Hi, list!
Thought I'd interrupt my protracted silence by posting my review of August
Kleinzahler's early collected. It originally appeared in the fall issue of
_Harvard Review_. Any opinions/comments are most welcome!
Cheers,
Philip Nikolayev
__________________________________
Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club. Poems: 1975-1990 by August Kleizahler.
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: New York, 2000. ISBN 0-374-52701-6 (paper). $15.
The 25-40 year old August Kleinzahler of these poems, essentially
continuous with the poet that we know today, already shows a dazzling
mastery of Imagist “painting with words.” The selections are drawn from a
few long-out-of-print volumes, and instead of being arranged traditionally
“by book,” come divided into two large groups by coast – “East” and “West.”
While one is struck by the laconic spareness of some of these poems compared
to the recent work, their minimalism hides a compressed exuberance. A high
density of thought and a persuasive earthiness of tone are aided by the
frequent choice of short, chiefly monosyllabic words. The verbal economy
gives freedom to a memorable, image-drunk voice.
Consistent with the poet’s education, his early style is at times
exquisitely imbued with dictions borrowed from the Far East, but retains
enough melancholy to dispel any suspicions of Zen-clarity, as in this
haiku-like stanza: “A cruel word at eventide / and night zips up / like a
spider’s retreat.” The writing is experimental, full-blooded and rooted in
life experience. It reveals life’s raw, harsh beauty. This is a lyric
poetry, peculiar in its self-estranged insight that “the ego is a ghost
ship.” Its subject-matter is “self” rather than “the self,” experience
rather than identity. An implicit Machism is at work behind the scenes – a
monistic metaphysic which takes experience to be the only substance, thus
eliminating the boundary between the self and the world. Experience is
captured in clusters of vivid and often disjoint, montage-like images which
combine into subjective portraits of moments in the universal flux.
The poetic vision is often fractured, yet largely retains a powerful
holistic coherence because it posits meaningful continuities in nature,
where “spirit and flesh played blithely in each other’s yard.” The mind is
mixed with the body and the body with the world, which is itself perceived
in terms of the body – of its various parts, hair, fluids – all purified by
the imagination and elevated to the status of empirical abstraction. There
are many vivid anthropomorphic portraits of weather and landscape; the
texture of some verses has the crunchiness of fresh snow.
Kleinzahler is obsessed with the organic, mortal stuff of life. “Storm over
Hackensack” begins: “This angry bruise about to burst / on City Hall / will
spend itself fast / so fluid and heat may build again.” But the poem itself
“builds” toward a sublime telos: “This is the gods’ perpetual light: /
clarity / jeopardy / change.” In Kleinzahler’s anthropomorphic aesthetics
experience supplies not only the subject-matter but also the poetic method
itself, which is at once somatic and cosmic, solemn and ironic: “the Mind is
a too much thing / cleansing itself like a great salt sea.” The whole tenor
of the volume works against the postmodern “dissociation of sensibility.”
Poetic language reconstitutes the meaningful oneness of perception while
coloring it in turn with its own materiality. Perception is mixed with
language, and reality is style all along the zigzag from Jersey City to San
Francisco.
Finally, the self is continuous trough empathy with other selves.
Kleinzahler portrays people very memorably. In “Where Galuccio Lived,” an
old Italian is characterized tragically through a description of his abode,
vacated by death and now being renovated. Galuccio’s painful loneliness, old
age and even the fact of his death are all unambiguously implied by the
anthropomorphic apartment, but never referred to explicitly. The only thing
mentioned about Galuccio himself is that he had a “busted leg.”
Many of these “early selected” poems have a Dostoyevskian depth, and all
invite multiple reading.
Philip Nikolayev
