Conjuring Act

Nearly 60 years ago, Weldon Kees vanished without a trace. Why is Kathleen Rooney
summoning him today?
BY JAMES REIDEL

Weldon Kees and Kathleen Rooney. (Rooney photo by Beth Rooney.)

Weldon Kees has been gone close to 60 years, but he continues to inspire. The
Nebraska-born poet, who also wrote fiction, composed jazz, and produced
experimental films, is the animating spirit behind Kathleen Rooney�s book Robinson
Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012). In her new collection, Rooney pays homage to Kees�s
best-known work, the four Robinson poems that he published before disappearing in
July 1955. (His car was discovered in a parking lot near the Golden Gate Bridge,
his body never found.) James Reidel, author of Vanished Act: The Life and Art of
Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), interviewed Rooney for the Poetry
Foundation. They spoke about why Kees is an invitational writer, what Nickelodeon
has to do with poetry, and the aesthetic elegance of disappearance.

Robinson was considered a doppelg�nger of Kees, an urban and urbane Robinson

Crusoe. Why write an entire book of post-Robinson poems?

The Robinson series is one of Kees�s projects that I would have liked to read more
of, but there isn�t any more. Not to say that the four poems aren�t �enough� or
that the series feels �unfinished��if anything, I admire Kees�s economy�but I
really love the poems and their mysterious, quasi-alter ego, and I wanted to see
the story continue. One of the poems in Robinson Alone concludes with the couplet
�Incompletion makes people / want to fill your blanks in.� The impulse to create, I
think, often comes from this feeling, even if it�s not always as direct as it is in
the case of my post-Robinson poems. Probably a lot of writers could tell you vivid
and specific stories of the writers they read who struck or inspired them in such a
way as to make them want to create their own work; I think of these writers as not
just �inspirational� but �invitational��like what they�re doing is an invitation to
try to do it yourself. Kees is an invitational writer for me.

An example of this invitational phenomenon that sticks with me is from an episode

of the Nickelodeon kids� show The Adventures of Pete & Pete, which I watched all
the time growing up. Little Pete is on his way to school, and he passes a garage
band that happens to be rehearsing a song that he falls head over heels for. He
can�t get it out of his mind, but when he comes back later, the band has
disappeared. Ultimately, Pete realizes that the only solution (in the absence of
ever finding the band again) is to start his own band and make his own songs. The
Robinson poems are like that to me.

I am with you on �incompletion.� As his biographer, a title and task that grew on
me slowly, I found an enormous blank to fill. And we�re not the only ones who keep
inserting things into this Kees void. Donald Justice wrote �Sestina on Six Words by
Weldon Kees� in Gainesville, Florida, while Kees was still alive in San Francisco�s
Mission District. Justice said that he had planned to send the completed poem to
Kees himself, but by the time it was published, it was too late.

Much poetry�and art in general�is addressed to an unknown audience: whoever will

eventually read or see it. But it�s also interesting when things are addressed to
impossible audiences: people who can never see the work no matter what. The poetic
convention of the apostrophe comes from these circumstances, obviously. Justice�s
poem isn�t actually addressed to Kees, of course, but it�s significant that he
wanted to show it to Kees.

You can get some appealing effects by just imagining the absent poet as part of the
audience. This conceptual approach is what Brian Eno might call an �oblique
strategy,� and it can be generative: although I think a lot about what Kees would
have made of my Robinson poems, and I want to think he would have liked them,
they�re not addressed to him, and, furthermore, he�s not even in them. I�m
borrowing his fictional creation and reimagining his own life through that
character.

I find the biography you wrote�and the biographical info about Kees in general�to
be fairly sympathetic to its subject, but that may be because of his unsympathetic
aspects. In an interview at the end of her memoir The Chronology of Water, Lidia
Yuknavitch says, �I�ve never met anyone who hasn�t fucked up in their life a time
or two. Royally. I�m pretty sure that�s what keeps us connected to one another,�
and I�m inclined to agree. In much the same way, I suppose, that incompleteness
engages the imagination, imperfection and fallibility make people more human, more
like individuals we�d actually want to know. Perfect, or perfectly successful,
people are not so interesting, not so instructive.

For some poets who discover Kees�s work, he�s like finding�having�an imaginary
friend. I remember how Justice said there was this pleasure in discovering Kees for
yourself. I had that experience in a big way, but I would fear, too, that my
biography might spoil this discovery. I don�t think so with your book. We have
poets possessed by Kees and possessing Kees�for you; for Larry Levis in his homage
to Kees�s �fabulous touch�; for David Wojahn, imagining Kees in Mexico living with
a pretty, Frida Kahlo�like ing�nue in �Weldon Kees in Mexico, 1966�; for Simon
Armitage, channeling himself via the agency of Robinson. Indeed, Kees is both
discovered and still missing�liminal in that way. He played with liminality too;
there is his frequently anthologized �For My Daughter,� that liminal daughter whom
he both beautifully and terrifyingly has. Are we playing with Kees�s Robinson doll,
or is he playing with ours?

Kees as a playful poet is something that I feel a connection with and is what drew
me to his work initially. Because of his mysterious end, there is a temptation to
read his work and life in a singularly gloomy light, but his poems are very often a
ton of fun, and it seems as though he personally would have been�not all the time,
but sometimes�too. To apply an ugly-sounding (to my ear) but apt word to his poetic
style, Kees�s writing is ludic�it feels like a serious game that he is very good at
and is having a good time playing. The poem that you mention, �For My Daughter,� is
a bitter poem, but it�s also a fake-out�a trick�and I say that with admiration. So
to answer your question about who possesses Kees/Robinson: Games consist of the
change of possession. Name a sport that involves a ball, and the game probably
consists of the ball being passed; that�s the game. And in literature�and maybe art
in general�almost anything of value gains its value by being passed on. Kees
started the game, and I�m still playing.

Let�s turn to the game. I see you�ve versified some of Kees�s letters and
interpolated these centos in your book. I can see why. Kees wrote really good
letters. Some passages of his correspondence are epistolary prose poems. I actually
tried to compose my own cento from a letter Kees wrote from California in January
1951. Do you think Kees wrote them knowing that one day they would be read by
strangers, biographers, poets? What�s amusing to me is that the man who edited his
letters, Robert Knoll, called Kees a solipsist, the kind of person who might not
care if we exist or not.

I�m not familiar with Knoll�s justification for terming Kees a solipsist, but it
seems worth mentioning that at least one of Kees�s Robinson poems, �Robinson,� is
animated by a horror of solipsism: the idea that things disappear when you�re not
there to look at them. As to whether he thought anyone besides their explicit
recipients would read his letters, I suspect it would depend on when you asked him.
There were likely times that he felt (despairingly) that nobody would care at all
about anything he wrote, letters or otherwise, and other times that he probably had
grandiose notions about being read by some kind of �posterity.� The sense that you
get when you encounter a piece of ostensibly private correspondence that feels as
highly crafted as Kees�s letters do is first that you�re in the presence of someone
who just loves and is skilled at language, but there is also this painful sense of
hope�a Who knows what kind of life this bunch of sentences is going to have once I
turn it loose in the world kind of feeling.

So that brings us somewhat full circle, to completion. I must ask you what I ask
myself from a cold-blooded biographer�s POV: Do you think that Kees, a careful
poet, understood the bad form of standing there hale and hearty beside the kind of
poems he wrote? There is a kind of elegance to his disappearance, an aesthetic if
you will, that looks far less like the self-treatment with extreme prejudice of,
say Plath or Berryman. How does one survive writing like Kees?

The aesthetic elegance of Kees�s disappearance strikes me, too, certainly, hence
the last poem in Robinson Alone, including the lines �Preoccupation & a certain
mode of self-presentation. / Even when absent, Robinson has a style.� As for how
one survives writing like Kees, one should probably immediately try to write again
in a style that is decidedly un-Keesian. Aside from collaborating with my writing
partner Elisa Gabbert, I�m taking a break from poems for a while and trying to
focus on writing a novel (though not a campus one, since Kees has one of those).

Originally Published: January 8th, 2013

James Reidel is the author of the poetry collections Jim's Book (Black Lawrence
Press, 2013) and My Window Seat for Arlena Twigg (Black Lawrence Press, 2006). He
wrote the definitive and only biography on Weldon Kees, Vanished Act: The Life and
Work of Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), and edited 3
Entertertainments (Knives Forks...

Read Full Biography

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AUDIO
Asleep, But Not at Rest
FROM POETRY OFF THE SHELFJanuary 2013
Kathleen Rooney on Weldon Kees and his mysterious poetic character Robinson

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POEM
Aspects of Robinson
BY WELDON KEES
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

Robinson on...
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POEM
For My Daughter
BY WELDON KEES
Looking into my daughter�s eyes I read
Beneath the innocence of morning flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night�s slow poison, tolerant and bland,
Has moved...

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AUTHOR
Weldon Kees
Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Nebraska and attended Doane College, the
University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska, earning his degree in 1935.
In addition to writing, Kees...

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POEM
Relating to Robinson
BY WELDON KEES
Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.

From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio

Was playing There�s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.
We...

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POEM
Robinson
BY WELDON KEES
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,

Reflects nothing at...

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