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.
He looks eerily young, what’s left of him, purged, somehow, back into boyhood. It is difficult not to watch the movie on TV at the foot of his bed, 40ll colour screen, a jailhouse dolly psychodrama: truncheons and dirty shower scenes. I recognise one of the actresses, now a famous lesbian, clearly an early B-movie role. The black nurse says ‘Oh dear’ during the beatings....
György Petri (or Petri György, as he would have been called in Hungary) was born in Budapest in 1943 to a family with a Serbian and Jewish background. A year after Petri’s birth, in 1944, Hungary joined the Axis powers with disastrous result. The war impoverished the country and brought in its wake the Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi, who was briefly...
A shriek hits the membrane
that canopies the street, falls, and the trough gets it. Sediment thickens with it, the dust of voices, the smoky penumbra around street lamps, finally settling to the ground.
A monster stirs, under this midden we love on, chafing himself against the crust, too miserable to rage.
Oat jism, perfume – the radio horn man blows a hole through, again...
Until it all turned into a waxworks The lot of them In the same old rooms Same lamps, chairs, wainscoting The piano still there, out of tune Sheet music under the seat
A period tableau, late ‘50s But off, somehow, dark A hint of menace in the shadows It could almost be something out of Kienholz But eastern, domestic Taped voices issuing from hidden speakers
How strange...
Bolinas is a sleepy little seaside community about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, at the end of a long, windy road over the hills. It isn’t easy to find the turn-off, and over time residents have put up misleading signs or camouflaged helpful ones in order to discourage tourists. For many years a fair number of artists and writers have made Bolinas their home, or one of...
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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