My first conscious encounter with Weldon Kees was less than a year ago, when Dana Gioia read several of Kees’ poems and none of his own at the Pasadena Public Library. After Gioia read “For My Daughter”, there was a susurration through the ample audience. You could actually hear the grimacing heartbreak at the darkening of Kees’ face delivering those final ultimatums: “I have no daughter. I desire none.”
The memory of this poem and its reading – where Kees’ intelligence was on grand display, where his particular rhyming strategies transcended the worn dressings of the sonnet, where I felt for the first time his incisive sensibilities – suddenly revivified when I got to Kathleen Rooney’s “Robinson Regards the Snow Babies in Central Park” from her collection, Robinson Alone, which remembers and prolongs our encounter with Robinson, first introduced to us by Kees himself(1, 2, 3, 4). This is also where I unconsciously absorbed the word “susurrations,” used earlier in this post.
This is a very cool book and a very cool project.
I’m allowing myself to list only 10 things I like about Robinson Alone, though believe me there are more:
1. There’s a double layer of persona in Rooney’s book, since she is taking on Kees taking on Robinson, a.) because she fashions her poems with Kees in mind, especially his intricate rhyming; and b.) because Robinson is a mask of Kees, even if Rooney is responsible for making this indelibly so. Robinson’s fate is Kees’ fate, in one sense, inasmuch as it involves a bridge (the Golden Gate) and being alone. After finishing the book, I’m wondering about whether Rooney’s Robinson and Robinson’s Kees both have the same portion of mystery or if Rooney’s project has demystified Robinson in a way that is denied to Kees’ suicide/disappearance/silence? Or let me put it this way: is there a double-effect to Robinson Alone being such a thorough personal epic, that there is no more story to tell?
2. The Burma-Shave poems during the second section, which occurs during the road trip between the coasts and, by the end, has turned into an exhausted surrealism caused by the interstate system itself. It is a delight that nothing American is sacred in this text.
3. I enjoyed how the energy is lofty and tight like a high-wire, all invisible and potential. Robinson’s sentiments are snow-globular, contained and distinct from anything outside his own boundary, but shaken and falling within.
For instance,
4. “Their New Apartment Came With A Garden” (no link)
6. and WHAT DOES HE WANT? THE FUTURE. WHEN DOES HE WANT IT? NOW. (no link)
7. I love what happens when Robinson and Ann get to Los Angeles: “The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, on the Prociúncula River./Easier, he admits, just to say L.A./Plainly not alluvial, no longer a floodplain, the climate seems wild, spooky in its mildness.” and then this Chicagoan writing in the voice of a Heartlander transplant from the East Coast really nails it: “The motto of this city: augment augment augment.” (Sixteen Days in a Lincoln Roadster, p. 84)
8. Her lines are stanzas and vice versa very often. This is a very deliberate move and has a powerful effect, creating a lot of space between the thoughts presented in each line/stanza so they have breathing room. What it demonstrates is a fastidiousness as neat as Robinson’s own, minding the wheres and whens.
9. I like the repetitions. “Consider consider consider the oyster,” (37); “Here, he is hailed, hailed/hailed again…” (54); Burma-shave; “of a lonesome man buying a postcard” etc. (81); “augment, augment, augment” (84); “cement, cement, cement” (ibid). And certain others. But these, in conjunction with the clever, Keesian peppered rhyme scheme, create a wonderful, show-stopping music.
10. The word Robinson. And its constant, incessant, sounding in your ear. Man, it makes you care. Rooney’s own interest becomes your own and the act of reading makes me complicit in Robinson’s being. And guess what? Guess what?! This is the best part: this is the truth. I can’t make Robinson go away anymore. That Robinson’s sad and explosively silent existence is now known, I am responsible for it. And guess what, guess what? he’s not even real in that other way we mean real. No, no, but that’s what’s more damning: what other excuse do I have now? How come not love?
This is made perfectly clear in the last poem. Suicide is strongly suggested, but never confirmed. Regardless, the pensive investigator (just a cop, really), is in Robinson’s house, which “looks the way it feels to read a newspaper that’s one day old.” Some of his friends are there, too, wondering about Robinson, inside Robinson, inside the snowglobe. And then the cop: ” The policeman wants to go back outside, among the lemons & fog & barking dogs./Out where the sun can copper their faces.” I’d like to go back outside, but can’t. I have a feeling it used to be easier before I read Robinson Alone, before I got to know him, less than a day ago. But I can’t go back. “There is no question of my gratitude.”
• • •
It occurred to me that Rooney is deliberately conscious of “For My Daughter” in Robinson Alone. For one thing, she directly alludes to this broader sentiment in Kees, naming Robinson’s principal cat, Daughter. But perhaps what is more ponderous is the type of genetic inheritance, a set of familiar traits emerging to identify Kees and Rooney. I have daughters myself and I understand the dread that motivates Kees’ poem: “How could they entrust/themselves with another life?” But Rooney has refocused Kees’ bitter wit in Robinson and, in doing so, proved an ally, a friend, and a worthy heir to Kees himself.
Consider, consider, consider….
SoftSift 