Harry Weldon Kees (February 24, 1914 – disappeared July 18, 1955) was an American poet, librarian, painter, literary critic, novelist, playwright, jazz pianist, short story writer, and filmmaker.

Despite his brief career, Kees is considered an important mid-twentieth-century poet of the Beat generation, and peer of John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell.

Kees Manufacturing Co., which patented and produced corn-husking hooks as well as innovative products such as a window defroster for automobiles and a moving lawn sprinkler that resembled a farm tractor.

By the time Kees graduated in 1935, he had already written and published short stories in that journal as well as other literary magazines such as Horizon and Rocky Mountain Review.

While working for the Federal Writers' Project in Lincoln, Nebraska, and after having suffered the rejection of several novels, Kees turned to writing poetry—and, for a time, engaged in union organizing and considered himself a communist.

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.

A pacifist, Kees left Denver for New York City, where he believed Selective Service psychiatrists were more likely to declare him unfit for military duty.

Although invited to pose in Life magazine's famous group photo of the Irascible 18,[2] Kees and his wife Ann had already driven cross-country to San Francisco in late 1950.

From 1951 to 1954, Kees also made many new contacts as well as renewed old ones in the San Francisco Renaissance, among them Kenneth Rexroth and the founder of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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).

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.

Despite how much energy he put into this venture, which he hoped would bring him some commercial success, Kees found time to produce a fine series of collages.

He then focused on organizing a musical revue, Pick Up the Pieces, which eventually became a much more elaborate venue of literary burlesque, titled Poets Follies, which premiered in January 1955 and featured a stripper reading the poetry of Sarah Teasdale [sic].

During much of July, Kees spent time with a woman he had met while working at Langley Porter, a Jungian psychiatrist named Virginia Patterson.

For several days in mid-July, Kees drank and commiserated with his friend and business partner, the San Francisco newspaperman and novelist Michael Grieg.

The late Joseph Brodsky, as poet laureate for the Library of Congress, wrote this appraisal: His poems display neither the incoherence of nostalgia for some mentally palatable past nor, however vaguely charted, the possibility of the future.

The poem, entitled "Aspects of Robinson," is the portrait of the postwar man of affairs: neither laborer nor magnate, but holding steady—and, at first blush, looking purposeful—within the middle rank.

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.