Sailing to Stamboul (August Kleinzahler's Late Style) — Curtis Brown
1.
As an American poet August Kleinzahler is hard to classify, not easily sorted into the familiar partisan camps devised by critics (Poundian vs. Stevensian, West Coast vs. East Coast, experimental vs. confessional, and so on). He is as indigenous to New Jersey as William Carlos Williams, a formative influence, but has spent much of his life in San Francisco; meanwhile his best readers and advocates have generally been Brits. Basil Bunting and Christopher Middleton were early mentors; Thom Gunn championed him at a critical point; the London Review of Books has been the main residence of his peripatetic poems and essays for the better part of his career. And it was the great English critic Kenneth Cox who greeted him at the beginning of it, reviewing his first full volume, A Calendar of Airs, published in 1978. In that brief, warm, prescient notice Cox laid out the lineaments and likely flight path of a body of poetry now in its forty-third year. He noted the poems’ acrobatic grace (“they gain height swiftly and touch down neatly”), their show of technical variety and contrast (“syntax smooth or angular, diction simple or far-fetched, handling close or loose”), and their “sense of the grotesque and rapid extravagant phrase.” He praised Kleinzahler’s sense of place (“it is a question where the North American winter has been more expertly evoked”) and of tone (“a careful word may be set in a throwaway cadence, slang in a sophisticated turn”), his drive to “extend vocabulary” in the realm of lyric, so as to achieve the “virtues of prose intensified,” and finally his resistance to “imposed or imposing ideas.” Kleinzahler’s “subjects are mostly the basic ones,” Cox wrote. “The weather, food, women.”
Those are still the subjects, if by the first we include the changing light of inner life, music, memory and dream; by the second the cycle of appetites, fleshly and intellectual, of life, love, and art assimilated and rejected; and by the third the long arc of desire and its transformations preparatory to the final salmon run. Kleinzahler at seventy-three is vigorous on and off the page, but his most recent volume, the unjustly neglected Snow Approaching on the Hudson, is a self-consciously “late” book. (“A wreck,” he calls himself in one poem, “but with remnants.”) It is a loose, spindrift collection at the surface but with strong steady tides underneath. It gathers into purposive pattern through thematic and imagistic counterpoint across poems and on the strength of its twinned movements, forward and backward in time: the first from youth to age, the second a mnemonic surge back upstream to origins, beginning with the room where the first poems were written (Rue Duluth, Montreal, 1977) and ending where the poet’s vocation was conceived, years earlier, on a Vancouver Island headland, looking out over Haro Strait, under the spell of Bunting’s voice.
It is the crown of an old tree, fine of leaf and fibril, both continuous with and transformative of the energies that produced it.
2.
The opener, “30, Rue Duluth,” gives a sense of the method.
—Elvis is dead, the radio said,
where it sat behind a fresh-baked loaf of bread
and broken link of kolbasz
fetched only lately from Boucherie Hongroise:
Still Life Without Blue Pitcher.
I read that piece of meat as if I were Chaim Soutine,
with its capillaries and tiny kernels of fat,
bound up in its burnt-sienna casing.
There and then the motif came to me
that would anchor my early masterwork, Opus 113.
No? I’ll hum the first few bars.
The reprised opus would be “The Sausage Master of Minsk,” the poet’s first poem, published in his mid-twenties by a small press in Montreal, equal parts immigrant song and mating call, which celebrated the body as proper medium of poetry and the vernacular its idiom, with the immigrant butcher’s emphasis rather on combinatory panache than prestige cuts: “young girls brought parsley to my shop / and watched as I ground / coriander, garlic and calves’ hearts…My knuckles shone with lard, flecks / of summer savoury clung to my palms. / My shop was pungent with spiced meat / and sweat.”
A charged contrast between the vital flesh of the singer and the dead flesh of his wares animated that early poem. The distance between them has foreshortened in this late one. Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox or Joachim Beuckelaer’s Slaughtered Pig—culinary still lifes en route to memento mori—may be models. Except the carcass here is not an animal’s but a fellow singer’s, “his blood turned to sludge” and with “fat around his neck like a collar of boudin blanc,” fusing with the charcuterie fetched “only lately” into mock-sacramental sustenance. Next to Elvis’ bloated body the other two points in the compositional triangle are comparatively spectral: the young poet’s remembered self in the kitchen as he “made ready/ with the preliminary slo-mo casting about that attends / the act of creation”), while the older self looking back looks on, making ready in his own way, with “afternoon and summer drawing to a close” and the “unlit room darkening by degree.”
There are other objects in this composition: the radio, which after the obituary “resumed its regular programming”; the window “small, / and set low on the wall,” and the legs of pedestrians outside; the sausage links; the thickening soup; Elvis’s “giant gold medallion,” the likeness of which the poet’s lover would have bought him “could she have managed the expense, / if only I would have let her.” Along with objects of the imagination: Elvis’ songs and films; Chaim Soutine’s paintings; lovers’ games and other domestic rituals, gone but recalled; Satie’s Gymnopédies, which follows the death notice; and of course, stray bars from some forty-plus years of the poet’s own corpus. The close reader of Kleinzahler may hear “Winter Soup,” an early erotic poem of joint making (hers a limpid broth, his a greasy stew), written in that same room; or “Where Souls Go,” his breakthrough poem from the early 80s, with its signature closing montage of ghostly radio bulletins.
What this compositional mode captures is time, the sequence of changes in the air enveloping still things. “He likes Time plain, / the better to taste it run out of him / like water out holes / in the Old Town’s corroded pipe,” wrote the younger poet (“On Johnny’s Time,” from 1988). Still in pursuit of time plain the older poet is more apt to catch it through juxtaposition, counterpoint, and perspective than with metaphor. Hence the striking ascendancy of music, travel, painting, and dream as formal scaffolding for his poetry in recent years. Kleinzahler has long been associated with the Pound-Williams tradition of imagism, colloquial statement, and “direct treatment of the thing”; with Bunting’s composition by musical phrase rather than metrical foot; and with O’Hara’s live-wire fidelity to the pulse and nerve of the passing moment. But for two decades now much of the new growth has been in the direction of Stevens and Ashbery, toward resonant interiors and a prismatic play of surface and depth.
The title poem is an impressive example of what this grafting makes possible. Here it is in full:
Passenger ferries emerge from the mist
river and sky, seamless, as one—
watered ink on silkthen disappear again, crossing back over
to the other shore, the World of Forms—
as-if-there-were, as-if-there-were-notThe buildings on the far shore ghostly
afloat, cinched by cloud about their waists—
rendered in the boneless mannerCloud need not resemble water
Water need not resemble cloud—
breath on glassThe giant HD plasma screen atop Chelsea Piers
flashing red and green—
stamped seal in a Sesshu broken ink scrollA tug pushes the garbage scow, left to right, toward the sea
passing in and out of the Void—
vaporizing gray, temporal to timelessClouds wait, brooding for snow
and hang heavily over the earth—
Ch’ien Wei-YenBustle of traffic in the sky, here, as well, on the shore below
obliterated—
empty silkThe wind invisible
spume blown horizontal in the ferry’s wake—
wind atmosphere, river silk
The pictorial mode in this case is landscape painting of the Northern Song era (960-1127), specifically that of Kuo Hsi, whose subject was spirit of place and whose sense of vital rhythm derived from poetry. His treatise on the subject—translated in 1935 “in prose as clear and cadenced as the hillstream of an English fell,” as its publisher John Murray put it—is Kleinzahler’s primary source, including for the quoted lines from Ch’ien Wei-Yen. Other ‘sources’ include Williams for the stepped triadic lines; Pound for phrasal compression and movement against exquisite stillness (the Pound of the “seven lakes” Canto and of the Cathay poems; per a later poem here, Kleinzahler “would always return to that well for refreshment”); Stevens and Ashbery for their experiments in ut pictura poesis. “Breath on glass” is from James Whistler, for the light application of paint producing a gossamer effect the Chinese call mogu, boneless; it is also the transient breath of the poet at the window, who took in this view from the Palisades as a child in Fort Lee, then in recent years from the Sheraton in Weekhawken, his place of seasonal pilgrimage (the “Hotel Oneira” of his 2013 collection). The composition is spatial, its depth temporal. In its apparent stillness the poem passes through these depths with breathtaking swiftness. Stevens described this passage as one from “ever-early candor to its late plural”: the pure notes of youth are subsumed into complex chords, the intricate afterglow of the latter offsetting lost exhilaration of the former. “Snow Approaching on the Hudson” exemplifies the process and is a guide to the rest of the book. Its ferry crossings are multiple: between youth and age, but also between forms and appearances, painting and writing, silk and air, the living and the dead, one’s mentors’ art and one’s own; between an eleventh-century Henan landscape and a twenty-first-century American skyline, filtered perhaps by the English hillstreams and dells of Bunting’s “Briggflatts”; between native grounds and a deracinated imagination.
The vulgar, majestic, ethereal city rising on the Hudson’s far banks from the steep Palisades is the ur-setting of Kleinzahler’s life, and its palimpsestic traces are visible everywhere else in this book: in the similarly situated Lisbon and Istanbul, in “the black waters now filling the collapsed and empty magma chamber” of a 600-foot-deep volcanic lake in New Zealand, in a stray line from Williams about the “moody, water-loving giants of Manhattan,” in the “patch of sea” and “snowy peaks poking through cloud” Bunting gazes out at off Victoria. If this particular motif is large and hard to miss—“to friends departed, see you on the river” is the book’s epigraph—it illuminates the many smaller, easily missed ones that make up the book’s circuitry.
A few examples will reveal how this circuitry works. The image of buildings in the poem above, “ghostly / afloat, cinched by cloud about their waists—rendered in the boneless manner,” is fed by a current of feeling flowing from one that closes a poem a few pages previous, about a late and much-loved cat, “Micino”:
his mortal flesh dissolving at the foot of the fan palm
in the shallow grave I dug for him there, the rhizomes
of the bamboos close by slowly, slowly pulling apart his bones…
A Cheshire cat, then, gradually dissolving, leaving its afterimage in the river’s world of forms. This uncanny effect is pervasive in the collection. One is continually encountering images one has seen before but is not sure where. Thus superimposed, however faintly, they modify each other: to the eye primed by Micino’s fate, “cinched,” “waists,” and “boneless” look more literal and physical, with even “rendered” now shadowed by secondary meaning (you render fat and marrow from the joints of an animal). The mortal body’s delicacy and liquefaction has been transferred, as if subliminally, to the skyline over the river. Not for nothing did we last see Micino crossing in the poet’s Chevy and headed this way, out the Holland tunnel and onto “the banks of the lordly Hudson.” It is where all the book’s souls go.
And not for nothing, those rhizomes in the burial plot. Rhizomes are not roots but subterranean stems that tunnel along horizontally, sending new shoots into the air. The structure of Snow Approaching is rhizomic, its images not rooted but wandering, underground, ever reemerging in new terrain. There is both death and regrowth in this grassy dispersal.
It also allows for the emergence of themes not singly sustained by any given poem. Look at Elvis’ “tongue bitten nearly in two” in the opening poem described above. There it is part of that poem’s grotesque charcuterie, linked to early appetite and late dread. It recurs in the “split tongues” of lizards who “have died back / into stone” in a poem mid-book about the slow retreat of summer heat; then again in another poem in the side of a mouth “gone missing” from another maestro, “perhaps eroded by the force of endless chatter.” None of these poems is specifically about fading powers but that theme emerges from their constellation. Tongues flick forth elsewhere—from delicate, doomed Micino “when he opened wide,” from the mouths of furtive lovers who stop short of an assignation, from Annie Lennox’s lover’s jesting mouth after a plate of cuttlefish in its own ink (“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die!”), from Thelonious Monk in his “gnomic shorthand” of grunts to bandmates in his last years, from the cats in that room where Monk ceased to play, “licking themselves clean where they’ve collapsed in a puddle of sunshine.” Kleinzahler is the most oral of contemporary poets, in every sense. (“I would go round savouring a phrase,” Cox once wrote to him, in a letter he cites as formative, and used as epigraph to his last new collection. “People talk about the sound of language but the real thing is the taste, in the mouth, harsh crisp sweet pungent, produced by the movement of sound.”). It is natural that tongues and mouths, variously fading or breaking up, should form the oneiric center of his book about last things.
Those cats in the sun are also worth watching. They wreathe in and out of Kleinzahler’s stanzas, and nothing animates rooms real or imagined like a cat. With their wry vigilance, their rhythm and reserve, their unwillingness to ingratiate themselves, their pensive flicks of the tail, and their torpors and sudden athleticism they are figures for the poet at work. They change the subject at will, and like to wrap things up by looking out the window. They are affectionate on their own terms. Their intelligence is not of the ‘brainy’ sort but seems rather to reside in their limbs. They sleep eighteen hours a day, interstitially as it were, so that their dream lives and waking lives seem thoroughly interpenetrating. A cat “stalks the boundary / of his autumn trance” in a 1978 poem, a trance that becomes a dream when he resurfaces in a 1995 one.
There is a superb, very lordly cat in this collection, at the end of a traveler’s tale in “Stamboul,” a harsh crisp pungent variant name for a city real and imagined, a place a different sort of poet would’ve called Byzantium. This feral fellow is assigned roughly the same role in Kleinzahler’s poem as the golden songbird in Yeats’. The lords and ladies in this case are rich tourists upset that their hotel’s internet is down. They are regarded with drowsy disdain by “Sultan es Selatin, king of kings, sovereign of sovereigns,” who
sits atop a pile of carpets, stacked high
in front of the carpet shop, whiskers bristling, and, taking in
the fearful events around him, eyes narrowing to slits,
blinks.
The blink of a cat is the briefest sort of sleep, but a lot can happen in the space of it.
3.
“Surrealism has become part of our daily lives,” wrote John Ashbery in a 2001 review essay. For Ashbery surrealism was neither school nor movement but rather broad cultural development, one with a “irrational, oneiric basis” flowering not only by design in literature and art but unwittingly in “movies, interior decorating, and popular speech.” Kleinzahler having tilled these fields and tapped the groundwater presumably would agree. Ashbery died in 2017, and is one of the many late friends and contemporaries (including Christopher Middleton, Lee Harwood, and Alexander Hutchison in 2015, Michael O’Brien in 2016) who ghost the pages of this book. If “the unconscious has a habit of turning up in unlikely places,” as Ashbery wrote, then so do dead poets.
The oneiric return had become a pronounced feature of Kleinzahler’s poetry with 1998’s Green Sees Things in Waves, which opened with the titular persona’s hallucinatory flashback and closed with a self-portrait as “headed home dream,” and in the middle of which is a double sonnet called “Napping After Lunch.” There’s no door to the daily surreal more familiar than the afternoon nap. The scenario of this one is self-deprecating, absurd, probably post-coital: the poet curls up “naked but for fur as God would have” next to a stuffed animal, “at sea on its expanse” of tea-green comforter, while the room sets sail as a breeze fills its curtains. Light as a paper lantern the poem is even so a complex tribute. It is written “for J.A. on the occasion of his 70th,” and in form and subject recalls Ashbery’s 1975 sequence of double sonnets, “No Way of Knowing,” which took as mock-Dantesque point of departure the experience of “waking up / in the middle of a dream with one's mouth full / Of unknown words.” But the title and nautical theme look past Ashbery to Stevens, whose “Sailing After Lunch” rued the “heavy historical sail” of a belated Romanticism. Kleinzahler’s belatedness is more modest, good-humored and personal. He was approaching fifty, a meridian past which the singular intensities of primary experience subside and recollection, refraction, and recombination afford ampler prospects for expeditions of the mind:
so many towns
unseen at first then bend after bend revealed
the distant slap and creaking of tackle
the great cedar and the fountain’s plashing
I recall, don’t you
say so, say you do
the bays, the teeming estuaries
say to me how possibility’s everywhere welcome
A double tribute in a double sonnet, then, for a triad of poets in intricate relation. Unravelling it will clarify Kleinzahler’s path through afternoon to early evening. Stevens’ sense of historical belatedness—of finding himself “A most inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place”—lies behind the moment-to-moment experience, ubiquitous in Ashbery, of continually surfacing, as if from dream, while the self “disperses / in sheeted fragments, all somewhere around / But difficult to read correctly since there is / No common vantage point, no point of view / Like the ‘I’ in a novel.” And “Sailing After Lunch” is Stevens at his most Ashberyean; its final lines—
…so to give
That slight transcendence to the dirty sail,
By light, the way one feels, sharp white,
And then rush brightly through the summer air.
—sound almost lifted from Ashbery, so much did the latter make this mode his own. In paying respects to Ashbery as a modern master of the oneiric (a form offering welcome possibilities for a younger poet preparing to cross into his fifties), Kleinzahler also credits him for having, as Borges would say, created a precursor in Stevens: Ashbery’s own, as well as Kleinzahler’s.
These affinities draw strength of purpose from latent contrasts. Kleinzahler pulls up sharply at Stevens’ solitudinousness, the longing, as Stevens had put in the last movement of “Sailing After Lunch,” to “expunge all people and be a pupil / Of the gorgeous wheel.” That gorgeous wheel is the transparent eyeball of Emerson’s “Nature,” and pupil is a pun: to be a true student of Emerson, Stevens says, is to be the seeing eye of his transcendental vision. But whatever else Kleinzahler may draw from the Emersonian line through Stevens, he rejects outright this cult of distance and solitude. It’s no coincidence that the next poem in the collection is called “Sunday Morning,” that it begins not with “complacencies of the peignoir” but with the “oddly content” dogs of the homeless, and that it ends with an utterly un-Stevensian, unironic, unforgettably tender pair of lines about the “very delicious smell” of one vagrant for the dog who loves him, and for the poet who in his own passing way does too. Nature for Kleinzahler is human nature, found in its purest form in cities. No one is to be expunged from it. For him not the transparent eye but the dirty ear, even the inner chambers of which teem with voices: those of crowds and seaplanes “trembling in the curtains”; a “fading steel guitar” from offshore; the radio in the next room “glowing, / adrift like a dinghy”; then deeper still, presumably from childhood, snatches of an advertising jingle, followed by a grandmother’s wind chimes, then a thunderclap.
In that movement from things unmoored and estuarial toward sources and origins lies both the kinship and the contrast with Ashbery. For both poets the oneiric is neither discrete activity nor consciousness’ shadowy antithesis but rather an integral part of waking life. In Ashbery it manifests chiefly as a special form of forgetfulness, of continually “cresting into one’s present” while what precipitates that present flees from the mind, as swiftly and surely as the hind in a Wyatt poem. These are conditions in Ashbery both of individual experience and of cultural climate. Not for nothing did Ashbery once tell a New Yorker writer that he could not remember by heart a single poem he’d ever written. Ashbery in this way revises but does not discard the ancient mnemonic function of poetry. His crystalline structures make fleetingly visible an ongoing oblivion.
Dispersal for Kleinzahler is part of a larger cycle that includes recovery and reconstitution. When the I is at the brink of dissolution it is re-endowed with constitutive experience, reintegrating in fresh dislocation. There had been hints of this in the early books. “The ways water finds to undo / the bonds of solid things” begins one early poem. “Fugitive scattered pieces / are called back to their nature / light pouring through muslin / in a strange, bare room” ends another. With the multiple displacements of middle age and the turn to prismatic retrospection this cycle becomes central to the poetry from Green onward. One begins there to see the ‘rhymes’ of space, place, and psyche brought to magisterial effect in Snow Approaching on the Hudson. “The local is the only universal,” Williams had written, following Dewey: with his transpositions and superimpositions Kleinzahler both honors and defies the dictum.
“Listening in April: Time Zones (Sydney, Virginia, San Francisco),” also from Green, best captures this process and in hindsight is the poem that pointed the way forward. It is in an aural triptych with three panels of mixed, impure sound. It opens with a storm in the antipodes, the roar and stream of which envelop the night work of a pair of immigrant office cleaners, a couple, by evidence of surname probably Portuguese by way of Angola, thus at a double remove from the “thin plaintive guitar and fado” that comes from their tape player; a sound in turn almost, but not quite, obliterated by the mingled noise of thunderstorm and vacuum cleaner. The next panel shifts back fourteen hours (as it were) to birdsong in Virginia, braided with the postprandial clatter of silverware in a college refectory, and the weeping of the school dietician at the end of an affair; all of it pushed to the brink of comedy by the croaking of frogs:
And now the damn peepers starting in, to boot,
with their wall of noise from the lake nearby,
the pitiless chorus her sobs dig into
like some low coughing horn—
fifty, fifty, fifty.
We are closing in on the condition of the poet. Dislocation (by turns diasporic, amorous, temporal, and existential) is the governing logic of the triptych, the splicing of sound and layering of place its chief technical means. Both form and theme clarify in the last panel:
I have for several years now,
while sitting here in the tub,
fastened onto how the chattering
of finches and robins,
the hammering, drills and catfights outside,
the shouts, the trucks double-clutching
(now, this instant, midmorning, San Francisco)
make rough counterpoint
or interlace with the tune playing
on the stereo or in my head:moments, half and quarter moments,
ambushed;
accident and artifice
so kindred, so swift and unexampled,
as never to be caught or remembered.
This is a near-sonnet with Poundian echoes, particularly of Canto 79 (which interlaced birdsong, external voices and aleatory sounds with the “pleasures of counterpoint” in the perceiving mind) and Canto 74 (the concluding lines of which joined amnesiac dispersal of the self with a gathering sense of aesthetic order: “so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron / we who have passed over Lethe”). These are significant formal coordinates, for what the poem inaugurates in Kleinzahler’s career is the “History of Western Music” series crowning each of his volumes since, beginning with 2003’s The Strange Hours Travellers Keep. This “history” has something of the zest, eccentricity and compendiousness of the Cantos without their crankery and self-seriousness. The afterlife of the sonnet, the little song, once the idiom of courtly love that sustained it has long dissolved—this might be a chapter in such a history. Another might be the spread of Italian baroque through indigenous Brazil by way of Jesuits. Another, the use of piped music in grocery stores.
Which is to say it is as Poundian in its elastic, expansive, ramifyingly contextualized understanding of song, in its fitful scholarship and mining of documentary material for “luminous details,” and in its improvisatory receptivity to chance and contingency; as it is anti-Poundian in its humane scale, its rejection of dogma and indifference to system-building (the numbering of the “chapters” in this history are random, as if to emphasize the point), and in its genial acceptance that this too shall pass, that if song is a mnemonic structure it is also “fugitive, living a moment and leaving nothing behind.” Music is in this way the human condition writ large.
Thus from chapter 4 (the only one written in prose):
So it was these maps of Migrenne would pass by quickly before one’s eyes, only to disappear without a trace. As to their verisimilitude and utility, one surely would be able to find his way among the cities, shrines and entrepôts, and through the wilderness between. But these maps had little to do with exactness of latitude. Rather, the estimable Migrenne put a prism over this world, in order to color it with his playing, visiting any one place only so long as the reverberation of a single plucked string.
This Migrenne would be a minor figure in the 17th-18th-century obsession with “painting sound” and making music visible. He is a freemason, a friend of Mozart’s who sets out to use Father Louis Bertrand Castel’s “ocular harpsichord” to “illuminate the entire map of the world.” All details of this fantasia are real and check out except Migrenne, who appears to be Kleinzahler’s invention and personal stand-in. What’s the difference between dream, travel, and song for a drifter and troubadour who sleeps on the wing? These form, at any rate, the three strands of Kleinzahler’s oneiric mode, which governs not only the sustained spells of the sleeping mind but the brief syncopes of the waking one.
Alongside the “History of Western Music” sequence (and in the same period) Kleinzahler has been writing another spuriously numbered sequence, this one of “Traveler’s Tales.” They are of a piece with the music poems. And in the writing of Snow Approaching he seems to have begun, then aborted, a third such series for the third strand. Traces of it remain: a poem called “Dream Machine: Episode 22, Take #3,” and several others clearly marked as dream poems. It seems to have been Michael O’Brien, Kleinzahler’s close friend and fellow poet, who put him off this path. “Dear August,” he wrote in September 2016, two months before his own death, in a letter Kleinzahler subsequently shared with me. “I have five of your ‘dream machines’”:
Dreams are a source like no other: however intimate, we have to get out of the way for them to happen, and some of the filters we use to get through daily life don't operate there. We ignore them at our peril, and we let ourselves be seduced by them at our peril…I think you have to let them collect and see what you've got. What you do get, very well, is the slight, almost unnoticed apprehension that accompanies them. And their sometime randomness. But they invite a longwindedness that wears out its welcome…Go on with it, see how, and if, they add up. Don't turn it off.
O’Brien was the sort of deeply trusted reader— Kleinzahler turned to him for “tuning,” as he says here in “So,” a poem dedicated to him—from whom even a gentle note of caution could be decisive. “I'm done with the ‘dream songs’,” Kleinzahler wrote to me a few days later. “How one moves away, or how I do, is wean myself off that cadence, while shutting a few doors behind me on my way out re subject matter. I have a notion of where I want to move next. I'm actually getting close to a new book, believe it or not.” He wrote again a couple hours later to clarify: “I didn't mean close the doors behind me on ‘subject matter’, but a particular approach or treatment of same.”
The distinction is important. For the approach he alighted upon seems to have been to write a collection not of dream songs but of poems with a dream life secondary to their nominal subjects, coursing underneath them like tunnels under the Manhattan schist. We’ve glimpsed some of the procedures above. This dream life is less often described and presented by the poet now than directly, if almost subliminally, experienced by the reader. It unfolds not so much within discrete poems as over the whole sequence of them, usually after rereading and reflective delay. The book-as-unit now has novelistic density. With this comes, I think, a shift in oneiric models from Ashbery and Berryman toward the late German writer W.G. Sebald, whose books Kleinzahler has read closely and ardently in recent years, and figures frequently in his conversation. A plate by plate, slide by slide fidelity to the surface of the world leaves in these pages a spectral residue. Less the daily surreal of consciousness than a seemingly inadvertent spirit photography in the midst of the sharply seen and remembered.
Image rhymes and hall-of-mirrors moments are everywhere. Stairs, parapets, tunnels, bluffs, bridges and waterfronts mazily proliferate. Success in this mode requires each setting be robustly realized in its own right, with rhyming and blurring between them only faintly perceptible, in a manner incidental not programmatic. (Kleinzahler manages literal rhyme in exactly the same way.) Like Sebald, if for different reasons, he specializes in transient spaces still warm from departed traffic. The scale historical in Sebald is here personal and generational. This is a poet whose ars poetica—a sonnet, of all things (“Poetics”)—takes in the air in a parking lot outside a liquor store, redolent with the smell of cheap pizza and up the street from the family synagogue; and whose best-known poem, the aforementioned "Where Souls Go,” finds what he loves well remaining “among pigeons / or clustered round the D train’s fan / as we cross the bridge to Brooklyn.”
The transient, spectral settings of the present volume include hotels, port cities, benches, borrowed flats and launderettes; pockets, passageways, airport roads, and vestibules. The spiritual haunts of a “dybbuk or freak” with a gift for “roaming impostiture,” with travel stickers “sprouting across the inside of my skull—”
not unlike the old, cordovan-colored suitcase belonging to my late Great-Uncle Nandor—
along with the attendant, requisite tricks of mimicry, vanishing
in a trice, transformation, all picked up on the fly, beyond any normal’s ken
and, of course, hidden in a vest pocket, as it were, that served to make me master
of the room in which we all together sat that very same afternoon, the house
in which it belonged, and any number of other rooms and houses just like them…
These are the closing lines of a poem about Chauncey Hare (d. 2019), photographer of homes and offices, “interior America” he called it: rooms at once intimately inhabited and hauntingly interchangeable, delicate as stage sets about to be struck. The long association (rooted in Italian) between rooms and stanzas is deeply felt in Kleinzahler, and he is after similar effects in the furnishing of his: an air of the provisional, even the transferable.
Hidden doors communicate between them. The room on Duluth in Montreal gives way to a pensão in Lisbon where another singer, a semi-fictionalized Annie Lennox, conceived her early masterwork (“Sweet Dreams,” naturally). The passage is by way of an airport road, “all the same, no matter what town you’re in,” but this one figuring as a “slow-motion pneumatic tube” into the Lisbon of mind and memory, an image reprised by the Holland Tunnel in the poem immediately following. These rooms of two troubadours in their early years communicate, so to speak, with that of a third in his late: this last at 63 Kingswood Road in Weehawken, the home of the Rothschild scion and jazz patron Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, where Thelonious Monk spent his final days with “a Steinway, marooned, in a corner.” The house sits directly over the Lincoln Tunnel, as it happens. (Type in that address on Google Maps and the “street view” you get, eerily enough, is from the inside of the tunnel.) It also sits a few hundred paces from the poet’s Hotel Oneira, and it is Kleinzahler’s view from the latter that Monk takes in from the former:
Tugs push garbage scows south to the harbor’s mouth and open sea.
He watches the river all day long. That’s what he does:
what the wind and light make of the water, for seasons on end,
the shimmer off the river at 9 a.m., the wakes the ferries and cruise ships make…
Poems rise to the surface in pairs, then decouple fugue-like to form other pairs. If Monk is contrapuntal to Lennox on one axis (his late jazz baroque to her early techno primitive), he is to, say, Edward Hopper on another: “East Wind Over Weehawken,” named for the Hopper painting, shares not only the setting of the Monk poem (“‘Coming on the Hudson’: Weehawken”) but its ekphrastic heart, and its dark closing lines about the transmutations of desire in late work. And if Monk at the window is the septuagenarian poet of the title poem, he is also that poet as a child, in the Fort Lee house “atop the cliff / the river 300 feet below, black waters trembling”:
where he has always been, a bare Mazda bulb switched on in his head.
It’s always on, this light, with a nimbus around it,
illuminating the big atlas he keeps at hand, lying open in bed beside him.
He riffles through it ceaselessly, like a supplicant fingering prayer beads.
He zooms in on every inlet, meadow, and lacustrine plain,
summoning them up as if in answer to some inner demand, stirring their surfaces
with his gaze, phosphors pooling at the bottom of each page.
This poem, “Driving by Bluff Road Just After Dusk in Late Autumn,” is one of the jewels of the collection. Its long, lucid, end-stopped lines suggest vision hypnotically held fast to and with hard-won serenity reported. The temporal prism is dazzling, and in the final instance both desolating and consoling:
It seems that you, even with all your outward journeying, now find yourself lost,
while here the boy remains, attending to the work you long ago abandoned.
Yeats said the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast,” but they’re usually found together in a Kleinzahler poem, in this case along with the child who begat them both. Stevens is an abiding presence at these moments. “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light” and “The Planet on the Table” are surely near at hand, and it is Stevens who sponsors Kleinzahler’s shifts between first-, second-, and third-person. For as it is with room and stanza—doors opening between them—so it is with mask and persona, with the poet’s many selves over the course of a life, and with the other minds that made his.
The Wordsworth behind Stevens is also a presence, more distant. Lines from “Tintern Abbey” surface in the Lisbon poem—the ones about “lonely rooms,” of course, where “ ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities” forms return to one after long absence. For my money those lines return to Kleinzahler in the Northumbrian accent of Bunting: “Tintern Abbey” was a favorite of Bunting’s, the BBC recording of him reading it was a favorite of Cox’s, and Bunting is recalled reading Wordsworth aloud in the closing lines of this book (“You poured those sounds into our heads. / Who knew what might come of it?”) But it is Wordsworth’s dictum that “the child is father to the man” that haunts these pages. Fatherhood in its many forms—real, fictional, proxy, figurative, absential, or estranged—is everywhere. It merges with mentorhood and influence: sometimes lightly, as in the punning title “Seminal Vestibule”; sometimes with pathos and gravitas, nowhere more so than in the pairing of the memory poem about Bunting with a dream poem about the father, both of which turn on the question of what the young can know of the thoughts of the old. This pair of poems, along with “Driving by Bluff Road,” brings to an elegiac head a kind of encounter Kleinzahler has been staging for over twenty years now. Here he is introducing his first retrospective volume, published in 2000, just after he’d turned fifty:
The older poet finds much to complain of here in the work of the younger one. And I’d be a fool to believe the younger poet wouldn’t find plenty to complain of in my work, and in me. But I’d like to think that he would almost certainly sit down gladly here beside me on this bench by the side of the road, outside the Moon Gate, in comradeship and wonderment.
The Moon Gate Scenic Window is an installation at the Chinese Cultural Center across the street from an airport hotel in Phoenix where Kleinzahler was waylaid between flights. Benches are great places for the stranded and itinerant to hold counsel, so to speak, with mentors, mentees, former selves and spectral others. They figure at key moments in Kleinzahler’s work. The poem that closes this collection is called “The Bench,” for the one Bunting sat on in Victoria, “gazing into the distance” over the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward the Olympic mountains, and closely observed by the young poet, under a sky that “would have been foreign to you, / the light, as well, / but not unpleasing.” In Kleinzahler’s 2004 memoir about his older brother Harris, whose suicide in 1971 has been the central event in the poet’s subsequent life and work, the climax of sibling candor, confession and bonding occurs on a stone bench off Sixth Avenue.
4.
In the late-summer high noon of this autumnal book a “shadow man” wakes on a bench. The setting is Claremont, California, where the dry desert air has a heat it can’t hold so shadows are sharp, substantial shafts of cool. The poet is shooting hoops and the bench is courtside. The man lives there. He moves between “his stations in the park,” seeking or avoiding the sun. He stares at nothing, but “a man is there, present in that gaze”; poets too, as Kleinzahler says in so many contexts, should learn to be still and taste time plain, stare at nothing, let their “days take shape around it.” The word nothing turns in the changing light of the poem, appearing so many times you’d need a mind of winter not to think of Stevens. And this is how the Stevens influence refracts in a poet both humanely alert to his fellow creatures and aesthetically interested in them, and who has learned—from a very different mentor—to go in fear of abstraction. The shadow man is “soundless, / marooned somewhere inside his head”: with those words a door opens on to the Monk poem, for this poem is that one’s shadow, too. There is indeed a single continuum in this book from anonymous cameos to personae to late friends and contemporaries to major formal predecessors like Monk, Stevens, Bunting; all are shades, as well as shadows of each other, and of the poet.
Poet and vagrant never speak but do occasionally wave or nod in recognition, absorbing each other’s rhythms, and the poem has a slow, trancelike mimetic choreography. It lifts off at the end:
Shadow Man is out there now, always out there.
I can tell you where by the hour of the clock,
under which tree, what corner of the park,
almost as if he’s waiting for someone,
someone who, when ready, will know to come find him there.
Whitman is under the boot soles here but so is the dead brother Harris. Harris is the shadow man of Kleinzahler’s poetry. He is everywhere in it. (“Where Souls Go” describes the process and answers its titular question, hence its place at the head of every retrospective and selected edition, beginning with the one dedicated to Harris in 2000.) His fate is for Kleinzahler deeply and mysteriously bound up with the beginnings of his poetic career. It is on Harris’ shelf that Kleinzahler first glimpsed Briggflatts, and Harris’ suicide that sent him west where he chanced to meet its author and become a protégé. A poem of a Montreal nightfall in 1978 (“The Lunatic”) has a last fungo “going thwop in a glove,” which in the version transposed to San Francisco in 1990 lingers for a moment lost
in one band of sky turning dark under another,
falling back into view, falling
out of the sky, pop, a dead wren in his mitt. Let’s
get home, the big boy says, Mom’ll holler.
The big boy and the dead wren are new, and it’s a characteristic revision, with Harris’ presence becoming more pronounced, its contours more distinct with each volume. That presence enables a growing willingness to show a “face naked, luminous with feeling,” as Kleinzahler wrote in his 1995 “Visits,” a poem about visits from the living and visitations of the dead, a poem full of displacements and mirrorings across distances of every kind, which begins with a friend talking about his brother, and ends with another kind of constitutive absence:
…we walked across town years ago
and admired the skyline from Russian Hill.
—Magnificent, he gasped.
—You enjoy tall buildings? I asked.
—No, no, he said, the shapes they make of the sky.
There is not just grief here but a transference of energy. Harris “was a wild, dear, buccaneering soul” and, for the poet, the first impetus to and permission for risks taken. When he comes up in informal conversation there is always a trace of there-but-by-the-grace-of-God-go-I. (Kleinzahler is by temperament and appetite susceptible to Harris’s excesses, but in the swift handoff from his mentorship to Bunting’s, existential risk was sublimated into poetic risk.) Harris’ early departure was the primer for the many others that stir this late collection into song. He is all at once kin, cameo and contemporary, persona and predecessor. In him the two archetypal figures in Kleinzahler’s long oeuvre—intimate other and magnetic, swaggering, vulnerable stranger—unite. “The shadow of the object fell upon the ego,” Freud wrote in Mourning and Melancholia. When a Kleinzahler poem sleeps it dreams of many things, most of them shadowed by Harris.
5.
I want to conclude with a poem from the new collection that lives in that radiant penumbra, and in which much else I’ve described comes together. “Murph & Me” is memory not dream, but its waters are fed by dream and issue back into it. Harris is nowhere in its lines but everywhere in its light, air, and speed. It is a poem of transit and passage, spatial and existential, linking spots of time and chambers of the self as well as the islands and boroughs of New York Harbor, in this case not by tunnel or ferry but by bridge. The crossings “in and out of the Void” in the title poem are seen not serenely from a distance but in real-time shock from the passenger seat of a careening automobile:
…the rolling black cylinder speedometer
flashing green, yellow, and red, holding steady at 65 mph, midnight blue frame
encasing me in terror, where I remain still, sleeping or awake
when I conjure that ridge across the old deck plate and girder bridge
with its big hump in the middle, all 29 spans, the muddy Raritan 135 feet below,
Murph’s foot to the floor as he wove through the pack, growling
imprecations, outraged by the pace of the rest of the world, frantic
to get nowhere in particular except in the early a.m. on the GW Bridge
dropping me off at the IRT on 168th then heading downtown to his taxi place
The long lines surge toward the city but also toward the present, toward the place of writing and conjuring. Note the old Romantic pun on “still,” both adverbial and adjectival: frozen in his seat that night the poet is also still there, awake or dreaming. The dark wood is that of adolescence but also of middle and late age, prismatically combining. Here is the poet’s guide, “at his best, or worst (‘wurst,’ he would have said), in that meat-grinder”:
a heavy-lidded Steve McQueen gone to seed, bald, paunch, sporty double-knit
casual wear of an indeterminate era, banging on his Roto-Matic steering wheel.
Flipper of cars, fencer of stolen goods (“what fell off a truck”), tender and piratical and bloated, Murph is one version of what a glamour like Harris’ comes to if it doesn’t extinguish itself. As the poet’s “unofficial guardian,” he is both family and not family (“Dad loved Murph, and Murph loved Dad. That’s why he let Murph drive me”). He talks sex and lore to the young poet gripping his seat (“Christ, Murph, I’m only 14!”); to the aging one recalling those drives he serves as mnemonic guide, in matters both impersonal (“the Meadowlands and railyards below, Hoffa’s bones likely somewhere near”) and personal:
…Oh, I ride with Murph still,
across the Verrazzano to the family grave plots, the Brooklyn Bridge, where once,
half-way across, he asks, out of the blue, —Howz the poetry game treating you?
Then, in that old-timey, low-rent Flatbush accent, starts declaiming:
Through the bound cable strands, the arching path / Upward, veering with light…
Hart Crane—like Harris brilliant, vital, doomed, semi-closeted, and suicidal—is the poem’s canonical sponsor, and we are both to believe and not believe that Murph can recite him from memory. For these lines are the segue to the poem’s fantastical coda, a montage of bridges all over the world, crossed by Kleinzahler in his itinerant life with Murph “still there beside me.” I ride with Murph still performs the same elegiac function as Shadow Man is out there now, marking the moment when, as Pound once put it, “a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective”; and by way of the same venerable pun, that mainstay from Keats to Yeats, which has Murph still now (dead and gone) even as he animates the living poem, which closes with a line original to Murph—
Check out the knockers on that broad; it’s a wonder she don’t tilt right over
—that is both the lewd and leering remark it appears to be, and a translation into local demotic of Crane’s sublime awe at the two-towered Brooklyn Bridge, its improbable suspension in a “palladium helm of stars.”
Kleinzahler’s poetry was born at that concourse between idioms and will live out its days there. Sometimes, as in “Murph & Me,” he delights in the force of contrast; elsewhere the fusion is quiet or reflexive. Channeling Ashbery, Monk, Johnny Mercer or Flatbush is all part of the same dybbukistic ventriloquy. “Lacustrine” and “phosphor” announce the presence of Stevens, “shingle and sea wrack” that of Pound, or of Pound-in-Bunting. And so on. In casual contexts and even at his most performatively New Jerseyan, his conversation teems with Latinate bookishness as well as colloquial Britishisms. For all its fidelity to the local his poetry has no pure mother tongue; all is dialect.
This, finally, may be another reason he has found a readier readership among the British. “I knew that the American language must shape the pattern,” wrote Williams when he sat down to reflect on his beginnings. That it did, and not only of his own work. It became the dominant idiom of American poetry since Modernism, so much so that it can be difficult for contemporary students to see what was radical and singular about Williams, who to their ears sounds perhaps a little informal, but in a way that is, well, perfectly ‘natural’. Something like the reverse process was unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic, with the very idea of a dominant, neutral poetic idiom losing sway and the imperial tongue devolving, as it were, into a mosaic of dialects. The British modernists were brightly alive to this process and to their place within it. Bunting at the headwaters is both local bard and deracinated cosmopolitan one, but little of the familiar “English poet” in between. (London, Paris, Rapallo and Shiraz were in this sense all equidistant from Northumberland.) Kleinzahler imprinted on Bunting, and learned from him to forge a syntax that joined metropole to hinterland. He was also close with Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Christopher Logue, Gael Turnbull, Tom Pickard and others associated with the “British Poetry Revival,” and has as much in common with those raffish heirs to a broken estate as with the suave new gentry of the New York School.
If these latter too are family then he is a wayward son. From O’Hara he learned to deploy a seemingly loose, chatty matrix of details that suddenly gels with epiphanic force. Like O’Hara he is a master of the urban cameo, of a form of offhand intimacy that spans friendship, eros, encounters with strangers, and affinities with fellow artists. But for O’Hara that sense of fraternity formed a glittering bridge between prewar Paris and postwar New York, the twin capitals of mid-century bohemia as well as high culture. Kleinzahler’s New York is a darker place and its bridges lead elsewhere. His tone is less evenly ebullient and his cosmopolitanism eschews pedigree. The preference, both in strangers on the street and peers on the page, is for the marginal, the underappreciated and the unassimilable.
As for Ashbery, Kleinzahler has his technical range, his aversion to eloquence and sententiousness, his love of non sequitur, his willingness to break his staff and abjure rough magic, to dwell instead in that zone where a sentence wakes in the folds of its predicate and forgets its dreaming subject. He does not have Ashbery’s gift of abstraction, nor probably has he ever wanted it. From Storm Over Hackensack to Snow Approaching on the Hudson he has always been a poet of the weather, never of what Ashbery calls “climate.” Meanwhile his sympathetic imagination is of a different order. The poetry is warm, populous, and animated by other selves in a way that Ashbery’s is not. It is a major body of work, coming now to a late fullness, and claiming its place in the larger constellation.
***
Curtis Brown is a writer and teacher living in Montreal. His work has appeared in Bidoun, San Francisco Magazine, and Al Jazeera America. He can be found on Twitter.