All the Smashed Up-Baggage of the Heart
Farfalla Press blog has posted a YouTube recording of Weldon Kees reading three poems. Weldon Kees has been a favorite poet of mine for years, since Bill Ford, my formalist adversary, introduced me to him. Farfalla has also put me in their links, so I happily reciprocate. http://farfallapress.blogspot.com/ . The other poet I associate with Bill’s efforts (entirely successful) to get me to see the virtues of formal writing is Edwin Denby. These were wise choices for Bill, because Denby was an important dance critic, friend of Frank O’Hara, and wrote sonnets on the side. Kees, who disappeared at the age of 31, was a great nay-saying bohemian, jazz musician, painter, journalist and most of all, poet. He wrote brilliant formal poetry, but his sensibility and aesthetic are proto-punk, hard boiled. He writes about suicidal losers with bad jobs. This was Bill’s point, that formalism was not inconsistent with darkness, expressionism, surrealism etc. Bill of course ran off the rails after 9-11, for which I forgive him, as he remains a friend. I have never accepted his or anyone else’s contention that the chaos of emotion and life require an artistic cage of forms to be understandable. But hearing Kees’s voice is revealing. He reads each syllable like a note and you can feel the words and worlds slipping on your tongue, thudding like waves. Here is a favorite:
A Good Chord on a Bad Piano
The fissures in the studio grow large.
Transplantings from the Rivoli, no doubt.
Such latter-day disfigurements leave out
All mention of those older scars that merge
On any riddled surfaces about.
Disgusting to be sure. On days like these,
A good chord on a bad piano serves
As well as shimmering harp-runs for the nerves.
F minor, with the added sixth. The keys
Are like old yellow teeth; the pedal swerves;
The treble wires vibrate, break, and bend;
The padded mallets fly apart.
Both instrument and room have made a start.
Piano and scene are double to the end,
Like all the smashed-up baggage of the heart.
