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.
And thus did the Atmospherical Theatre play out, with its transmutations & shifting of vapours, whether the rain-bearing clouds of January riding over our heades like vast Carracks or Bulging, dull-swelling Bas-Releive clouds bloated & pendulous, ubera caeli fecunda: sky cubbies or udders clouds; Enclosed & stufft ye whole visible Hemisphere in colour like Lead-vapours or a tall...
I went down to the corner bar last night with a few of my neighbourhood friends. We get together every few weeks down there. It’s a bit young, noisy and yup for my taste – I prefer the old man slob bar across the street – but it’s become our custom to meet there and catch up.
When the Barocco came over the hill with its cerulean vaults and golden exhortations Otto in the tower took leave of his fleisch, attending to the rumble in the near beyond.
Up the staircase of the Dolomites and along the length of the turquoise river, streaming in channels of differing hue, it bounded like a beach ball across the great passes,
the summer pastures, flattening all that came...
Master claps of thunder, Wrath of God thunder – Sitting on the porch at night and waiting For the rain to fall in Texas;
Or at the Cantina Grill Express In Denver airport, between flights, Watching as you dab at some hot sauce On your chin:
How many times, how many places, Have I said ‘I love you’? How many _____ does it take To change a light bulb?
Watching smoke from the...
In Vanity of Duluoz, a cross between a novel and a memoir published in 1968, a year before his death, Jack Kerouac wrote about the circle of friends he had met in the spring of 1944, on his return from a stint in the Merchant Marine, describing them as ‘the most evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien...
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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