Book: Understanding contemporary art

Weldon Kees: the Robinson poems

Great Poems #4

(Artwork by Jakob Zaaiman.)

(The four poems are reproduced in full below.)

Wish I’d thought of something along the lines of these poems myself! Instead of the tedium of just another cute observation about birds and mice, Weldon Kees manages to take us out of ourselves and into another realm of experience altogether. The four ‘Robinson’ poems show what you can do with contemporary poetry if and when an unfathomable inspiration strikes. For a start, the poems make no sense, yet they’re very straightforward and easy to understand. No need for close readings and complex hermeneutics. They’re also exciting and intriguing and, best of all, inconclusive. We don’t know if Robinson is real, or merely trying to be real. Not that it matters; anyone can enjoy the stories and their details for their own sake.

What’s going on here? Who knows. Other than Robinson, perhaps. And we don’t know even what he’s trying to tell us, or why, and this keeps the poems finely balanced and uncertain, though without the least sense of obvious calculation. The risk at hand is that Kees will tell us too much, and ruin the mystical insubstantiality of his Robinsonian presence. So it’s right that the poems feel completely unstudied, and look as if scribbled down in the moment. Although of…