When Thom Gunn died ten years ago I was left no longer knowing who my favourite living poet was. I never really got around to picking one, either. Possibly it was because there were a number of differently but equally well- qualified candidates for the post but more likely because in middle age it is less essential to have favourite football teams, pop singers, colours, drinks or poets to help you identify who you think you are. However, August Kleinzahler was one of the main contenders for the honour had I needed to award it.
The Hotel Oneira retains all the qualities that made him such an idol and possibly, even at the age of 64, is it, enhances them. All the old reference points are in again - the virtuoso, bravura performance using a full range of language from the highly erudite, through exotic names to a demotic register that makes us feel spoken to by someone familiar. The book is prefaced by a quote from Kenneth Cox that refers us beyond the 'play of words' to the 'taste' of language and that is what Kleinzahler takes as a manifesto.
Perhaps as the years go by, he is less muscular, there is a little less swagger and machismo. There is still the melancholy, the elegiac longing, a rapture in a sense of loss and there is still tremendous energy in places but I wonder if it is paced a little more steadily now. We still hear about the aeroplanes overhead coming in to land, the state of the ball game, flowers fading, the sense of the river nearby as well as the jazz clubs and personalities and Chinese culture. Not much has diminished. In fact, it might even be the better for it. The vagabond spirit is perhaps slowing a little and relishing the experience all the more.
Closing it Down on the Palisades recalls a prevoius poem, Gray Light in May, except that the two parts of it are set in September and October but its regret at nothing more particular perhaps than the passing of time, is the same. The title poem is another return - not much happens, in fact he says it is a story he chooses not to know but, good grief, here is a description of heavy goods being moved in the night,
Last night, what at first looked like a giant coelacanth
strapped to a flatbed rattled slowly past,
but it was merely the enfoldings of a tarp catching the streetlight.
Summer Journal is ten and a half pages of mainly short entries, a genre I usually harbour doubts about, but here we get,
The vast, bruise-coloured fogbank
sitting out there,
spread across the horizon like some dreadful prophecy
waiting to blow in.
Time and again, it's good and yet you know it would be better to hear Kleinzahler reading it. He is one of the most compelling readers of his own work among contemporary poets and I really should be finding a CD of him doing it.
There is a pastiche of a Roman satirist, possibly Juvenal, in Epistle XXXIX but it would appear that Thomas Appletree, the Edgiock weather diarist, was real and Kleinzahler's version of him is not fictional. The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay is a baroque extravaganza perhaps loosely on American history. But we are best off on recognizable ground with A Wine Tale, about an old caretaker,
of no particular ambition, wit or aptitude,
whose destiny has been to lift things up, clean them off,
and put them back down again where they belong
in Paradise?
And I notice that Kleinzahler has been listening to Heinrich Biber, mentioning his name once, the Rosary Sonatas specifically and a passacaglia. And so one instinctively knows he must be right. I could see why he might be compared with John Ashbery for his playful associative streams of thought but I've never seen it done and I wouldn't want to do it myself. And I did once see the most inane of associations with Billy Collins but that was made by a scurrilous web forum contributor who was trying but failing to be provocative, as usual. Kleinzahler is, as far as I can see, of his own type and inimitable, a trace of beat poet with his own idiosyncratic mass of allusions and orientations.
If I ever need to say who my favourite living poet is, it will be him.