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6 unusual facts about Weldon Kees


Jurgen Ruesch

In the 1950s, he wrote two major works on communication theory: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951, with Gregory Bateson), and Nonverbal Communication (1956, with Weldon Kees).

Kathleen Rooney

Her 2012 novel-in-verse Robinson Alone was inspired by the poet Weldon Kees and the character of "Robinson," Kees' alter ego persona in a number of his poems.

Weldon Kees

He talked of going to Mexico as an alternative, a country that fascinated him up until then in books such as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

Helm had played with Lu Watters and Turk Murphy, both prominent figures in the San Francisco’s New Orleans Revival Movement, which Kees preferred over Bebop.

Restless and often estranged from his poetry, Kees began to collaborate with the jazz clarinetist Bob Helm in 1953 on ballads and torch songs (some written for the singer Ketty Lester).

In early 1941, Kees signed a provisional contract with Alfred A. Knopf for a novel, Fall Quarter, an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college.


The Joy of Life

The two stories are punctuated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's reading of his ode to San Francisco, "The Changing Light" and bookended by opening and closing credits music from legendary '50s icon (and probable Golden Gate suicide) Weldon Kees.


see also

The Irascibles

Weldon Kees discussed the issue of the open letter further in the June 5 edition of The Nation, calling director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Henry Taylor a philistine.