Kathleen Rooney - a bold act of literary mediumship, conjuring Weldon Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his restless journey across locales and milieus and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his skewed humor.

Kathleen Rooney, Robinson Alone, Gold Wake Press, 2012.



The Nebraska-born poet, painter, critic, and musician Weldon Kees traced a brief, bright path through midcentury America before vanishing in 1955, an apparent suicide. Among the poems he left behind are a particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a prototypical member of the smart set—masking his desperation with urbane savoir-faire—and an alter ego for the troubled Kees himself.

In ROBINSON ALONE, Kathleen Rooney performs a bold act of literary mediumship, conjuring Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his restless journey across locales and milieus—New York, San Francisco, the highways between—and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his skewed humor. The product of a decade-long engagement with Kees and his work, this novel in poems is not only a portrait of an under-appreciated genius and his era, but also a beam flashed into haunted boiler-rooms that still fire the American spirit, rooms where energy and optimism are burnt down to ash.

Weldon Kees is one of the more mysterious figures in American arts. 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, 2010) improvises on Kees’ 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’ 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. Rooney’s syncopated wordplay, supple musicality, and cinematic descriptions subtly embody Kees’ artistic pursuits as well as Robinson’s sardonic grace under pressure. An intricate, psychologically luminous homage, tale of American loneliness, and enthralling testament to poetry’s resonance.

— Donna Seaman

 Meet Robinson, the protagonist of Kathleen Rooney’s brilliant novel-in-poems ROBINSON ALONE. Conjured up by Weldon Kees and set loose in an urban landscape, Robinson reflects and refracts mid-century American kitsch, optimism, and despair. ‘What do you / think the post-war world will be like?’ he asks, via Rooney’s revisions and erasures of Kees’ own letters. Lyrical and detailed, precise and ornate, Rooney’s genre-bending text showcases an obsession with literary history. At once repulsed by Midwestern provincialism and fearful of urban excess, ‘There’s still as much of yesterday / as there is of tomorrow in all he does today.’”—Carol Guess

1. Robinson Alone is a book by Kathleen Rooney. She publishes Rose Metal Press which is good for flash fiction. Robinson Alone is from Gold Wake Press you can get it here through SPD. This is the trailer if you’re into visuals and varying auditory sensations:

2. Robinson Alone is in flash poems which are all: Robinson writes a letter. Robinson is a letter. Etc like that. We follow Robinson through his entire life also Kathleen Rooney has written something beautiful. Actually I was so/so for the first 12 pages or so then loved it this book rules.
3. My new things is “just fucking saying it” how’s this working out.
4. I quoted some of the book for you here okay.
5. Robinson Walks Museum Mile
6. The thought coalesces: a snowflake in the muggy air.
7. Let’s break into small groups & save each other.
8. This friend is a blowhard.
9. Robinson stoops on his stoop
10. This is Nicolle again, hi. Also I think that geography is huge throughout the work. Robinson goes to Wellfleet, Robinson goes to Ptown. These are ominous beaches in New England. Ok sorry to interrupt the reading of Kathleen Rooney quotes from Robinson Alone bye.
11. One rule of attraction? Never act like you want the thing you’re attracting.
12. Incompletion makes people want to fill your blanks in.
13. Consider consider consider the oyster.
14. AT RACE POINT BEACH, ROBINSON SMOKES TEA
15. At the sound of the question (from one of the Senior Editors): “Are you happy here?” you know your goose is cooked. I’m going to try to stay away from a regular job as long as I can, unless something so tempting that I can’t resist it comes along. Nearing the end. Write.
16. ROBINSON ON THE ROOFDECK There’s something sexy in desolation.
17. He keeps looking in the windows. Do you think this means anything? No more paper. Write.
18. WHAT DOES HE WANT? THE FUTURE! WHEN DOES HE WANT IT? NOW! 1939 New York World’s Fair. He was there. He was there.
19. What could have
remained a national treasure, now
seems the last full measure
of obscene sarcasm.
20. ROBINSON BUYS A SOUVENIR POSTCARD
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
of a lonesome man buying a postcard
21. How they hold themselves apart.
22. Ann drinks alone. During the day. For no particular reason.
23. Various vistas opening up here.
24. But he could
start over in the afterglow.
25. I blows kisses in your direction. Love, Nicolle. - Nicolle Elizabeth

 
First things first: you don’t have to be a fan of Weldon Kees to enjoy this book. Shameful confession: until I read the note that precedes the table of contents, I’d never even heard of Weldon Kees or his Robinson poems, which Kathleen Rooney explodes into this novel in verse. And I still know little more than that which Rooney provides in her end notes–that Kees was, as Donald Justice put it, “one of the bitterest poets in history,” and that he disappeared in July of 1955 on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It’s possible that a knowledge of Kees’ life would make a reader appreciate this book more–I’ll leave that to other reviewers to decide. What I know is that Rooney adeptly married verse and narrative and produced a fascinating work of art in Robinson Alone.
The book begins in Beatrice, Nebraska, where Kees was born, a town Rooney describes as “This hateful small. // This hateful empty. Civic & dutiful. / No not beautiful,” which sounds in some ways like the small southern towns I lived in as a kid, where everyone knew your business and didn’t hesitate to let you know it. Some people call it friendly. I found it stifling, and so did Robinson because he’s in New York as soon as he gets the chance, and he knows what he wants. From “Robinson Walks Museum Mile”:

Do museums

amuse him? Yes, but not today. Would he
like to be in one? Of course. Why not?

An object of value with canvas wings,
an unchanging face in a gilt frame, arranged–

thoughtless, guilt-free, & preserved
for eternity. Robinson does want to be

exceptional. He knows he is. He wants to be
perceived exceptional.

It’s fascinating the way Rooney casts Robinson as both confident in his abilities as a musician and artist and yet self-negating, unsure, as though he can’t be considered a success unless others recognize him as one.
I’ve had mixed feelings about novels in verse in the past, perhaps because I’ve felt that too often the poetry gets sacrificed to the story. That doesn’t happen here. Read these lines aloud and listen for the music in them:

Robinson Ice-Skates at Rockefeller Center

though he’ll readily admit: he’s no outdoorsman.
Natural beauty can floor him. Then? Boredom.

Yet skating elates. Skating exhilarates. Invigorates,
sans irony, his childhood memory: iron skates

made in his grandfather’s factory. Racing
across the ice, Robinson traces ampersands.

The energy of the first lines is palpable, and the repeated long a’s in lines 3-6 make the poem pick up speed until we’re flying along the ice along with Robinson until two-thirds of the way through

Robinson imagines a fight inside him: anomie

v. bonhomie, each a skate blade–no,
a pistol. Cruel smile v. nice. Each taking twenty

paces then facing off. A duel! Who’ll win?

As I read about Robinson’s relationship with his wife Ann, I couldn’t help but think of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Ann isn’t portrayed here quite like Zelda Fitzgerald or Viv Eliot–an artist in her own right bled dry by her husband and institutionalized when she became inconvenient–but she does share their fate. She’s an alcoholic who has a psychotic episode and who winds up institutionalized and divorced, and left behind.
Rooney makes use of her prodigious personal talents throughout this book, but she’s also good at making use of found text. She created 15 centos out of Kees’ writing, all titled “Robinson Sends a Letter to Someone.” They trace Robinson’s decay. In Cento II, for example, Robinson is formal, straight. His letter to the unnamed someone is about his worry that he’ll be drafted (World War II was raging at the time) and the language reflects his terse worry. “Everyone said that if you told the draft / board you were a bedwetter / you were a cinch for Class 3D,” he says, while noting that his attempts to look for a job have been hampered by his high eligibility status. But by Cento VIII, Robinson is having problems:

I find myself becoming more & more anti-social:
it is an ordeal to get myself out of the house
& there are fewer people I care about seeing.
It may be the end of New York as a romantic idea.

By Cento XIV, it’s clear the end is nigh for Robinson. “Had any interesting dreams? / I am discouraged, indeed, about my own dream life–/ repetitive & moth-eaten–so tiresome / I’d give a good deal not to have them any more.”
And yet, for me, the most painful moment of the book doesn’t involve Robinson at all. It’s a poem about his cat, left alone as Robinson neglects everything near the end of his life. Rooney writes “the cat walks the keys of the piano / all night, longing / for a hand to gently remove him.” The cat’s name is, appropriately enough, Lonesome.
This isn’t a new story–a recent study from Sweden found that people in what researchers called “creativity-based careers” were more likely to suffere from bipolar disorder, and authors were about twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population. So it’s fair to ask, do we really need to read this story again? I think, in this case, the answer is yes.-
Brian Spears

Poetry is intimate by nature. Consider how it is consumed: slowly, first with the eyes or ears, then steeped within the body until the language is unraveled and revealed. If prose is drip coffee, poetry is a French press. A poem must make direct, lasting contact with the self who invites it in. However, many levels of intimacy which poetry is capable of producing are frequently overlooked. Poems have a tendency to exist independently of a larger narrative—they shy away from deep character development.
Enter Kathleen Rooney. An already accomplished Chicago poet and professor, her newest collection, “Robinson Alone,” is a brave and extended meditation on a specific character (the titular Robinson) whose life and losses are fully witnessed throughout the book. This is art that stitches itself between the world of poetry and of the novel. Furthermore, the book is an homage to the late Weldon Kees, whose poem “Robinson” (originally published in the New Yorker in 1945) and whose life inspired Rooney’s project. This is a book of remarkable, deliberate poetry:
She used to walk through the house, skirt rustling
like rain. How was he to know she’d end up drunk—

face puffed like a corpse in a lake? that they’d grow
as capable of savagery as they used to be of grace?

Long before the strain of life on the coasts, they
toasted each other after work at night, getting tight

together on gin & 7 Up. When it got too late
for her to read, or him to type, they’d fall asleep,

& share the same dreams, & sometimes wake up
in the middle of a thunderstorm.
The experience of reading “Robinson Alone” is an extraordinary one. No doubt many will find themselves finishing the work in one sitting, quickly immersed in both the language and the study of Robinson as a man, an intellectual, and a deeply introspective, haunted protagonist. And yet the most impressive quality of this collection is its ability to provide us with a compelling narrative while still maintaining a commitment to each individual poem’s substance. “Robinson Alone” is an incredible accomplishment, a wonderful read, and further proof that Kathleen Rooney is a poet of depth, grace and astounding empathy. - Raul Alvarez

1. Excuse me for beginning with a rather longish question. Weldon Kees and Robinson are so durably linked, a bit inexplicably since Kees created a great deal of art, and “Robinson” appears in but four poems (to my knowledge). What is it about Robinson that emits such power? To borrow a term from Kees, what does it mean to be “Robinsonian?”
Actually, one of the things that makes those poems so compelling and unsatisfying is that there are four of them. If Kees had followed the rule of threes, then they’d probably be known as the Robinson Trilogy, and that would be that: done. But there’s something about there being four of them that calls for addition. Four is a bad luck number in Japan associated with death. I think that I—and other people who’ve done individual Robinson poems over the years since Kees vanished—read the fact that there are four of them as a kind of permission or even an invitation to take over. Like he’s saying “Obviously, guys, I wasn’t finished.”
As to what it means to be Robinsonian, not to be glib, but the poems in Robinson Alone are kind of an attempt to figure that out. Kees’ Robinson is stylish, worldly, and extremely anxious, but these are four very mysterious poems that present themselves as mysteries that open up onto other mysteries.

(book here)
 2. What is your opinion on fame in a writer’s life? Follow up: would you like to be famous?
Wait—you mean I’m not famous?
J/k! Fame in a writer’s life and fame in general is fascinating, but as an ontological state that a person has to inhabit, it seems dangerous—a trap. Last Fall, I read Eileen Simpson’s excellent memoir Poets in Their Youth which is about her marriage to John Berryman, but it’s also about how so many of those mid-century poets who were Kees’ contemporaries—Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Delmore Schwartz—wanted to be, and sometimes were, famous. Simpson makes it sound as though any position along the fame spectrum—wanting it, thinking you deserve it, pursuing it, getting it, losing it—made them fairly miserable, although, of course, they thought fame would make them happy. I want my books to be read and I want people to have heard of me, but fame as such is not a thing I “want.”
3. I sometimes think contemporary poets have little understanding of prosody, classical forms, the structural history of poetry. You (as did Kees, of course) seem to have a very strong understanding of these techniques. Why is this important to your poetry?
W.H. Auden defines poetry as “memorable speech” and one way to make speech memorable is to think about meter, syllables, counts and rhymes. I like to read and sometimes to write “formal” poetry (especially in collaboration with Elisa Gabbert), although I’m not a “formalist”—nor was Kees—but these things are like magic to me. Also, anything that helps me to understand the depth of something (its history, like you say) as well as its most minute features (prosody, in this case) makes that thing more fun. FWIW, my favorite metric foot is the spondee because they’re so relatively rare, at least in English: shortstop, snowstorm, ad hoc, heartburn.
4. Carol Guess mentions the “Revisions and erasures of Kees’ own letters.” Can you discuss that process?
There are 15 pieces in the book which have the title “Robinson sends a letter to someone,” and each of them is a cento. They’re the only first-person pieces in the book—the rest are close-third—and they’re comprised of lines from Kees’ own letters, primarily, but also his reviews, stories and poems. “Cento” supposedly comes from the Latin for “a coat made of patches,” and the etymology goes with the process, which was one of searching for evocative lines that could be re-ordered and manipulated into standalone poems that would give the character a chance to “speak.”
5. How do you read Kee’s final act, the car, the bridge, the disappearance?
Maybe the best way to read it—and conceivably the way that Kees intended it to be read—is exactly as it appears: as a puzzle. A Schrodinger’s cat style mystery with no solution. An artist’s biography that has no ending cannot help but send people back to the work.
6. What causes you despair?
I despair at the idea of a world where everything has either the actual marketplace, or the belabored and ubiquitous metaphor of the marketplace, imposed forcibly upon it without question. It’s gross. The notion that the highest expression of your taste and values is achieved when you “consume” something or “vote with your dollars” is a frame that’s overtaken so many systems and ways of thinking. In his really bitter, really honest publishing memoir, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, Andre Schiffrin writes, “we have seen the development of a new ideology, one that has replaced that of Western democracies against the Soviet bloc. Belief in the market, faith in its ability to conquer everything, a willingness to surrender all other values to it and even the belief that it represents a sort of consumer democracy—these things have become the hallmark of publishing.” I’d say that the belief is rampant not just in publishing, but in general, and the lack of resistance this frame has met with seems hazardous. Thinking of people, of ideas, of art, of education, of whatever as only being worth some kind of monetary figure, and then subsequently hierarchizing the value of any given person place or thing based on that figure seems, ironically, like an impoverished and lazy way of looking at the world.
7. What are advantages and disadvantages to persona poems?
It’s you but it’s not you. Berryman is Henry isn’t Berryman. Kees isn’t Robinson is Kees. I am not Kees/Robinson are me. I love the kind of first person that Whitman does in “Song of Myself”—“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”—but sometimes that reads (or mis-reads) as vain or self-centered. So the persona poem is a great opportunity to empathize and identify but not to lose your “self.” You can use the persona to get at concerns you have for real but with a filter that causes you to express them—and your reader to experience them—differently, and maybe better.
8. There’s a lot of play in these poems. Sparks of joy. Language revelry. Is that important to your work?  
Yes! Because of how Kees’ life ended—a probable suicide (although maybe not)—there’s a temptation to read his work as more gloomy or depressive than it actually is. His poems are smart, fun, funny and playful—they’re game-like. I feel like my non-Robinson solo stuff and the work I do with Elisa is also fairly playful. But I tried hard to make Robinson Alone as playful—at least on a linguistic level—as possible, even when the subject matter is melancholy because that seemed truest to Kees’ life and work.
9. I’ve rarely read poetry this tight. Very, very precise. Quick, stark images. Tight observations. Get in, get out. Can you discuss revision?
Thanks. I wrote and revised this book (on and off, but still) for about ten years.  So it was approximately one decade of researching and writing and revising all at the same time. There’s a tendency, I think, to consider research, writing, and revision as three separate processes, but of course, in most cases, they’re all sort of happening simultaneously, and that was the case with this book, definitely. It kept changing shape, and I call it a novel in poems because I was dealing with a narrative arc and a structure that are like those you’d find in a long work of fiction.
10. When writing, how do you know when a poem of yours is finished?
Funny thing: I tend to know quickly when something is finished. It takes me longer, usually, to know that it’s “good.” Often, after leaving it alone for a while, I’ll conclude that a “done” piece is just not ever going to be something I’d want to show anyone, no matter how much revising I’ve already done to it.
11. You publish individual texts in print and online. Will you talk about that decision? Do you consciously try to publish in both mediums?
Yes, I make an effort to publish in both because I like both a lot. And I dislike the binary, zero-sum game of print versus electronic that the “media” or whoever like to endlessly hype. Henry Jenkins terms the way that new and old media can and do exist synergistically “Convergence Culture” and it’s a super-sane, super-useful concept: “Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to co-exist with emerging media. That’s why convergence seems more plausible as a way of understanding the past several decades of media change than the old digital revolution paradigm had. Old media are not being displaced. Rather their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies.”
12. I find the ordering of these poems purposeful and exquisite—from the beginning page we are going on a journey, an inner and outer quest. I suppose the book is a novel in poems. Will you discuss writing the actual poems? Did you write them in the order they appear?
Thanks! Like I mention above, I definitely do consider it a novel in poems, which maybe is kind of like a linked collection of short stories or a novel comprised of short stories. I drafted a whole bunch of poems that were meant to be able to stand totally alone (just intrinsically and then also for when I wanted to try to have them published in journals), but did so while thinking, too, of how they might eventually go together. So I went through several drafts of the manuscript before it got to its current 130-page length and structure. For example, the book ended up having three main (though not equal in size) sections: New York, a trip from one coast to the other, and San Francisco. So once I realized that that was how the format would be, I had to go back to the poems from each point in the narrative and cut the ones that weren’t working or didn’t fit, and then in a lot of cases to write new poems that would make that arc make sense.
13. Robinson thinks about a system for processing doubt. Let’s assume poetry is also a system. What do you think poetry is a system for?
It’s a system for getting lost in a flow state and learning stuff.
 14. What is the best part of writing for you?
It’s an unbreakable tie between getting lost in a flow state and learning stuff. - interview by sean lovelace



Two poems from Kathleen Rooney's Robinson Alone Provides the Image

Robinson's Hometown

has nothing to do with Dante. You say
it with an accent: you say it Be-at-trice.
A dirt road lined with leafless trees.
Smokestacks. Some background.
A slight white kid in white kid shoes
& a dress with ruffles & three pearl
buttons. Structures skidded against
the flat flat plains, all rising vertical
sightlines man-grown or man-made.
The corn bursting. The First Presbyterian
Church. The Institution for Feeble-
Minded Youth. The football games
& the Buffalo Bill Street Parade
& Robinson acting in elementary
school plays: Sir Lancelot once,
& Pinocchio, obviously. A little man.
Robinson reading on the family porch.
Torchsongs wafting from the nighttime
radio – AM broadcasts lofting
like ghosts from real cities. This
& his mother's artful research – her side
is descended from the Plantagenets,
maybe signed the Magna Carta – &
his suffragette Aunt Clara giving him
a French dictionary for high school
graduation chart it out for Robinson:
most of the world is not in Nebraska.
Robinson lacks patience for too much
prelude, rude though it is to be so
fidgety, ungrateful. This hateful small.
This hateful empty. Civic & dutiful.
Not not beautiful. These moldered.
These elderly. Soon-to-be outgrown.
He simply must. Or bust. A loner
ill-suited to being alone. In a double-
breasted suit. En route to elsewhere.

Robinson Walks Museum Mile

the ideal city building itself in his brain.
Is this mile magnificent? He's lived here
a while, but the mile feels unreal. Robinson's
training himself to act blasé. Do museums
amuse him? Yes, but not today. Would he
like to be in one? Of course. Why not?
An object of value with canvas wings,
an unchanging face in a gilt frame, arranged –
thoughtless, guilt-free, & preserved
for eternity. Robinson doesn't want to be
exceptional. He knows he is. He wants to be
perceived exceptional. Trains plunge by, steam
rising from the grates. Sing, muse! of a man
ill-met at the Met. A man on his lunch break,
heading for a heartbreak, a break-up with Time.
A break-up with time? Feeling filled with ice,
the way you chill a glass, Robinson passes
the National Academy. He craves a sense
of belonging, not to always be longing. To be
standing in a doorway, incredibly kissable,
not waiting at the four-way, eminently missable.
Is this mile magnanimous? He wants it
unanimous: that this is his kind of town –
up & down & including Brooklyn. The sky
is clearing, but the isolation sticks.
Robinson's not sure what a camera obscura
is for, but he thinks he should have
his portrait done with one. Faces
blur by as he heads toward the Frick.
Something used to photograph the obscure.



Southern Wind, Clear Sky

Hokusai says the morning is clear, but it’s never really clear around Mount Fuji

Mount Fuji is an active volcano, so we can never get entirely comfortable

People have their theories, but nobody knows for sure what the Fuji part of the name Mount Fuji actually means

Mount Fuji may not be red, but children will tell you the sky isn’t blue

In Japan, traffic lights are considered to be red, yellow, and “blue,” whether one is near Mount Fuji or not

The closer you get to Mount Fuji, the more unattainable it seems

Hokusai did 36 woodblock print views of Mount Fuji, but was never fully satisfied

This particular woodblock is a study in treeline and stratus over Mount Fuji

When the wind hits Mount Fuji from the south, the eye becomes restless

Those near Mount Fuji have longer life spans, but not because of their proximity to the mountain

The trees on Mount Fuji in the 1700s have been replaced by crowds of climbers in the 21st century

The rivulets, the rivulets on Mount Fuji are snow, not ash, I assure you

What if I told you no one has ever looked into the top of Mount Fuji?

There are 36 views of Mount Fuji; this is only one