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.
Odd, unsettling somehow, visiting here again after so many years, travelling through town at this hour, the Baixa nearly deserted, then along the river, the lights of the bridge blurred by rain, just me and the Consul’s driver: customised Citroën C4 Aircross Picasso, outsized smoked-glass windows, upholstered like the inside of a leather queen’s crypt, brown Bavarian bull...
I took a walk in the forest the other day, a national forest. I’m not, customarily, big on walking in the forest unless there’s a Hansel and Gretel Bar & Grill about 300 yards in, but I’m glad I did. It was an uncommonly sultry April afternoon for San Francisco, and windless, rarer still.
‘One of the most wonderful places you can find anywhere,’ Will Rex wrote in Picture Play in April 1916, ‘is Fort Lee, that magic New Jersey town across the Hudson from New York City where murders, robbers and Indian chases take place while the police force – his name is Pat – leans, yawningly, against a convenient lamp post.’
What passed through your mind, old man, what passed through your mind back then, staring out beyond the shingle and sea wrack, the islets and rocks, to the Olympics on the far shore, snowy peaks poking through cloud?
I would spot you often on this bench, smoking your unfiltered Players, gazing into the distance, reading the grain of the sea, the currents and wind, as if parsing the...
[3 p.m.]
Loss leaders in shop windows, fog spilling down the slopes of Corona Heights, Twin Peaks, Tank Hill –
my name on everyone’s lips:
– August, they say, with resignation and dismay, pulling up their collars against the wind.
[Blue]
The student doctors in blue scrubs, passing up and down Parnassus to the hospital, now invisible, on top of the hill,
past the...
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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