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The Disappearing Poet | The New Yorker www.newyorker.com

Highlights

who at that moment—one of those wrong and shapeless moments which dog the tragic—was heading out the door to fetch her mother-in-law from the airport. “Things are pretty bad,” Kees said, adding, “I may go to Mexico. To stay.”

On January 22nd of that final year, he and a few kindred spirits had put together an event called “Poets’ Follies,” a mishmash of readings, music, and dance. It was poised, like so many Keesian schemes, between old and new, a rickety fusion of post-twenties burlesque and pre-sixties art happening. Kees read some of his work, as did a local poet by the name of Lawrence Ferling.

Kees had met her because he and Grieg ran a weekly radio broadcast on KPFA, out of Berkeley, called “Behind the Movie Camera,” on which Kael had become a regular guest. Movies were one of Kees’s passions: he had worked on newsreels in the nineteen-forties and had recently, in one of his loftier schemes, mooted the idea of a new production studio.