The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees PDF Author: Weldon Kees
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803278097
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance of one of America's most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914-55). --University of Nebraska Press.

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees PDF Author: Weldon Kees
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803278097
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance of one of America's most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914-55). --University of Nebraska Press.

The Poetry of Weldon Kees

The Poetry of Weldon Kees PDF Author: John T. Irwin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142142262X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
A study in how a poet’s corpus is remembered after he vanishes. Weldon Kees is one of those fascinating people of whom you’ve likely never heard. Most intriguingly, he disappeared without a trace on July 18, 1955. Police found his 1954 Plymouth Savoy abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge one day later. The keys were still in the ignition. Though Kees had alluded days prior to picking up and moving to Mexico, none of his poetry, art, or criticism has since surfaced either north or south of the Rio Grande. Kees’s vanishing has led critics to compare him to another American modernist poet who met a similar end two decades prior—Hart Crane. In comparison to Crane, Kees is certainly now a more obscure figure. John T. Irwin, however, is not content to allow Kees to fall out of the twentieth-century literary canon. In The Poetry of Weldon Kees, Irwin ties together elements of biography and literary criticism, spurring renewed interest in Kees as both an individual and as a poet. Irwin acts the part of literary detective, following clues left behind by the poet to make sense of Kees’s fascination with death, disappearance, and the lasting interpretation of an artist’s work. Arguing that Kees’s apparent suicide was a carefully plotted final aesthetic act, Irwin uses the poet’s disappearance as a lens through which to detect and interpret the structures, motifs, and images throughout his poems—as the author intended. The first rigorous literary engagement with Weldon Kees’s poetry, this book is an astonishing reassessment of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted writers.

Aspects of Robinson

Aspects of Robinson PDF Author: Christoper Howell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Kees was, I believe, one of the four or five most talented members of his generation. And this is the great post-modern generation of American poets which includes Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Theodore Roethke. That these other writers are so widely known and discussed while Kees is so forgotten seems strange indeed. -Dana Gioia, "The Achievement of Weldon Kees"

Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation

Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation PDF Author: Weldon Kees
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803278080
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Before he vanished in the fog of San Francisco, Weldon Kees (1914?55) was a poet, storyteller, critic, painter, musician, and filmmaker. What remains is a body of work and a large collection of letters that shed light on Kees?s complex personality. Robert E. Knoll traces the odyssey of a Nebraska boy who made his way in a fiercely competitive national scene, befriending the movers and shakers of the art worlds on both coasts. Kees?s letters?satirical, witty, poetic, gossipy, intensely individual?provide the feel of lives being lived, of a career going forth, and finally, of the darkness that engulfed him when, in Knoll's phrase, he was "ten minutes from triumph."

Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees

Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees PDF Author: Weldon Kees
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803278066
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
By the age of thirty, Weldon Kees (1914?55) was a poet, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, and short story writer living in New York City. Despite a contract for aøforthcoming novel, however, he stopped writing fiction, moved to San Francisco, and worked as an artist and filmmaker. On July 18, 1955, his car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he has not been seen since. These stories by Kees, predominantly set in Depression-era mid-America, feature bleak, realistic settings and characters resigned to their meager lives. The owner of an auto parts store occasionally "sells" his sister Betty Lou to interested patrons; a cryptic message in library books indicates the yearnings of a silenced patron; a young woman taking tickets at the Roseland Gardens futilely dreams of escape from the future she sees for herself; and an old man carefully saves his money to fulfill the requirements of a chain letter only to be disappointed by a spiteful daughter-in-law. Many of these stories are set in the Nebraska of Kees's youth, and they are written from a Midwestern sensibility: keenly observant, darkly humorous, and absurdly fantastic. In this new edition, Dana Gioia has added three stories to the fourteen gathered in the first edition, The Ceremony and Other Stories. The New York Times named that first edition, published in 1984, a notable book of the year.

Fall Quarter

Fall Quarter PDF Author: Weldon Kees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"Fall Quarter is an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college."--Goodreads

Collected Poems

Collected Poems PDF Author: Donald Justice
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Presents a collection of the selected poems of twentieth-century American poet Donald Justice depicting memories of childhood and youth, eulogies for the dead, and reflections of life's disappointments.

Robinson Alone

Robinson Alone PDF Author: Kathleen Rooney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780983700142
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Born in Nebraska in 1914, he followed his polymorphous muse from coast to coast as a musician, librarian, writer, screenwriter, critic, and painter. He is remembered most for his poetry, and for his disappearance. Did he leap to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge in July 1955 or seek a new life in Mexico? In an extraordinary act of identification, poet and essayist Rooney (For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010)) improvises on Kees's most haunting poems, a quartet featuring an alter ego named Robinson. Her loosely biographical, knowledgeably imaginative, and gorgeously atmospheric story in verse portrays Robinson as a dapper,talented, and bedeviled man who conceals his sorrows behind insouciance. Rooney weaves lines from Kees's writings into her bluesy, funny, and scorching lyrics as she follows Robinson from elation to desolation as his wife succumbs to alcoholism and his dreams fade.

Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury

Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury PDF Author: Daniel A. Siedell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803242951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Born in 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska, and presumed dead in 1955 (when he apparently leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge), Weldon Kees has become one of the better-known ?unknown? American poets of the twentieth century, his fiction and poetry largely kept alive by other poets. But Kees was also that rare artist who excelled in many genres and media: a skillful painter, filmmaker, jazz musician, and composer. He was a gifted critic as well, and his criticism bears the marks of his own deep and broad engagement with the arts.øWeldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury is the first book to reflect the full range and reach of Kees?s artistic activities. Bringing together writers from various disciplines?art historians, poets, literary critics, curators, and cultural scholars, including Dore Ashton, James Reidel, Dana Gioia, and Stephen C. Foster?this volume offers a wide variety of perspectives through which to evaluate the meaning and significance of Kees?s achievement. Although the essays themselves partake of the diversity of Kees?s impact on the culture, all agree on one fundamental point: any history of postwar American culture that neglects Kees?s multifaceted contribution is ultimately incomplete.

The Poetry of Weldon Kees

The Poetry of Weldon Kees PDF Author: John T. Irwin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422611
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
People who vanish -- An almost invisible note -- The excellence of Weldon Kees -- "The dynamics of inferential mention": Hart Crane's influence on Kees -- Kees, a learned poet -- "Relating to robinson": mystery and literary interpretation