Poor Monk, dying

Thelonious and the Baroness

An old article in the NY Times about Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a new book of her photos, and an exhibition at Gallery at Hermès, brought bak to mind one of the first poems I read by August Kleinzahler ... 'Love Poem' from 1989 book Earthquake Weather. The poem starts with a striking mixing of registers

As long as the cat comes home
and the skinheads keep
to their concrete shell, over the fence
screaming break your face smashing empties

It was the ending of the poem that came to mind:

Poor Monk, dying at the Baroness's
on the hill above Weehawken
night after night
cars sluicing into the tunnel below

into the city, fanning lights
across the broad river
the West Side throbbing
across black water

out of notes, dying

The compact efficiency of that image of cars sluicing, bringing a zing of energy to the more familiar idea of a 'river of cars', and that ending hangs in the air, like a musical phrase unresolved, a cadence that doesn't quite bring us home to the tonic.

And the black water, and the death of Thelonious Monk, the cat who came home.

Ballistics

Billy Collins latest book - Ballistics (Random House, 2008) - continues his line of light accessible wit. Lines from his poem on Liu Yong (柳永) "If only he appreciated life / in eleventh-century China as much as I do" illustrate well the charm of the self-mocking tone he typically adopts. The slightness or lightness of the occasion of some poems reminds me a little of John Ciardi (for example Ciardi's poem on a neighbour complaining about his dog soiling her garden). Collins' title poem is in the entertaining tradition of poems on the less-than-charitable thoughts a poet might harbour towards other poets. Clive James' psalm-like 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered' is one of the best of this mini-genre; there's also August Kleinzahler's 'An Autumnal Sketch' which describes professors, "sensitive men paunchy with drink" parked where the suburb ends waiting like hunters for a duck:

...
They will take it and make it their own,
something both more than a duck
and less.

They so badly want a poem,
these cagey and disheartened men
...

Collins describes a photograph of a bullet passing through a book; the poem ends:

But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,
I realized that the executed book
was a recent collection of poems written

by someone of whom I was not fond
and that the bullet must have passed through
his writing with little resistance

at twenty-eight hundred feet per second,
through the poems about his childhood
and the ones about the dreary state of the world

and then through the author's photograph,
through the beard, the round glasses,
and that special poet's hat he loves to wear.

The Georgia State University digital archive contains a version of this poem where the penultimate stanza is missing. Presumably the stanza was added later, and it brings an energy and vividness to the close of the poem both in focusing on the violence of the bullet by describing its velocity in precise mathematical language, and also in depicting the conventional subjects of the target's work.

Kleinzahler's new New and Selected

August Kleinzahler's latest - Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (2008) - is subtitled 'Poems, New and Selected', and is described on the front flap as the "first broad retrospective" - the Australian retrospective edition Like Cities, Like Storms (1992) now too old to qualify. The new book is a hefty enough tome - 234 pages - and very many of the early poems haven't made it through the cull. So many didn't make the grade: 'Indian Summer Night: The Haight', 'Love Poem', '16' , '1978, Montreal', ...

Kleinzahler had over time assembled a sequence of poems called 'Four Worthies' ... one poem, on Thomas Urquhart, appeared in A Calendar of Airs (1978). The sequence has been dismantled again and now of the worthies only Australian poet John Tranter remains in the poem 'Tranter in America'.

The new book is organized in five sections which seem to represent selections from earlier books as follows 1. New poems 2. Early poems (Storm Over Hackensack (1985), Earthquake Weather (1989)), 3. Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (1995) 4. Green Sees Things In Waves (1998) and 5. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (2003). However it is worth noting that the poem 'Vancouver' which appears in the first section is a much longer version of an old poem with the same title. Is this an earlier draft reworked, or have other poems or fragments been invisibly mended into the fabric?

In the previous collection - The Strange Hours Travelers Keep - a number of old poems - 'Hot Night on East 4th', 'The Gardenia', '86', and a significantly reworked second-half of 'Evening, in A minor' - were stitched together to make the poem 'Montreal'.

Kleinzahler keeps tinkering with his poems. 'The Last Big Snow' in Earthquake Weather, was divided into two numbered sections when re-collected in Live From the Hong Kong Nile Club (2000). 'The Lunatic of Lindley Meadow' appears in the new book, its major transformation having occurred twenty years ago between A Calendar of Airs, where it was called 'The Lunatic of Mt.Royal' and was built from four-line stanzas, and Earthquake Weather where the stanzas have three lines. '1978, Montreal' was called 'Radio' once ... after the lines 'Down the same shaft old TV westerns / in French', Kleinzahler inserted ''Allons, Monsieur Hopalong". Anyone one day working on a bibliography or critical edition will have their work cut out.

Sleeping it off

I notice that August Kleinzahler's new book Sleeping It Off in Rapid City is released today. It's a 'new and selected' and I'm looking forward to seeing it. The title reminds me of an old Origin Press publication: Clive Faust's Sleeping It Off (1992).

Tony Frazer interestingly notes on the Shearsman recommendations page that despite Faust living in Bendigo, none of his books have been published in Australia.

Sleeping It Off is a beautifully produced chapbook - quoting from the colophon: "bound into Ingres Antique Camel endsheets with letterpress printed Indian Wool covers".

Faust provides snatches of urban scenes caught vividly with emotion and a sense of humour which aren't a million miles from Kleinzahler ...

... The flags
on the flagpoles at the R.S.L.
hall
    stay floodlit
in white arches of the portico, each
month monday -
              that'd be
tonight

but generally the texture of the verse is a sort of article-free pronoun-free string of newspaper headlines, which - like any formal device from heroic couplets to Berryman's contorted syntax - serves to constantly present the reader with the fact that this is conscious art. Here the prolonged and static description, blow by blow, is somewhat in the vein of Joyce:

         Attendant

bolts gate, lugs carcass off truck,
hangs slippery liver from a free
hand, closes to gate on black leopard pacing
the double mesh, tosses liver in, secures
gate on outer wire, opens inner
from angle to slip meat through; shuts lock bolts each
gate to respective fence.

I'm reminded of one of the clauses of Bunting's advice to young poets: "Cut out every word you dare" ... one advantage of stripping out the little words is that the others words take on more individual clarity, they stand out the more. What is the origin of this article-less style? Pound with 'May I for my own self song's truth reckon, / Journey's jargon' and 'Set keel to breakers', or Hopkins? Or what about:

Blind sight, dead life, poor mortal living ghost,
Woe's scene, world's shame, grave's due by life usurp'd,
Brief abstract and record of tedious days,
Rest thy unrest on England's lawful earth,