August Kleinzahler was born in 1949 in Jersey City, New Jersey. "And I was raised," he said, from his home in San Francisco, "in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Up the road about 15 miles. On the New Jersey Palisades." Kleinzahler attended junior high and high school at the Horace Mann School in Manhattan, commuting, he said, every school day for six years, from New Jersey to Manhattan and back. After high school Kleinzahler attended the University of Wisconsin, as an East Asian Studies major. He dropped out of Wisconsin, eventually finishing at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, with a major in English. At Victoria, he studied with the English poet Basil Bunting, "who," said Kleinzahler, "was a great hero of mine."

I asked Kleinzahler if, after he finished university, he began to teach.

"No," he said. "I’ve been a sort of unskilled laborer for most of my adult life. Until the last couple of years." Among jobs at which Kleinzahler has worked are driving a cab, lumberjacking, and locksmithing. For the past seventeen years Kleinzahler has lived in San Francisco. Previous to that, he said, he’d lived in Alaska. I asked if he’d worked on the pipeline there. "No," he said. "But I should have done that. It would have been better money. I worked in the Alaska State Museum. Designing learning kits for native children."

Kleinzahler has been recipient of various awards and fellowships, including NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Award for Poetry and an Award in Literature from the Academy of American Poets. He has taught writing at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as well as to homeless veterans in the Bay Area. He has been widely published in various magazines and journals. He is author of Earthquake Weather, Storm Over Hackensack, Red Sauce, Whisky and Snow, and Green Sees Things in Waves.

Kleinzahler’s poems in his new collection, Green Sees Things in Waves, and his last, Red Sauce, Whisky and Snow are, for me, some of the most interesting poems set in urban landscapes since Frank O’Hara was alive and writing. O’Hara, though, who died in his early forties, seems always to "sing" as a tenor while Kleinzahler’s voice is a deep and often melancholy basso. At a first and casual reading, Kleinzahler’s poems, like many of O’Hara’s, may, with their beautifully articulated surfaces, fool you into thinking that what you see is all you get. No way. These are poems by someone who’s been old for a long time, who’s worked hard for a living, who’s perhaps said goodbye more times than he wishes to remember. These are grownup poems for grownup readers.

I always feel uncomfortable when I interview poets. I read at least a few poems almost every day. I read poems because I like how I feel while I read them. I like the sounds. I like the way a poem’s words direct me to see a green hill or a bum’s face in a new way. I like the way poems speak to parts of me that seem hidden even from myself. There’s nothing that language does that excites or satisfies me in the deep way that the language of poems can do.

I don’t think, however, that I really ever "understand" a poem any more than I ever really "understand" another person. Certainly, I never find myself wanting to hunt around in a poem for "symbols" like a wild pig in the forest roots out acorns from under the duff. I never seem to ask myself, "What does this poem say?" If I ask myself anything, I ask, "What does this poem do?" Mostly, O Ignoramus Me, I ask myself, "Do you want to read it again?" And if my answer to myself is, "Yes," then I know that the poem is giving me what I want, which is pleasure. I confessed my ignorance to Mr. Kleinzahler and asked how, as a poet, he felt about my belief that with a poem, the first thing that seemed important to me was that I enjoy it. Was that okay?

"Absolutely. That's the function of all literature. To entertain. And instruct as well. But I don't know how much literature does instruct. And, of course, I mean ‘entertain’ in a different way than a Batman movie entertains. But, yes, that's the job."

"To give deep pleasure?" I asked.

"Yeah, a deeper, more complex and lasting pleasure than that which merely entertains."

I mentioned that I’d recently been reading and rereading a Wallace Stevens poem "Imago," in which he writes:

    Something returning from a deeper quarter,
    A glacier running through delirium,

I said that I found myself particularly enjoying the "glacier running through delirium." But, I said, I felt guilty. I felt I should get busy and figure out what the poem means.

Mr. Kleinzahler laughed. "Oh, I don't think Stevens knows much of the time. He's enjoying those descriptions and word play as it comes out of him."

When Mr. Kleinzahler teaches and works on a poem with his students, what does he do?

"Well, the first thing I do is that I try to avoid their poems. Which is a molding tactic. I try to get them to read poems by other writers. So they have models. And I ask them what's going on. What does it do? What is it trying to do? What feelings does it evoke? Or provoke? Do you like it? Why? Why not? And then, retroactively, how does he or she achieve those effects? You say, about the Stevens poem that you like how it sounds. So I would ask a student, ‘What about how it sounds? What about "delirium" hooks up in an interesting fashion with the word "blizzard?" And does it have anything to do with where the stresses go or the repetition?’ And on and on and so forth. And just getting them to think about some of these things. But first they have to read it and experience its effect which is often coming in half-consciously."

I said that with a poem that was difficult for me, that I found that I almost have to set up housekeeping with it.

"I think that's true in any work of art. Theater or a movement of a sonata or a painting. I think it's a great cultural myth that you can go into a museum and in an hour, say, digest the Louvre. Or, if you sit down and go through Beethoven's piano sonatas or quartets, you cannot digest those quickly. Each painting, each part of the painting, each movement of a sonata is so complex; these need to be seen and heard, over and over, time and time again. So that, finally, the particulars make themselves apparent to you. People, I think, are always trying to colonize art and make it fit their own purposes. And good art resists that.

"This is, partially, an American phenomenon, to believe that by ‘understanding’ you own it, you possess it. You can approach it, and participate in parts of what's going on. But it has to be like something in a household that you see in different lights, over different seasons, over a stretch of time. I know this because my father collected antiques. Sculptures and paintings. I saw them as a child, and then as an adult over many, many years. I’ve looked at them in various lights. If they’re truly interesting, these objects continually divulge their nature and their complexity."

I had read and re-read, with great pleasure and interest, the last poem in Kleinzahler’s new book, "Self-portrait." I mentioned that several of his poems feature dreams.

"I have a lot of those dreams. Train stations and getting lost, and so forth. When I wrote this, I hadn't written anything in quite a while. I was in Providence, Rhode Island. It was one of those dreams I woke from and I knew it was a very significant dream. And there was some emotional disruption in my life. I just wrote it out. I was interested in blank verse at the time, so it's a rather loose blank verse. Although one always misses bits and pieces when one is consolidating and making a poem more shapely, I think the major images and sequence are close to the dream itself. If it's a good dream it's more interesting than anything you could invent. I had one a couple of weeks ago that I didn't write down but it also had that same feeling. It was a very significant dream. I'm not quite sure why."

I said that it was interesting to me, in Mr. Kleinzahler’s poems, that objects often were lost and then, as the poem progressed, the objects were found.

"I never thought of that. It's only in the last 10 years or so that people ask me these questions. I was unaware of many things like that; people asking questions have made me aware of certain patterns. But often, when I am asked, I simply don’t know. I'm not being disingenuous. Even when I'm told, it doesn't bother me, because it doesn't inhibit me. I just continue doing whatever forces me. And I guess those are some thematic materials that drive my poems."

I said that if someone were to ask me to describe certain hallmarks of a Kleinzahler poem, I’d say that one might expect many cityscapes and also poems that have in some way to do with transportation.

"Well, I'm a city boy. And I don't have a car. A lot of poets are affluent now with their teaching so they drive their Toyota Corollas around. It's been very useful to me not having a car. I really dislike the whole nature of what cars have done to this society. But it's more an economic matter than anything else. Also, I can't park in the Haight. But when you get on a bus or the streetcar, or train, or subway, you see things you wouldn't necessarily choose to see. I would just as soon avoid that. But I can't. I think that's probably good. You can't predict, particularly in the Bay Area, because there are so many lunatics, what you're going to run into."

Copyright © 1998 by Judith Moore.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.