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.
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.
The dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham has died, age 90. He had one of the longest, most artistically rich, lives on record.
This piece about him, marking a lecture he gave at Stanford, evokes that richness.
An excerpt:
In 1966, Cunningham collaborated with filmmaker Stan Van Der Beek to produce Variations V, the first of its kind “dance film.” What must have excited Cunningham about this venture was how the camera could work as a creative instrument, framing and structuring the look and feel of dance in a way that differed tremendously from viewing a performance in a concert hall. Variations V is also intriguing as an early and consummate example of the collage-like effect of multimedia. The dancers perform in a dark space broken up by vertical antennae, photoelectric devices, and a plant-like object. Multiple projection screens, with moving images from film and television, displayed both the sublime (man’s walk on the moon) and the mundane (a man coming home to his house in suburbia). As the dancers advance near the antennae, or cut through beams of photoelectric light, they trip sensors that emit the electronic bleeps and blips of John Cage’s musical score. Ambient sound, an occasional piano solo, and the auditory snow that one hears between radio stations contributed to the complexity of Cage’s soundscape. Movement ranges from elaborate ensembles, with dancers rolling, spinning, and somersaulting on the floor to unusual solos (Cunningham pulls off the leaves of the plant-like object, only to replace them later; a female dancer, sporting a 1960s dress fit for a go-go club, stands on her head). The hypersensory event is completed with the projection of bright spotlights and spiral patterns on the stage that are sometimes superimposed on the dancers’ bodies.
Second in a University Diaries series featuring professors.
(First That Which Does Not Kill Me here.)
Today’s TWDNKM:
PROFESSOR OF PAIN EXCELS IN JUJITSU
At first glance, math and the martial arts do not seem to have much in common, but for Pat McDonald, professor of mathematics at New College, the similarities are obvious.
“In both cases there are fundamental skills that you need to know,” said McDonald, 45. With a firm understanding of the basics, you then “chain the fundamentals into more complex and intricate patterns in order to succeed.”
McDonald, who got his doctorate in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not just at the top of his field in mathematics. He is also a pan-American champion in Brazilian jujitsu.
He says he became interested in Brazilian jujitsu about seven years ago while working out at the fitness center in New College. “There were usually a few people in jujitsu outfits and one time I was challenged to grapple, in a submission match.”
McDonald says he thought he was doing pretty well at first.
“I dropped the guy and had a choke on him. I noticed he was changing color. I asked him if he was OK. Then the next thing, I was tired and my face was on the mat and my arm really hurt.
“I thought it was a fluke and demanded a rematch. The same thing happened, and I was hooked.”
It turned out the man he was grappling with was Derek Taaca, a world champion purple belt.
In March, McDonald won first place in the Senior Three Lightweight Brown Belt Champion in Brazilian jujitsu at the Pan-American games in Los Angeles.
McDonald had to bow out of the next competitions, including the World Championship in Brazil, because of a broken thumb and a bleeding intestine.
The internal bleeding happened while he was training.
“I had my opponent in a triangle choke,” he said. “He tried to escape by forcing his hand between my legs. I moved to relieve the pressure and his hand jammed against my abdomen. It was very painful.”
He went to the hospital, where doctors found blood in a cavity between his abdominal muscle and the small intestine. The doctors treated him with strong antibiotics and monitored the injury…
