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“... The best bar in San Francisco reopened for business the other day under new management. But it’s no good. They’ve got it all wrong. For one, the place is too bright and cheerful now. The new owners have installed all manner of lighting and cleaned up the mural over the bar. It looked better with sixty years of smoke stains, a kind of patina. Now, it just looks like what it is: a 1940 interior decorator’s kitsch version of a magnified Persian miniature ...”

“... of dream analysis and the following autumn started teaching at the University of Minnesota. On 12 August 1955, using 650 pages of dream analyses he had collected over the previous nine months, he began a poem in six-line irregularly rhyming stanzas that makes use of baby talk, blackface speech, religious allegory and dream-like slips of the tongue. On 21 ...”

“... James Merrill​ has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life. But James Merrill: Life and Art shows that you should be careful what you wish for ...”

“... There’s a window, 36 hours or so, not even, after travelling by air between places, places where you’ve lived for a long time. When you’ve landed and into the next day, perhaps the evening – then you begin to lose it. It goes very quickly, decaying like a tone in the air. But for a while, inside that window, you’re hyper-awake. I’m talking about light, scale, smell, all of it familiar, but for that short while extending beyond the common registers of the familiar until the buildings, river light, the smell of benzene and tidal flats, what have you, become almost stereoscopic, carrying a taste of the unreal – as if the world had been passed through a solution, cleansed ...”

“... They didn’t look like hoods, more like mid-career bureaucrats, fortyish, chubby, thick glasses. But they’d brought two good-looking molls with them; I can’t imagine they were even 18: blonds, Marty and Will. It fell to me to keep the boys entertained while my brother retired to his bedroom with the two Mafiosi for what was to be a very, very serious conversation ...”

“... 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, The Sausage Master of Minsk (1977), was hand-set by the publishers and the poet himself on a platen press in Montreal. Until the early 1990s, when he was taken on by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Faber in Britain, Kleinzahler’s work was not much known beyond the alternative poetry world, and in a postscript to this selection, written at an airport hotel in Phoenix, he ponders his transition from the shadows to the bright lights of the professional poetry scene: I am on my way back from a writers’ festival in the hills, en route to a semester-long job teaching poetry in a graduate writing programme ...”

“... of what Faber is calling its ‘American Connection’. The American poets – Simic, August Kleinzahler, and Chase Twichell – have all been done out in plain white-cover paperbacks, with modish modern art miniatures on the front and, in a revival and reversal of the old frontispiece-principle, author photographs on the back. The jacket ...”

“... of health problems and died in Los Angeles. The letters that follow were written to the poet August Kleinzahler between 1994 and 2002. Boulder itself getting on my nerves. It’s sickeningly sweet and rich and white and every single resident has a golden lab. I’m rigging up a pit on the corner. Clerks don’t say ‘enjoy’ anymore they say ...”

“... the new hub of gay life after Stonewall. One night at the International Stud he ran into the young August Kleinzahler – out on a bar crawl with his gay older brother – who later described him as ‘a tall, handsome-looking galoot in a T-shirt and leather vest, with lurid tattoos on his arms. He didn’t look like any sort of poet to me, more like a ...”

“... anthology. ‘If Rakosi were more predictable, clubbable and given to the right patter,’ August Kleinzahler wrote in 1984, ‘a collected poems would have been through several editions by now.’ He was not. Nor, despite several long poems, was there a clearly indicated work of some ambition with which to mark his card as a Modernist master. He ...”

“... such as William Carlos Williams. Wavering between systems, Gunn didn’t please everyone. In August Kleinzahler’s introduction to the third Selected, which appeared in 2007 (the second came in 1979), Kleinzahler quoted two anthologists on the decline of Gunn. The first was Lucie-Smith: Around 1960, it sometimes ...”

“... 1931. Carl Rakosi, another first-phase Objectivist and a good raconteur, reran the story for August Kleinzahler and George Evans half a century later: Once the poems were assembled for Poetry, Harriet Monroe sprung a surprise on Zukofsky: she told him the newcomers would have to have a name . . . Zukofsky was caught. He hated classifying people ...”

“... sound of teacher. Publishers wanted​ to make her famous before she could acquiesce to it – August Kleinzahler suggested once that she might only have been comfortable with fame after she was dead, and this is what was granted.* In her letters to Ed Dorn in 1960 there is an odd sequence where Little, Brown offers her $250 for a first option on an ...”