August Kleinzahler

                                                        Coltrane just sits there,almost expressionless, thoughtful, perhaps even a touch sombre,on the little red stool in my bedroom, listening to the Dodgers radio broadcastfrom Ebbets Field. We speak not...

I have circulated among its many rooms over the weeks, the seasons and yearsimpelled, one might argue, more by circumstance or chance than predilection.Though long ago converted into apartments, this place retains its former name, L’Hotel Deluxe,a vast edifice of an earlier era, corridors lit by chandeliers, stretching for what seems foreverin the fashion of the old railroad hotels like...

A good lad, Christopher, a tad pensive, or watchful, for one so young.A bookworm too, if ever there was one: perhaps a career in lawor some sort of scholarly pursuit or other, but surely a hopeless fitfor the give and take of Fleet Street or the City or as an estate agent.Still, a well-behaved and temperate child, pleasant enough company,but just this very moment struggling, and failing, to...

Like the faint sound of thunder, rumbling in the distance, then gathering in volumeuntil, with a great roar, it all comes crashing down, an avalanche of Europe’s concert halls,like the 7.4 cubic kilometre chunk of the Jakobshavn glacier, calving into the sea below:the red and Alaska yellow cedar stages and smoked birch parquet floors, a reverberating crack,splintering on the rocks below,...

Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish)...