July 2013
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July Poet/Po of the Month
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Weldon Kees 2/24/1914 – 7/18/1955
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It is almost half a century since San Francisco police found a 1954 Plymouth Savoy on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. On Tuesday, July 19, 1955, a highway patrol reported that the car, belonging to a Weldon Kees, had been discovered with the keys in the ignition. Two of Kees’s friends, Michael Grieg and Adrian Wilson, went to search the apartment of the missing man. There they found, among other things, his cat, Lonesome, and a pair of red socks in a sink. His wallet, watch, and sleeping bag were missing. So was his savings-account book, although the balance, which stood at more than eight hundred dollars, would remain that way. There was no suicide note.
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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/04/050704crat_atlarge
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Harry Weldon Kees (February 24, 1914 – July 18, 1955) was an American poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, playwright, jazz pianist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Despite his brief career, he is considered an important mid-twentieth-century poet of the same generation as John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. His work has been immensely influential on subsequent generations of poets writing in English and other languages and his collected poems have been included in many anthologies. Harold Bloom lists the publication of Kees’s first book The Last Man (1943) as an important event in the chronology of his textbook Modern American Poetry as well as a book worthy of his Western Canon.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weldon_Kees
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White Collar Ballad
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There are lots of places to go:
Guaranteed headaches at every club,
Plush-and-golden cinemas that always show
How cunningly the heroine and hero rub.
Put on your hat, put on your gloves.
But there isn’t any love, there isn’t any love.
There are endless things we could do:
Walk around the block, watch the skaters whirl,
Promenade the park or see the newest zoo,
Plan for the future in a sensible world.
The water boils on the stove,
But there isn’t any love, there isn’t any love
Our best friends lived in the house next door.
Went around to call on them the other day,
But they hadn’t left an address or a word before
They packed their bags and moved away.
We could call on the people on the floor above,
But there wouldn’t be any love, there wouldn’t be any love.
It didn’t use to be like this at all.
You wanted lots of money and I got it somehow.
Once it was Summer. Here it’s almost Fall.
It isn’t any season now.
There are seasons in the future to be thinking of,
But there won’t be any love, there won’t be any love.
—Weldon Kees
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· White Collar Ballad – By Weldon Kees
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No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.
No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.
Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scattered with check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note: “To be killed this way is quite all right with me.”
Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.
-Weldon Kees
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Kees left in Ignition
In the early evening
of a San Francisco bay
suppertime fog
I can see myself walking
on the bridge and him
silhouetted there ready to jump.
His foot up on the rail.
You would have had to move fast.
because he certainly was going to
……before he lost his nerve.
Perhaps if you had called,
Robinson Don’t!!!!
It might have startled him
just for that brief second.
Thrown him off his resolve
to do this thing
to bail
on all the poetry
ignored and unread
or just not written yet.
Abandon
Fats Waller
De Kooning
The Asphalt Jungle
The Narrow Margin.
He’s looking down into the water
smoking a last cigarette I suppose.
The bay breeze upon his face
the smell of salt, somewhere a gull calls
then impulse propelled
him to silently, quickly, simply
climb up and hop of the rail
to drop below into the water
a shadow dart enveloped in gray
and probably be knocked out
instantly by the concussion
of the impact
and drown.
Quickly.
With a decided lack of
theatrics or dramatics.
No one saw anything.
Investors never turned up a body.
It was 1955 and I was just over a month old.
Newly born into his used up world of despair
and disappointment.
I wish he
hadn’t been so quick
to jump the ship
of the flesh
leaving the only door
left open
to conjecture
over a staged suicide
or a vanished act in Mexico.
Maybe he didn’t
really leave the engine running
and the keys left
swinging in the ignition
of the 54 Plymouth
on the approach to the Golden Gate
shrouded in the July Fog as
night fell like the closing scene
in a RKO Radio Picture
as the Detective writes
in his notebook…
…But why did victim
make that last payment on the
car a week before ?
From Sometime Grief –barks up the wrong tree 2012
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