August Kleinzahler - Snow Approaching on the Hudson

August Kleinzahler, Snow Approaching on the Hudson (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)

In Revenue Stream, August Kleinzahler tells of an 'interlocutor' he took a car ride with who takes an undue interest in him and his work,

                               he was determined, all right,

 

to find out what, I could not begin to surmise. About how

I went about stringing these words together, as I do,

 

and he might well have asked. I suspect there's a trick to it as there must be with other idiosyncratic poets with their inimitable styles. Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, John Burnside, none of who Kleinzahler is particularly like but who have found their own way of doing it. And then Kleinzahler adds in a bit of Frank O'Hara's contrived, casual, non-poetry colloquial idiom.

It's been a little while since the last new Kleinzahler but as he hands in 80 pages of long lines dense with words, it has been worth the wait.

The title is Kleinzahlian with several of his previous volumes being threatening ominous weather but the slick wiseguy is 71 by now and even Archie Bell & the Drells grew old and it is to be expected that poets reach a time when their new work seems to be generated from what went before. It wasn't a problem with Heaney and it's not a problem here. Kleinzahler remains exhilarating.

The book could come with its own menu and gazeteer, never mind glossary. There is as much relish for the food as there is for the language, which is place names and anything that sounds exotic. But I've looked some of them up. Weehawken is in New Jersey and a dybbuk is '(in Jewish folklore) a malevolent wandering spirit that enters and possesses the body of a living person until exorcised'. It would appear that things worth writing poems about don't happen to him in places like Portland or Boston with more mundane names but Michael Longley has Carrigskeewaun and so Irish poets as well as American jews have a word hoard of place names that most English don't but I might spend more time in Ashby-de-la-Zouche or Kingston Bagpuize and hope for the best.

Kleinzahler has long been one for a sense of rootlessness and nostalgia for times and places remembered, hardwon like an old bluesman past his prime. Perhaps he's poetry's much better answer to the question that pop music provided the answer Tom Waits. I thought Tom Waits must be about 60 when he was only 30 but August is now going back to childhood and adolescence at times, bringing back characters from the past with vivid anecdote and affection. There's not much in his extravagantly laconic default mood that isn't vivid and there is a swagger even in his elegies. I even checked on some lines quoted to August much to his surprise by his 'unofficial guardian' at the age of 14, Murph, in Murph & Me, in his sedan in all its specified specification and they are from Hart Crane. Had to be, really. Kleinzahler is masculine and his poetry is so, too, which is not to say that the lady I went with to see him in the LRB bookshop didn't love him, too. It's hard not to like the swank and sashay of his performance, either on the page or in person even if he's glamourizing the downbeat in a sort of bluesy way.

It all makes the sensitive moments the more touching, when he not talking about broads, a spicy sauce or the leather upholstery of a choice automobile. In She,

She barely acknowledged that I was there, turning

her head ever so slightly in my direction as if she had picked out

in the breeze the faintest strains of an unfamiliar folk melody,

 

even though we had been lovers once, long ago  

 

For one who delivers poems with such panache and verbal largesse, he isn't half world-weary, describing,

        on the TV overhead the number one ladies' morning chat show

featuring the twin goddesses of our exhausted imagination,

Kathie Lee and Whoopi

 

but maybe it's only the drearier, commodified parts of the debased culture that he's weary of because there's no lack of enthusiasm, his own raw affections or wide-ranging reference points.

FSG might not have minded, but I always somehow will, lines just so long they need indentation. Editing a booklet some years ago now, one poet did that which was a pain in the ass. Sorry about that - neck. One can't help but adopt the vernacular argot. But the long lines are a sort of rapture, carrying the expansive sweep of the language onwards and I daresay it couldn't be otherwise.

It's possible Kleinzahler is one of those poets whose schtick you either buy or don't buy. I've not really bought Allen Ginsberg's since I was about 17. I have my doubts about O'Hara and any other contrivance of authenticity. A poem is a contrived thing and the more 'natural' and immediate it tries to sound, the more contrived it will look. One can hardly accuse poems with this level of erudition of trying to be bar-room speil or the off-hand jottings-down. It's sophisticated and the adopting of an informal tone is only a part of it.

It is, for me, as thrilling as contemorary poetry gets and, with the sad passing of the likes of Derek Mahon, Roddy Lumsden and Anne Stevenson this year, August doesn't have as much opposition as he did a few months ago for the position of my favourite living poet, a position he has in the past been not far off. 

This book won't be going on the shelf any time soon. In fact, some of the back catalogue at least will be coming back out of the top right hand corner of the bookcase where they live.