August Kleinzahler is a double agent. His poems began appearing in the late 1970s and early 1980s in little avant-garde magazines such as Origin and Sulfur; today his collections are reviewed in The Guardian and The New York Times. He owns up to influences both high modernist (Basil Bunting, Ezra Pound) and countercultural (the New York School, the Beats, Thom Gunn), yet he writes in a lucid style that makes his work available to readers who live outside the institutions of poetry and higher education. He speaks one moment of Bartók, the next of gas stations and liquor stores. His poetry embraces both high culture and the culture of people living on the margins, and it does so as a matter of course. He is unabashedly erudite, yet he writes about poor people and poor places—the “other half” of American life—without condescension or romanticism. He is a rare sort of poet, one who is both aesthetically sophisticated and truly egalitarian.
Kleinzahler is also a man of divided geographic loyalties. Born in Jersey City in 1949, he has lived for much of his adult life in San Francisco while returning often to New Jersey both in person and in his imagination. His writing has long been organized according to an implicit bicoastal logic, but his new split volume of selected poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) makes it explicit: on one side, we read Before Dawn on Bluff Road: Selected New Jersey Poems, and flipping to the other we read Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected San Francisco Poems. These selections make a fine introduction to Kleinzahler’s large and various body of work, framing him definitively as what he has always been, which is a poet of place. He has written dramatic monologues, character sketches, historical panoramas, dream narratives, faux-classical epistles, elegiac songs, and verse essays on music history, to name just a few of his modes, but the locodescriptive is perhaps the one to which he returns most frequently, and the one in which he has written some of his finest poems. Yet while many poets of place are deeply rooted in one particular location—Roy Fisher in Birmingham (UK), for instance, or Lorine Niedecker on Blackhawk Island—for Kleinzahler, being a poet of place also means being a poet of transit.
By framing him as a poet of two places, Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog also helps us locate him in the history of American poetry. When Kleinzahler writes about the places he knows and the people who inhabit them, he makes his inheritance of Walt Whitman and especially William Carlos Williams richly evident. In his combination of adventurousness and availability, the poet he most resembles is Williams, his fellow New Jerseyan. Both are poets of compact technical dexterity and of American speech—capable both of rapid, surprising swerves and of talking plainly to cats and dogs. And like Whitman and Williams, Kleinzahler is a democratic realist with a lyric gift, one who believes that ordinary people and things are suitable subjects for poetry. Yet where Whitman and Williams prized immediacy and planted their feet firmly on home terrain, Kleinzahler is a poet of both proximity and distance, writing from an airplane as often as from home. An American in the age of mobility and globalization, he writes in and of transit. His poetry is marked by a sense of doubleness—here and there, self and others, now and then—and a sense of how one place, person, or time might become or be haunted by another.
The poem “Snow in North Jersey,” which first appeared in the 1998 collection Green Sees Things in Waves, is a formal homage to Whitman, a rangy litany of ordinary people and locations—everyone and everyplace the snow falls upon—joined by anaphora and the accretion of simple conjunctions. Its homage to Williams is even more explicit: “and they’re calling for snow tonight and through tomorrow / an inch an hour over 9 Ridge Road and the old courthouse / and along the sluggish gray Passaic / as it empties itself into Newark Bay.” Kleinzahler names the doctor’s address and quickly sketches the itinerary of his Paterson, the long poem which followed the Passaic River over the Great Falls and out to sea. But while Williams’s approach to North Jersey is archaeological, excavating what he called “the elemental character of the place,” Kleinzahler’s is cinematic, panning with the weather across the region. The poem provides something like an extended aerial shot that zooms fluidly in and out:
Snow is falling along the Boulevard
and its little cemeteries hugged by transmission shops
and on the stone bear in the park
and the WWI monument, making a crust
on the soldier with his chinstrap and bayonet
Kleinzahler begins with a cartographer’s distance, yet a brief survey of the landscape quickly establishes a sense of temporal depth. The dead and the auto mechanics who survive them are intimate with one another, lovingly occupying the same turf. Then the time scale broadens to include world-historical events: in the finely rendered face of the WWI statue, a familiar representation of local boys who died abroad, North Jersey’s past is integrated into the global twentieth century. Kleinzahler continues by shifting scales again:
It’s blowing in from the west
over the low hills and meadowlands
swirling past the giant cracking stills
that flare all night along the Turnpike
It is with a terrible deliberateness
that Mr. Ruiz reaches into his back pocket
and counts out eighteen dollars and change for his lotto picks
while in the upstairs of a thousand duplexes
with the TV on, cancers tick tick tick
and the snow continues to fall and blanket
these crowded rows of frame and brick
with their heartbreaking porches and castellations
and the red ’68 Impala on blocks
In the space of a few lines, the poem sweeps back out to encompass a natural terrain overlaid by highways and oil refineries, then zooms into Mr. Ruiz’s pocket and the pathos of his careful count of bills and coins, a tiny hard-luck narrative. From there the poem expands and contracts at once, giving us the deadening endlessness of “a thousand duplexes” and the particularity of a single upstairs room lit blue by the TV. And then the most dramatic zoom yet, down to the cellular level, as Kleinzahler unsettlingly imagines cancer proliferating in thousands of bodies, the result perhaps of overexposure to petrochemicals, while they watch sitcoms or the evening news. Out on the wintry street again, Kleinzahler plays “castellations” off of “the red ’68 Impala,” achieving a sort of tragicomedy in the juxtaposition of a multisyllabic archaism with the name of a best-selling Chevy sedan, a jalopy decaying in front of run-down duplexes adorned by castle-like parapets. The shift of verbal registers and the sharp observation of socioeconomic class markers are both signature Kleinzahler.
Whitman sought a new poetry appropriate to what he believed was the infinite breadth of American democracy, and Williams wanted to find poetic form for the American idiom and the humble particulars of everyday life. Both held utopian hopes for their poems, believing that poetic innovation could bring readers into closer contact with the “reality” of their lives. Kleinzahler seeks a similarly capacious, realistic rendering of contemporary American life, but he is more doubtful about its transformative potential. “Snow in North Jersey” ends with this image:
It’s snowing on us all
and on a three-story fixer-upper off of Van Vorst Park
a young lawyer couple from Manhattan bought
where for no special reason in back of a closet
a thick, dusty volume from the ’30s sits open
with a broken spine and smelling of mildew
to a chapter called “Social Realism”
After an earnest note of Whitmanian solidarity—“It’s snowing on us all”—the poem takes an almost satirical turn. At first the joke seems to be about yuppies moving into the neighborhood, but then it turns on the poem itself. This faithful recording of an evening in North Jersey—its cemeteries, oil refineries, convenience store gamblers, junked cars, tumors, and dead poets—might end up as an example of an outdated art form in an old book. Its realism might become just another mildewed object of study or curiosity for the young college types who gentrify working-class streets. Yet the poet persists in his witnessing, and he does so without condescension, sentimentality, or pulled punches. The reality he depicts includes the possibility that bearing witness to what’s passing finally won’t matter much, but he writes it anyway, out of something like love for the world.
Kleinzahler’s lyric “Poetics,” first published in the 1985 collection Storm over Hackensack, is another poem of his native North Jersey, though here he works in the more compact, imagistic mode common to his early poems:
I have loved the air above ShopRite Liquors
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.
At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father—
a sale on German beer.
Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon.
A few well-chosen words specify the landscape and let it expand in our imaginations. “ShopRite Liquors” names a package store of certain vintage, concerned not with refinement but with cost-effectiveness, its parking lot or curb lit by a familiar sort of sign. We can begin to construct a local economy. “Synagogue” offhandedly signals a certain religious and ethnic milieu, one that’s relatively comfortable here in Jersey. The temple’s proximity to the package store and the faint verbal echo of “ShopRite Liquors” in “synagogue” give us a wink: there’s as much family ritual in a beer run as there is in worship.
“Poetics” doubles this primary landscape with another more distant one—“the Marin hills at dusk”—to which, perhaps surprisingly, New Jersey compares favorably. Kleinzahler plays this surprise for humor, but the development of the first stanza’s transcontinental comparison also allows him simultaneously to expand the poem’s scale and to make its primary location seem all the more particular. The description of “lavender and gold / stretching miles to the sea” quickly transports us from neon-lit asphalt to sweeping grassy vistas bathed in late California sunlight. Yet by a slight shift in register, from the brassy particularity of “ShopRite Liquors” to the more ambrosial, generically “poetic” description of “lavender and gold,” Kleinzahler makes his beloved New Jersey pop. The second stanza narrows the scale again, cutting rapidly back to the poem’s kernel scene, a thumbnail narrative of the poet and his father. We zoom in on “living dust: / bus exhaust, airborne grains of pizza crust,” but this minute focus also enacts another kind of expansion, as the particulars of the scene—buses and pizza joints—become particulate matter suspended in the atmosphere, drifting into the evening lit by streetlights and neon. New Jersey’s polluted, pizza-dusted air is made to glimmer as preciously as a Marin breeze, but it also now evokes the “wounded” disappointment of the people who breathe it. The son has gone away and come home: he now knows the Marin hills, which are both beautiful and populated by rich people, but New Jersey remains constant and constantly unsuccessful. “I have loved the air above ShopRite Liquors” (emphasis mine): the present-perfect resonates with both praise and remembrance. The poet has lost yet still breathes the air outside ShopRite Liquors. If this poem is a statement of Kleinzahler’s poetics, he proposes that writing poetry is the composition—the putting together—of seemingly distinct times and places. It involves both love and disappointment.
The poem “San Francisco / New York,” which originally appeared in 1995’s Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow, inverts the orientation of “Poetics.” Now Kleinzahler is in San Francisco, his adopted hometown, thinking back toward the Northeast:
A red band of light stretches across the west,
low over the sea, as we say goodbye to our friend,
Saturday night, in the room he always keeps unlit
and head off to take in the avenues,
actually take them in, letting the gables,
bay windows and facades impress themselves,
the clay of our brows accepting the forms.
Darkness falls over the district’s slow life,
miles of pastel stucco canceled
with its arched doorways and second-floor businesses:
herbalists and accountants, jars
of depilatories. Such a strange calm, the days
already lengthening and asparagus
under two dollars a pound.
Is New York fierce?
With its image of evening light stretched across the sky and an announcement of setting out, the poem’s opening stanza might be a pastiche of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Once out the door, however, Kleinzahler quickly diverges from Eliot. While Eliot’s Prufrock projects etherized patients, tedious arguments, and feline forms upon the cityscape, drenching it in his pathos, Kleinzahler seeks not to project but to receive the impressions of the city around him, which he hopes will be quite physically pressed into his body. His San Francisco appears as an actual place, whereas Eliot’s city is a more generic representation of urban alienation, its “one-night cheap hotels” and “sawdust restaurants” functioning as atmospheric touches rather than particular locations. With the wonderful detail of the asparagus’s price, Kleinzahler signals a lived intimacy with this “district’s slow life,” his attention to its ordinary rhythms. As a true poet of real places, he is more Williams than Eliot.
“San Francisco / New York” is included in Hollyhocks in the Fog, but the thought of New York haunts the poem, threatening to take it over. We quickly realize that Kleinzahler walks alone, thinking of an absent companion. “Is New York fierce?” comes upon us with abrupt intensity, as the pang of another’s absence might suddenly seize a person. Is one alone in such moments or not? The poem’s pronouns briefly go wobbly:
The wind, I mean. I dream of you in the shadows,
hurt, whimpering. But it’s not like that, really,
is it? Lots of taxis and brittle fun.
We pass the shop of secondhand mystery novels
with its ferrety customers and proprietress
behind her desk, a swollen arachnid
surrounded by murder and the dried-out glue
of old paperback bindings.
What is more touching
than a used bookstore on Saturday night,
dowdy clientele haunting the aisles:
the girl with bad skin, the man with a tic,
the chronic ass at the counter giving his art speech?
How utterly provincial and doomed we feel
tonight with the streetcar appearing over the rise
and at our backs the moon full in the east,
lighting the slopes of Mount Diablo
and the charred eucalyptus in the Oakland hills.
As if to hurry past a moment of vulnerability, Kleinzahler turns to his gifts as a storyteller or local colorist, his knack for conjuring a place and its “types” in just a few words. Yet the comic sketch of the bookstore reveals his own identification with the shoppers, sliding right into his lament—“How utterly provincial and doomed we feel”—so that “we” momentarily unites the poet and these other lonely hearts “haunting” a Saturday night at the edge of America. The poet is one more “type”: the solitary middle-aged flaneur looking into shop windows. The sense of loneliness only grows more acute as the scene broadens with beautiful efficiency, the streetcar carrying in passengers from other districts and the city giving way to the wilderness at its edges.
New York comes back into view at the end of the poem, with Kleinzahler wondering whether his absent companion sees the same moon he sees:
Did you see it in the East 60s
or bother to look up for it downtown?
And where would you have found it,
shimmering over Bensonhurst, over Jackson Heights?
It fairly booms down on us tonight
with the sky so clear,
and through us
as if these were ruins, as if we were ghosts.
The questions are about the moon, but they’re really asking something else: Are you thinking about me as I’m thinking about you? Here Kleinzahler risks becoming maudlin, and the poem seems almost to comment upon its wager. As sentiment crescendos, color and life drain away. The moonlight of the poem’s final sentence blanches these characters and their distinctive landscapes with audible force; its emotional power washes away the previously vivid particulars of place and person. Book shoppers, the poet, and his companion—the moon makes ghosts of them all. There is a sort of beauty in this ghostliness, but there is also something lost. Ghostliness, perhaps, is the risk of living between two places, and once we understand Kleinzahler as a poet of transit, we can feel a new urgency in his acute observations of place, as if his poetry’s alertness is what allows him to be present someplace real instead of lost no place at all.
Kleinzahler’s New Jersey poems tend to be more emotionally intense than his San Francisco poems—charged as they are with the presence of family, memories of youth, and the sensory data of his native habitat. But the San Francisco poems bring us into another sort of confidence, a mellower intimacy with the neighborhood: Silicon Valley kids coming home from work “solitary as widows or disgraced metaphysicians,” which days of the week one will find in the shops, which time of year the weather does what, and which composer the oboist upstairs prefers, all of it inflected by “foghorns / lowing like outsize beasts / shackled to cliffs at the mouth of the Bay.” In early poems like “Sunset in Chinatown” and recent work like the wonderful sequence “Summer Journal” or the title poem “Hollyhocks in the Fog,” Kleinzahler records the daily rhythms and sensations of his adopted hometown with wit and vividness. San Francisco seems to be the place where he finds it possible to make a life in the present. New Jersey is both more and less real to him. As he puts it in “Gray Light in May,” a homecoming poem published in Green Sees Things in Waves but not included in Before Dawn on Bluff Road, the “stereoscopic” light of New Jersey intensifies experience almost unbearably at times: “So much a part of me / So much of what is dearest / I can barely stand upright under the weight of it…How many years / For how many years / A stranger to my own heart.” This feeling of strangeness in the places we know best—of strangeness to ourselves—is likely familiar to many of us living in an age of geographic mobility and dislocation. In such an age, the poetry of August Kleinzahler helps us both to feel our strangeness and to make ourselves a bit more at home.
July 2017