August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.

Letter

His Own Prophet

11 September 2003

What is disappointing, even embarrassing about the poetry of Robert Lowell in retrospect is not so much the tin ear or heavy-handedness, not the posturing and self-dramatisation, not even the straining after the important subject, the insistence on being taken as major, when, in fact, with very few exceptions, the poetry isn't really much good at all; what is, finally, so dreary about the oeuvre at...
Letter

The Admirable Logue

16 March 2000

I laughed like a drain all through A.N. Wilson’s review of Christopher Logue’s memoir Prince Charming (LRB, 16 March). It is really quite perfect. But it was only after finishing it, and weak at the knees from mirth, that I realised Wilson was an actual person and that the article was not a send-up of a high-handed, querulous review engineered by the mischievous Logue himself or some arch sub-sub-editor...
Letter

The spuggies are fledged

21 January 1999

Marilyn Bowering was apparently so smitten by Basil Bunting’s eyebrows (Letters, 1 April) that she has forgotten what year he was at the University of Victoria. It was 1971-72. Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’ was on the jukebox and my distinguished fellow alum was, if I recall, in charge of the mimeograph machine at the English Department, which always made visits there worth looking forward to.Bunting...
Letter

Homeroidal

11 May 1995

Bernard Knox knocks Christopher Logue’s Husbands for not being what it was never designed to be, a literal translation (LRB, 11 May). Really, it’s like going after Sonny Rollins for playing ‘All the Things You Are’ in a manner quite different from what Jerome Kern probably had in mind. But it’s a very interesting version, no? Logue has his antecedents in this sort of thing. Paraphrase, quote,...

Pieces about August Kleinzahler in the LRB

Flirting with Dissolution: August Kleinzahler

Mark Ford, 5 April 2001

The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first,...

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Cheesespreadology

Ian Sansom, 7 March 1996

In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...

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