August Kleinzahler - A History of Western Music

 August Kleinzahler, A History of Western Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The old boy is still rockin', don't you worry, although we had this much evidence that he was from, as acknowledged, having had the chance to see most of these poems already in the LRB if not also in previous collections but here they are collected together. He's still downtown in clubs with jazzmen, with the Great American Songbook, with Sinatra, remembering his friend, Thom Gunn, in the style of Johnny Mercer but, not quite as one might expect, he opens in customary, well-advised fashion with just about the best piece that he has and it's about Whitney. 

He's not much if not laconic. It's an idiom that he has made his own, owing a debt to the casualness of Frank O'Hara but with more hyperbole such as, in the ending of Chapter 63, that first poem in the book, with reference to I Will Always Love You, 

                                     if they played that one,

it wouldn't just be you dying in aisle 5.

All the girls would be dropping there like it was sarin gas

pouring from the speakers up there hidden behind the lights.

 

Widely read in his subject, there's an authenticity that only someone devoted to it can bring to it from so many disparate genres, as in Chapter 72, the titles all being such out-of-sequence headings,

And the 'Pavane'...What was it Ravel himself said

after a too too adagio performance years later?

Something about that it was the princess, not

the 'Pavane', that was supposed to be dead.  

 

Chapter 1 (Mahler/Sinatra) must have been written a long time before Trump's excruciating, overly enamoured reference to Arnold Palmer in a recent bunch of spiel that he passed off as a 'speech' but Ava Gardner's reporting back on Sinatra is almost as unbecoming in what can drift sometimes into a prowling machismo although there is a vast difference between Kleinzahler's convincing cool cat attitude and the monstrous overbearing narcissism of Trump.

For the most part, though, these poems and August in general are much cleverer than that and he incorporates his learning discreetly into his art. The idea of synesthesia in Chapter 4 (The Monkey of Light), the desperation of the late night radio phone-in host fielding out of season calls from,

no one calling but the hard cases,

 

the same sad old bachelors  

in Chapter 12 and,

Almost a hiss

An old shellac LP of white noise

Playing in the distance 

in Chapter 5 (Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M.) like the sound radio telescopes pick up from the edge of the universe.

Born in 1949 and so 74 years old now, it's not often that poets set off in a new direction at an age like that and Kleinzahler hears the shipping in the fogs in the bay off San Francisco, there is the old longing and the appreciation of moments of outrageous beauty but there is still the exuberance. It's not easy to recapture the time when one first caught such things but one can continue to catch them. This wouldn't be his very best work but he certainly hasn't lost it, either. The music is more to him than some cliché about it being 'the soundtrack to our lives'. Mine is an essential part of me, too, but I'm not going to claim it as quite as essential to me as his is to him.

On the day this book was due to be delivered Amazon.uk announced they couldn't source it. It's not due in the UK until next Spring, from Carcanet. But I can't wait that long for something from one of my last remaining, very favourite living poets and so had it from Amazon.com, it being published by FSG. There isn't time to wait that long. I want it now. And, as I knew he wouldn't, like an old raincoat, he didn't let me down.