Comments about Weldon Kees
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cjsarett: A Weldon Kees morning. “The Plague” — “We could hear the sound of beating clothes”
cjsarett: Weldon Kees, “1926”— “An orange moon. I see the lives/Of neighbors, mapped and marred.”
bloemkolk: Weldon Kees.
drei__dog: Weldon kees
plastic_bio: A good night for the fireplace to becrackling with flames - or so he figured,Crumpling the papers he could only seeAs testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness.
- Weldon Kees
watercrime: weldon kees, what a delight
Wasgrou8965: I look at youAcross those fires and the dark.,Weldon Kees,dark, fire, look, love,
cjsarett: Weldon Kees, “The Coming of the Plague” —“Locusts dying in the fields, our dogs/Silent, moving like shadows on a wall:”
phillipcrymble: Weldon Kees — born on this day in 1914
And now the plaza drenched in rain, the locusts
Gone, and eaten stems against the sky.
pauljimerson: It is the birthday of Weldon Kees , b Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1914. Kees first poetry collection was published in 1943, the first of three collections to be released in his lifetime. He wrote a handful of poems about a character named Robinson.
pauljimerson: In 1955, Weldon Kees made a phone call to a friend. At the end of their conversation he asked her, “What keeps you going?” Later that day, Kees packed a sleeping bag and his savings account book and disappeared.
LibraryAmerica: Some fantastic photos of Kees and his artwork can be found in the Dan Wynn Archive:
seventydys: across those fires
Weldon Kees, ‘Late Evening Song’
poemtoday: Happy birthday Weldon Kees …
cowboycoleridge: I look at you
Across those fires and the dark
A good night for the fireplace to be
crackling with flames – or so he figured,
Crumpling the papers he could only see
As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness.
- Weldon Kees, The Heat in the Room
cowboycoleridge: Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes
I look at you
Across those fires and the dark
- Weldon Kees
BorisDralyuk: Today is the anniversary of the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—and the birthday of Weldon Kees, a poet keenly sensitive to the catastrophes of his era. The refugee in this poem is, by ironic etymology, “the home of man”; he’s based on Wolfgang Born, emigre artist.
JamesPasley1: Currently reading a bio on Weldon Kees and man what a shot
ArchieG1946: “Year’s End,” Weldon Kees.
tulip_incognito: I don't know what BookTok is I'm literally reading Diane Wakoski, Weldon Kees, Frank O'Hara, and contemporary poet's most recent books out loud on TikTok lofl
unjustlyunread: one by Weldon Kees
("and why the world thins out and perishes / as it has done for me, szíeved / as i am toward silences")
kjavadizadeh: Weldon Kees. “I did not know them then.”
b2l_Literature: By the age of thirty, Weldon Kees (1914–55) was a poet, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, and short story writer living in New York City. Despite a contract for a forthcoming novel, however, he stopped writing fiction, moved to S...
b2l_Literature: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance and absorbing vision of one of America’s most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914–55). : Collected Poems of Weldon Kees
tulip_incognito: JANUARY by Weldon Kees. A calming poetry reading for the last week of January. Sit back, relax, and let the words wash over you. You’ve made it to 2023. How was this first month for you? What are you grateful for today? What are you looking forward to tomorrow? Rest when you need
nonchalantly_: literature in America, it dies as it’s born. Weldon Kees died before the Newport Jazz Festival took place—but there is some grand foreshadowing, some grand foreboding, in this poem, that some of Benn’s poems might capture, but I do not know. ‘Capture’ is a strong word. Usher in.
consertum: Morning: blue, cold and still.
Eyes that have stared too long
Stare at the wedge of light
At the end of the frozen room
Where snow on the windowsill,
Packed and cold as a life,
Winters the sense of wrong
Weldon Kees / January
Kulambq: To start off the new year.
Weldon Kees' poem 'January.'
trodgneiss: The Bridge by William Heick. Weldon Kees shot much of the footage.
seventydys: raging, raging, in a darker world
Weldon Kees, ‘That Winter’
geschwartz58: Weldon Kees!
ForgottenGPoems: Here's a midweek throw-back to FGP's first months: "The Patient is Rallying" by Weldon Kees (1914-1955). Taken from his posthumous Collected Poems (1960).
ForgottenGPoems: Any Weldon Kees fans out there? Here's his "The Patient Is Rallying."
cjsarett: The amazing Weldon Kees,”Subtitle” “The sharp dead click/of empty chocolate bar machines”
ArchieG1946: “Colloquy,” Weldon Kees
estebanjrod11: Weldon Kees. ✨
cjsarett: The amazing Weldon Kees. “Crime Club” — “Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,”
cjsarett: What a poem by Weldon Kees, “The Coming of the Plague”— “We could hear the sound of beating clothes/All through the night. We could not count”
pshares: Weldon Kees' poems do the work of centering lonely, aching figures who call out and are desperate to hear an answer.
pshares: When people hear of Weldon Kees, the first thing they usually learn is that he vanished.
pshares: Weldon Kees’s poetry spans a variety of forms, and the poems similarly include such a scattering of voices that you might not think they were written by the same person. In the poems we also find a unifying characteristic—a kind of sneaky violence.
phillipcrymble: Weldon Kees
TheCult_Reviews: books i have in my room, x if i've finished or essentially finished.
- Alice Munro Selected Stories 1968-1994
- DH Lawrence & ML Skinner The Boy in the Bush
- Michael Ondaatje Running in the Family
- Weldon Kees The Ceremony & other stories
- Isabel Huggan The Elizabeth Stories
BoyerCollege: Boyer faculty member Dr. Marcus DeLoach presents the road goes on ahead: music by Marcus DeLoach, an evening of his own original vocal works on texts by Robert Bly, Derek Walcott, Weldon Kees, E.E. Cummings and more.
This event is open to the public.
3forwardslashes: weldon kees and connie converse are definitely on the same UFO
akbvrr: Weldon Kees: On “Aspects of Robinson” (1998)
nberlat: 148 Weldon Kees (this is so good; it's like Oscar Wilde meets Lovecraft.)
quinoa_cowboy: whatever happened to weldon kees
KhalidM14787825: His act is over. The world is grey. Ghosts in the sunlight.
"The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian."
-- Weldon Kees.
angsuman: Weldon Kees: On “Aspects of Robinson” (1998)
hn_frontpage: Weldon Kees: On “Aspects of Robinson” (1998)
L:
winsontang: Weldon Kees: On “Aspects of Robinson” (1998)
HNTweets: Weldon Kees: On “Aspects of Robinson” (1998):
AmateurReader: Poetry
Discrete Series (1934) &
The Materials (1962), George Oppen
The Middle of a War (1942) &
A Lost Season (1944) &
Epitaphs and Occasions (1949), Roy Fuller
The Last Man (1943) &
The Fall of Magicians (1947) &
Poems 1947-1954 (1954), Weldon Kees
i.e., his Collected Poems
aliner: Difficult to recall an emotion that is dead,
Particularly so among these unbelieved fanfares
And admonitions from a camouflaged sky
- Weldon Kees, "The Patient is Rallying"
aliner: For a while
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
- Weldon Kees, Late Evening Song
LuminousRuins: The lease is up, the time is near.
Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well.
—Weldon Kees
boomerangJurA: “But now, my bark a ghost in this strange scentless air
I am no growling cicerone or cerberus,
But wreckage for the pound, snuffling in shame”
WELDON KEES
ArchieG1946: Weldon Kees
freakhighway: i love weldon kees.
crollyson: “Mr. Reidel uses biography as a poetic form. His mission is to re-create the experience that drew people to Kees, who enchanted women and men alike because he completely immersed himself in art and made his life into art.”—Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun
ArchieG1946: Weldon Kees
ArchieG1946: “Land’s End,” Weldon Kees
ArchieG1946: Weldon Kees
ArchieG1946: Weldon Kees, “That Winter”
FleurB75: “I look at you
Across those fires and the dark.”
― Weldon Kees
SeanSingerPoet: Weldon Kees
SeanSingerPoet: Weldon Kees
Stumps: Weldon Kees having fun in a scathing review, Prairie Schooner Spring 1937: “… rarely is he much concerned with their cruelty, banality, anger, vanity, hopefulness, their determination, or their ambition or the hundred and one other things that make human beings what they are.”
NomineLucis: The lease is up, the time is near.
Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well.
— Weldon Kees
AmericanDebris: The lease is up, the time is near.
Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well.
— Weldon Kees
AmericanDebris: "Pull the curtains to the sill,
Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.
Crush the embers as they fall
From the dying fires:
Things are not going well."
— Weldon Kees
Heghoulian: I’m not here, but I recommend this old piece about the still-unsolved disappearance of cult American poet Weldon Kees, whose car was found by San Francisco police on this day in 1955.
illdesperado: "In between convulsions, I am working away
at poems."
WELDON KEES, who
disappeared forever
on this day in 1955
somewhere in the
vicinity
of the
Golden Gate Bridge
aliner: I remember the ferns, the organ faintly out of tune,
The gray light, the two extended prayers
- Weldon Kees, “For H. V. (1901-1927)”
curthopkins: It's impossible these days not to think of Weldon Kees' comment to Mark Rothko when the latter advertised his indifference to the Holocaust. "What you mean, Mark, is that you're a moral dwarf."
rarebookman: Weldon Kees INSCRIBED to San Francisco Printer Wallace Kibbee
POEMS 1947 - 1954. 1954. First Edition. Beautifully printed collection, the last by Kees before his mysterious disappearance the following year. Lacks wraparound band otherwise Fine $2,000
Kulambq: 'Memory of summer is winter's consciousness ...
But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for
Is absurd.'
~ Weldon Kees
Kulambq: 1/ 'What happened to the predictions, all the promises
Of achievement, the golden beaches that we hurried to like tides?
Where have the faces gone, the curtained windows
That opened on the park - green fields, green woods, green distances ...'
~ Weldon Kees
sp1ndriftgaze: … 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 were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street... -Weldon Kees
Kulambq: 1/ 'Where are the marvelous cities that our childhoods built for us,
With houses unlike those that we have come to know,
And the cathedrals, and the violet streets? And all the rooms
Miraculously designed, warm as our nights, with friends at every door?'
~ Weldon Kees
Kulambq: A great anti-war poem titled 'June 1940' (1943) by Weldon Kees.
'It is summer again, the evening is warm and silent. The windows are dark and the mountains are miles away.
And the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform.
An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.'
Kulambq: A poem by Weldon Kees I am obsessively re-reading. Like Keats, who pronounced himself a failure, as one whose name was written in water, Kees saw his poetic career marked by uncertainty, relative resignation, ephemeral, doomed to meet the veil of oblivion.
Kulambq: 'Beyond the lighthouse, black against the sky,
Two gulls are circling where the woods begin.'
~ Weldon Kees, 'Land's End'
Kulambq: 'One is continually astounded that art persists at all in the face of so much indifference, failure, and isolation.'
~ Weldon Kees
Kulambq: 'I think it's wonderful, densely, thickly, and completely written: one of the best things that's happened to narrative prose in some years.'
Weldon Kees on Malcolm Lowry's 'Under the Volcano'
mattkeywest: Weldon Kees. Listen learn
Mystery Poet
Kulambq: "EE Cummings, TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams - remain our most gifted avant-garde contributors ... If that was a Wasteland and they were the Lost Generation, then what is this moldy milieu, in which we find ourselves, and what are we?"
~ Weldon Kees
Kulambq: 'What ranker winds may blow one cannot say,
Nor guess. The one tonight blows through the mind,
And every syllable is false, and dry.
Goodnight, goodnight. To strangers, to an empty street.'
~ Weldon Kees, from 'Poem Instead of a Letter'
Kulambq: 'It is necessary that writers keep working (i.e. writing). We are being drowned in banality, Philistinism, etc. Writers must go on, in the face of it, oppose it, and set an example.'
~ Jim Farrell, 26 March 1941 letter to Weldon Kees
Kulambq: 'It is a duty of serious writers to go an at all costs in order to set up some standard against the bilge that is swamping us.'
~ Jim Farrell to Weldon Kees
BLCKDGRD: Ellicott City, pre-bleggalgaze, 25 links, Karen Dalton, Weldon Kees
theangrynumpty: Weldon Kees is a seriously underrated, and sadly forgotten, loet. Read his poems.
seventydys: Goodnight, goodnight
Weldon Kees, ‘Poem Instead of a Letter’
Kulambq: Weldon Kees describes meeting Lionel Trilling, one of the the most important American literary minds of the 20th century.
Kulambq: 'T. S. Eliot is the poet who sings the song of Oswald Spengler ... It seems to me that anyone can be a futilitarian right now: it's the easiest, simplest thing in the world - because it's negative.'
~ Weldon Kees
Kulambq: 'But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for is absurd ...
What we have learned is not what we were
told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there.'
~ Weldon Kees, 'Early Winter'
Kulambq: Haunting poem by Weldon Kees, in many ways reminiscent of Hart Crane's 'Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge' and 'The Broken Tower.' The last quatrain is a terrifying vision of emtpiness and spiritual desolation.
Kulambq: 'Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.'
~ Weldon Kees, from 'Robinson'
The painting 'New York, New Haven and Hartford' is by Edward Hopper, who died on this day in 1967.
Kulambq: 'Praise to the mind
That moves toward meaning,
Kindness; mixes keenness
With routine of
Grace, has space,
And finds its place.'
~ Weldon Kees, from 'Praise to the Mind'
