"He is a kind -- the Gnostics have a word -- a demigod, a demiurge, an incarnation spirit. It's a kind of spirit with destructive powers, too. So for us, there is a kind of, I don't want to call it cult, but he kind of has a religious dimension.
"There's a famous paragraph, at least to the Kees-heads, written by Donald Justice in the preface to The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees.He writes, 'For Kees is one of the bitterest poets in history. ... Kees lived in a permanent and hopeless apocalypse. Yet he appears to accept whatever is, however terrifying or ridiculous it may seem, with the serenity of a saint.'
Weldon Kees, icon.
James Sanders
Related Content
More About
"My contention is that Kees provides a kind of saintlike character, a secularized saintlike character, that relates to the kind of vocations his followers have taken on. They seem to share the same risks, the same kinds of cultural view, the same kind of appreciation for how hard it is to make it in whatever they try to do. The risks taken to be a poet, to be a journalist, whatever -- Kees embodies that. But he shows the dangers of that. He's the best and worst examples of what a talented person can be."
During the quarter-century of Weldon Kees' postmortem renaissance, San Francisco has indulged a strain of psychic fretting that Kees and his fans might find familiar. To borrow Lane's characterization of Kees and his Robinson character, San Franciscans perennially watch their city become everything they dread, as well as everything they suspect it ought to be.
The city's official chronicler, Herb Caen, spent much of his career shaking his fist at the skyscrapers that sprouted from San Francisco's downtown during the 1970s and '80s. Yet toward the end of his life, he wrote an essay expressing dismay at what he feared may have been his complicity in retarding San Francisco's progress.
The city's social values and politics still have their roots in the alarm many residents felt at the 1999 influx into San Francisco of highly creative, extraordinarily successful Internet entrepreneurs and employees. The city responded with an impulse to drive them out. But mostly it absorbed them. Places to work and live became dearer since then, making life here available only to the most exquisite of Robinsons and McGoins.
There's a bright side to the fact that an ordinary apartment here costs $750,000, and that a job to pay for it requires a record of breathtaking accomplishment. People one encounters here are interesting, able to hold a conversation about anything, they have so much going on.
And, I hope, they are energetic enough to install a Weldon Kees memorial suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge by this time next year.
