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.
‘I am well. How are you? It is wonderful here,’ the first letter in this selection begins, and goes on: ‘I love it here; real mad fun. Especially the evening game of gin rummy before beddy-by (9.30); the 8 p.m. cup of cocoa.’ The letter was written on 15 November 1951, a few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in...
A southerly buster off of Bass Strait was raising whitecaps in the Bay and jittering the flags out across the plaza. We were sitting under the famous bare-ass portrait of Chloe. You know the one, in the old upstairs hotel bar, posh. So _______ says to me, he says . . . Wait a moment, you knew _______? Not well, acquainted-like, a snort, or two, or...
Rain a cab you Standing there on the sidewalk, in the dark The gathering thrum as the city awakens
A field of clouds below Below the clouds the sea On the screen overhead a movie
Across the great city They are moving, the two of them The freeways nearly empty In pursuit, being pursued Down ramps, among warehouses A girl in jeopardy A beautiful young woman in jeopardy Before dawn, before the...
Fulcrum Press, a small poetry publisher, operated out of 20 Fitzroy Square in London between 1965 and 1972. I don’t know of a more important or influential publisher of poetry in recent history, or one which achieved so much in so narrow a window of time. The press was founded by a 26-year-old physician-poet from what was then Rhodesia called Stuart Montgomery, the author of a...
Well now, it really is you, and after how many months? I had ceased keeping track. No, not given up, never that. I should die if that were true. But still – was it some affront? You’ve never been this cruel.
Distracted? To be sure; even you can’t begrudge me this: a father, friend, another friend. Death’s visits threatened never to end. I know better than to...
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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