By Stuart Mitchner

Nobody has seen or heard from Weldon Kees since Monday, July 18, 1955.

—Anthony Lane, in “The Disappearing Poet”

I was on my way out of the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Preview Sale with $10 worth of books when I noticed a devastated Cedok guide to Prague on a table of discards. Although the back cover was detached, the book was full of information and photos from a time when Franz Kafka and his family were living in the Czech capital. Attached to the ravaged back cover was a large colorful fold-out map of Prague in first-rate condition, which I’ve been using to locate entries from Kafka’s Diaries 1910-1923 (Schocken 1975).

On March 14, 1915/2025 I found Kafka “in Chotek Park. Most beautiful spot in Prague. Birds sang, the Castle with its arcade, the old trees hung with last year’s foliage, the dim light.” Even if you can’t “be there” in 2025 by tracing his movement on a map, you can at least feel closer to the living, breathing, feeling, thinking man who began the same entry: “A morning: In bed until half past eleven. Jumble of thoughts which slowly takes shape and hardens in incredible fashion.” In the evening he goes for a walk with “the defensible but untrustworthy ideas of the morning” in his head. Struck by the phrase “in incredible fashion,” I looked up his most notoriously “incredible” work and found that Verwandlung (Metamorphoses) was published six months later in a journal and in December 1915 as a book.

The Poet Who Disappeared

When I wrote about the book sale some 20 years ago (“Billy Collins and the Homeless Poets of Bryn Mawr”), “homeless” was just another word for “lost” or “unknown.” At this year’s sale I found a poet who decided to disappear, a fate Kafka effectively chose when he told his friend and executor Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished writing, including the diaries that I’ve been quoting from. The working title of Kafka’s unfinished first novel, published by Brod in 1927 as Amerika, was The Man Who Disappeared.

Imagine a little known American poet born in 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska, who “disappeared” in Marin County, California, on July 18, 1955. Thanks to the survival of Kafka’s diaries, I’ve found the disappearing poet’s vision of life presaged in entries such as the one for March 13, 1915: “Occasionally I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity and of the existence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by undergoing every kind of unhappiness.” And on March 23: “My feeling of ease in my room today. Hollow as a clam shell on the beach, ready to be pulverized by the tread of a foot.”

“The Last Man”

Weldon Kees, the “disappearing poet” called his first poetry collection The Last Man (Colt Press 1943). With only 12 years of recorded life ahead of him, he begins “Subtitle,” the first poem, “We present for you this evening a movie of death.” For this film, “the ending is your own….Sit forward, let the screen reveal your heritage, the logic of your destiny.” The fifth poem, “The Inquiry,” asks if you “fear the keyhole’s splintered eye?” The answer: “I fear the eye.”

Part Two of The Last Man, “June 1940,” is headed by a quote from Wilfred Owen (“All a poet can do today is warn”), and ends with a line borrowed by Bob Dylan 30 years later, “An idiot wind is blowing.” The next poem, “After the Trial,” would have sent me to Kafka’s Diaries if I hadn’t already been there with references to “long plateaus of guilt,” “the machinery of law devised by parents,” and “the silent rooms where darknesss promises a final sentence.” Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial was first published in English in 1937. A few poems later there’s “The View of the Castle,” which is mortgaged now (“The princesses were whores”). Abandoned by Kafka in 1922, The Castle first appeared in English in 1940.

New York Years

The Fall of the Magicians (Reynal & Hitchcock 1947) looks ahead to the busy New York years when Kees published poetry and criticism in Partisan Review; wrote reviews for the New Republic and Time; played jazz piano in clubs; reviewed art for the Nation; and began painting, with four one-man shows and work shown at the Whitney annual exhibition in 1950 and displayed “with Picasso, Mondrian and de Kooning at the Kootz Gallery,” according to Anthony Lane’s June 2005 New Yorker profile, “The Disappearing Poet.”

During his time in New York, Kees created a persona he calls Robinson, a variation on T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Sweeney, as well as the name Kafka used for one of the antagonists in The Man Who Disappeared. As Lane puts it, “Robinson” is the only one who knows why Kees abandoned his car on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the only witness who could verify reported post-1955 sightings of Kees in New Orleans and Mexico.

Intimations of Frankenstein 

Although Robinson first appears in The Fall of the Magicians (“the dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over”), he shows up three times in Poems 1947-1954 (San Francisco 1954), Kees’s last act. In view of what happened or didn’t happen at the Golden Gate Bridge, the most haunting lines relate to his first appearance: “All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson calling. It never rings when he is here.” He sounds like a dandified Prufrock in “Aspects of Robinson,” which ends with his “covert topcoat” and “clothes for the spring” covering “His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.”

“Robinson At Home” wakes in sweat to “the terrible moonlight and what might be silence…And the long curtains blow into the room.” In “Relating to Robinson,” the poet is “walking in the twilight toward the docks” when “I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me…We were alone there he and I, inhabiting the empty street.” The meeting becomes a nightmare, as if Kees were channeling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creator encounters his creature: “when his own head turned with mine and fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes…I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.”

The poet from Beatrice, Nebraska plays on his Dantesque roots in “La Vita Nuova,” which begins “in the blue heat” and “the burning air” and ends “Under a gray sky ripped apart by thunder and the changing wind.” When he visits Los Alamos in “Travels in North America,” he could be searching for his Virgil among the men keeping watch “on the University of California’s atom bomb.” Kees finds a “fitting portent” for “the Capital of the Atomic Age” in “the peaks of the surrounding mountains, Sangre de Christo, Blood of Christ.”

Prague in New York

With a map of Prague spread out on the desk, and Kafka’s Diaries open to March 1915, I was pleasantly surprised by “The Hourglass,” the first poem in the collection, with its reference to “a state of watchfulness, or the act of watching.” Not sure yet where we are, San Francisco Bay, Beatrice, Venice (“High in the tower of St Marks … spangled with golden stars and trimmed with lapis lazuli”), or it could be a church on East 10th in the Village near where Kees and his wife lived. The image of the abandoned car at the Golden Gate bridge haunts “My mind shaped routes for some immense retreat out of the world of men.”

Kees and Kafka came together for me in the last stanza of the poem’s fifth and final section, “where ghosts take up their wanderings on routes the owls improvised” — “In Prague,” above “the City Hall, Death’s figure stands against the dial of a calendar, and sounds a bell before the hour strikes.” Eight lines later, the poem ends as “shale tumbles from a mountain to a road, a planet surges, plunging, and goes out.”

Kees and the Movies

Kees loved movies. There’s a cinematic aura about the image on the cover of The Collected Poems, edited by Donald Justice (Bison Books 1975). With a cigarette jutting from his mouth, he could be a character in a California noir, a doomed poet or a private eye. At the time of his disappearance, he was running a weekly radio broadcast on Berkeley’s KPFA and had hatched the idea of a new production studio called San Francisco Films that would deliver art-house foreign movies, and American noirs. A frequent guest on his show “Behind the Movie Camera” was his friend Pauline Kael, film reviewer Anthony Lane’s predecessor at the New Yorker. As Lane recounts, Kael was one of two women Kees called that last afternoon, saying “Things are pretty bad. I may go to Mexico. To stay.” He ended the phone call to Kael, “What keeps you going?”

Other BM-W Finds

My first purchase at the preview was a slim volume of poetry misplaced on the criticism table: X.J. Kennedy’s Emily Dickinson in Southern California (David R. Godine 1973), a title guaranteed to hook someone with a weakness for oddball combinations. For the same price, $4, I found a nicely illustrated paperback Coleridge and Wordsworth; The Crucible of Friendship (2002) by Tom Mayberry. This friendship, set to music by Van Morrison in his album Summertime in England, is associated with my British friend. We visited Coleridge’s cottage together in 2013 and were in touch day and night by email until he died in April 2022, a “disappearance” that becomes an “appearance” every time I access our correspondence.