its terminal.–Now in an older hand
I write my name. Now with a voice grown unfamiliar,
I speak to silences of altered rooms,
Shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return.

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If you read my earlier post about Kees, and looked at the two earlier poems, you’re not much surprised by this tightly compacted depression narrative.

Two years, two stanzas; two chapters, Before and After.

The first stanza describes the automatic self-feeding machine of classic melancholia, in which the self, without agency, becomes, in a weird paradox, both a nothingness, and a thing that somehow sustains itself on nothingness. The speaker is a writer, so his despair takes the form of writer’s block: pencils that don’t write, sentences that don’t form, thoughts that shatter into fragments.

And the whiteness of writing paper now is only whiteness, not a whiteness on which we write things that “reflect the world,” but a whiteness that stands as a symbol of a world whited out, a whited sepulcher, sky “white as clay with no sun.” (People see resemblances between Philip Larkin and Weldon Kees. I mean, I see them too; but Kees has more blood in his veins.)

This was “the world that I was silenced by.” Awkward, at first, to end on by; yet the next line – the first line of the second stanza – will create continuity through rhyming with by (Slowly); and in any case the awkwardness both demonstrates, in a way, his faltered writing style under conditions of depression, and hands agency to the world: Not the world that silenced ME; but the world I was silenced BY.

Note too how in the first stanza, as in the second, the poet will somehow find a dignity of line, a fitting length and meter, an emotionally open and yet controlled form of self-expression.

Surely he accomplishes this through, first of all, a combination of metaphors that ennoble one person’s raw and particular feeling, lift it into a social and historical world the reader shares (we have encountered this anomie before; we have encountered poets who’ve encountered it before; these are not bizarre and novel metaphors, but rather figures that take their place among similar figures in poetic history).

And the writer accomplishes it, too, by making this language dance, by taking despair out for a spin. This is what Jay Robinson, I think, means when he describes Kees “injecting his own personal darkness into villanelles, sonnets and sestinas.” (I began my earlier Kees post with this quotation, and with a similar statement about Kees by Dana Gioia.) To have enough distance from your misery to aestheticize it — that’s impressive in itself. Though if Ted Hughes is right, a certain sort of poet is absolutely compelled in this direction:

Almost all art is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… in other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session. [Poetry is] nothing more than a facility… for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction… [T]he physical body, so to speak, of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

So here’s its reconciliation: There were two years of depression; then, who knows why, “Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides / To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned / And flickered to its terminal.” Whatever forces divided me from the world, made the world white and me silent, ended (note how carefully Kees sustains his eating metaphor: feeds upon itself; diet of corrosion).

We now jump to the present by means of a mere dash — .

Now. Now I can write. In an older hand. In altered rooms. (As with the first two Kees poems we looked at, note how yet again this is an aftermath poem, evoking what was, and now, in an ashen hereafter, what is.) In a voice grown unfamiliar. I don’t know myself. I’m shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return.

Nice Nietzschean note there… Chastened. I’ve been through it. And I’m scared now, because although I’m back from nothingness, nothingness can return.

See how he’s slipped rhyme into these seemingly blank verses? It’s all over the place, if you look — it’s not obvious, because obvious rhyme is for song, for worlds of rhyme and reason. Here we’re still pretty shattered, pretty shaky, but in the second, sort-of-recovery, stanza, the poet tentatively picks up his toolbox again: Repetition with words from the earlier stanza (hand/hand), rhyme (turn/burned/return), consonance (break, blank, crack, flicker, shaken)…

A great poet like this one shows you, in real time, the wound, and the slow, compromised emergence of healing. It’s quite an amazing thing.

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And now, to end our Kees seminar, something a little lighter. Some light verse. A piffle, really. The poet chats with his cat. Cute!

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Colloquy

In the broken light, in owl weather,
Webs on the lawn where the leaves end,
I took the thin moon and the sky for cover
To pick the cat’s brains and descend
A weedy hill. I found him groveling
Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge,
Furred and somnolent.—”I bring,”
I said, “besides this dish of liver, and an edge
Of cheese, the customary torments,
And the usual wonder why we live
At all, and why the world thins out and perishes
As it has done for me, sieved
As I am toward silences. Where
Are we now? Do we know anything?”
—Now, on another night, his look endures.
“Give me the dish,” he said.
I had his answer, wise as yours.