Craft: Weldon Kees

Weldon Kees (1914-1955) was not only a poet, but a generalist who made visual art, jazz music, short stories, and films. He is associated with the San Francisco Renaissance poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but his poems are not as celebratory as theirs. His poems are a critique and reflect a cynical or sardonic voice of the alienated, lost, or grieving mid-century person.

Weldon Kees, c. 1953

Kees, both in his personal life and in his artistic endeavors, was ambitious, dissatisfied, frustrated, clear, and direct. Joseph Brodsky said of this unusual and overlooked poet:

His poems display neither the incoherence of nostalgia for some mentally palatable past nor, however vaguely charted, the possibility of the future. All he had was the present, which was not to his Muse's liking, and eventually not to his own either. His poetry, in other words, is that of the here and now and of no escape, except for poetry itself.