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Friday, March 29

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On the Web Fri Jan 25 2013

Kathleen Rooney on Nickelodeon Memories, Poetry, and Weldon Kees

Back in November, I reviewed Rose Metal Press founder, Katheleen Rooney's, Robinson Alone, a novel in poems commemorating the life of poet Weldon Kees. Rooney brings Kees back through Robinson, a character of his own making, who featured prominently in Kees's most famous poems. rooney-kees.jpg

I thoroughly enjoyed the book as well as this interview with Rooney by James Reidel, Kees's biographer and author of Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), conducted for the Poetry Foundation.

Reidel and Rooney discuss Kees's relationship to Robinson, the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and the way incompleteness and imperfection bring us together. Rooney says in one response:

In an interview at the end of her memoir The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch says, "I've never met anyone who hasn't fucked up in their life a time or two. Royally. I'm pretty sure that's what keeps us connected to one another," and I'm inclined to agree. In much the same way, I suppose, that incompleteness engages the imagination, imperfection and fallibility make people more human, more like individuals we'd actually want to know. Perfect, or perfectly successful, people are not so interesting, not so instructive.

Read the whole interview here.

(Photo by Beth Rooney.)

 
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