August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.
There you are, looking like the Khan’s most favoured concubine, but in a London doorway, cigarette and beige Aquascutum, smiling, at me, it would seem, all ardour, woundedness and hope. How would I not have adored you? And you … and you … ‘Dear August …’ Oh, no I can’t, please … The carnage …
Drifts of blue...
The cruise ship heads out of the harbour before dark in the direction of Point Blanco and the sea beyond, the din from the convent playground below having subsided and the sickle moon making ready to take up its post beside Venus and Jupiter, aligned this month, and on display above the flood-lit cathedral.
They erupt like cicada whirr, like starlings...
Sesquipedalian Thomas, aureate Urquhart, Sir Thomas of Cromarty,
author of THE TRISSOTETRAS: OR A MOST EXQUISITE TABLE FOR RESOLVING ALL MANNER OF TRIANGLES, and the most commendable LOGOPANDECTEISION, OR AN INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, dedicated to Nobody,
and, not least, his PANTOCHRONOCHANON:or, A PECULIAR PROMPTUARY OF TIME which, with rare exactitude, traces the URQUHART line...
They follow you around the store, these power ballads, you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs, cookies, 90 fl.oz. containers of anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid, buffeting you sideways like a punishing wind.
You stand, almost hypnotised, at the rosticceria counter staring at the braised lamb shanks, the patterns those tiny, coagulated rivulets of fat make, both knees...
Thass me, your jibber-jabbering Sulawesi booted macaque, most amused to be braining rodents with fig buds from up high, near the tippy top branch of my tuq-tuq tree, and that’s no lie, when you passed by below wearing I forget now which look. You gazed up and smiled, sweet-like: ‘Why not c’mon on down, Joe?’ How’d you get onto all that? And we’re talking...
The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first,...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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