>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^E00:00:03 ^B00:00:23 >> Welcome, I'm going to turn this over now to Rob Casper, head of the Library of Congress' Poetry and Literature Center. He is also the Program Director for the Poetry Society of America. Casper has served as membership director for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and 11 years ago, founded the literary magazine, ^IT Jubilate ^NO, which publishes the best of contemporary American poetry or contemporary poetry. So Rob. ^M00:00:51 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:57 >> Thanks Diana and thanks to all of you. Oh, our microphones -- microphones are challenging, for coming out tonight. It's great to see such a good crowd on midterm election night. I hopefully all voted and we'll give you a little break from hearing the results. I'm Rob Casper. I'm head of the Poetry and Literature Center. And I'm thrilled to have you all here and thrilled to see this conversation unfold. I want to give a little shout out to Ron Charles and what he has done here over the course of our past five programs. I think he's established himself as one of the country's best interviewers of poets. He serves as a great guide for the audience. And if you've been to these programs, you would know that yourself. And he has helped our future poets to discuss their work in new and exciting ways. Before I say anything about our future poet tonight, let me say a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center. We are home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the only federally funded position for a literary artist in this country. Our current Poet Laureate is Charles Wright. He's a wonderful man from just a few hours south of here, down in Church Hill, Virginia. We also host a range of literary programs, readings, panels, discussions and that sort of thing. Most of them are just up the street in the Library's Jefferson Building or Madison Building. If you want to find out more about the kinds of programs that we do, you can visit our website, www.loc.gov/poetry. We are in our 76th year. We just celebrated our 75th and are looking forward to our 100th and we've just launched our first ever Friends of the Poetry and Literature Center. I brought a little brochure with information which looks like this, about the Poetry and Literature Center and our friend's group. We also have two of our Poet Laureate Circle members here tonight who have been instrumental not only in this series but in developing the Hill Center, Steve and Nicky Cymrot who are right in the front. Yes, Steve and Nicky. ^M00:03:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:05 Great, great, great figures of Capitol Hill and of the city. If you have any questions on how to become a friend of the Poetry and Literary Center, you can ask one of us. We can talk to you about what's inside this brochure. It's a beautiful brochure. So yes, on to the end of our 2014 season of Life of a Poet and August Kleinzahler. Tonight's featured poet is the author of 11 books of poems. And in fact, [inaudible] has his first book of poems which doesn't look so good but is beautiful on the inside. It's bound by the Library of Congress and Ron always takes the -- >> Rebound. >> Rebound. He always takes the opportunity to give me a hard time about what we do but it's a beautiful, beautiful book, a signed edition. After that, August Kleinzahler published 10 books including the most recently, ^IT The Hotel Oneira ^NO, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in Atlanta and Literary Award for Poetry in 2008 for his collection, ^IT Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, Poems New and Selected ^NO. He also received the Griffin Poetry Prize in the International Division for ^IT The Strange Hours Travelers Keep ^NO as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and he is also the author of [inaudible] collections, ^IT Cutty, One Rock, Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained ^NO which I think wins an award for one of the greatest fun titles to read aloud, and ^IT Music I-LXXIV ^NO. In 2005, Kleinzahler was named the first poet laureate of his hometown which is Fort Lee, New Jersey. ^M00:04:56 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:05:02 In a review of ^IT Sleeping It Off in Rapid City ^NO for the ^IT New York Times ^NO, Dwight Garner wrote, "Mr. Kleinzahler is an American eccentric, a hard man to pin down. Born in New Jersey, he writes poems that have a pushy exuberance and an expert recall of that state's tougher school yards. And he writes with elegiac insight about life's losers, the people he calls strange rangers, the addicted, insane or destitute. Yet for all his gruffness and love of dive bars, he is no Bukowski. Mr. Kleinzahler writes most often in a strongly accentuated free verse that is among the most articulate and alive sounds American poetry is currently making." David Wheatley in a review of ^IT The Hotel Oneira ^NO in The Guardian, offers a punchier summary when he says, "This is dreamwork of a tough and streetwise hue." Prepared to be wowed by this lyrical alchemy from one of America's singular voices. Please join me in welcoming August Kleinzahler. ^M00:06:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:14 >> Ron Charles: Thank you so much for coming. >> August Kleinzahler: Thank you for inviting me. >> Ron Charles: It's a great honor to have you here tonight. This is a little longer than you'd see in a bookstore but a little less technical than you see in a poetry journal. So that's what we're aiming for here. I don't know how it'll go. We'll talk for about 75-80 minutes. We'll take a little break in the middle. I prepared some questions. I'll ask him to read but we don't exactly how this will work out. It largely has to do with the interaction between us so let's sit back and see how this goes [laughter]. You are one of the most enigmatic poets after all [laughter]. The life of the poet, you've been publishing for more than 40 years but did that kind of thing, the life of a poet, did that seem preordained to you as you were growing up? Did you think as child, "I'll probably be a poet"? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I was [inaudible] in shortstop in the New York Yankees but by the time I was 16 or so, I'd been bitten by and smitten by the notion of being a poet. >> Ron Charles: Really? In high school? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: You had good high school teachers? >> August Kleinzahler: Some of them. And I tried my hand at it and I was excited by the act of it. It excited me. >> Ron Charles: But it's usually taught so badly. It's all like what this poem is in code. I kept trying to figure out what the code is or the horrible scanning of lines that sort of deadens one's appreciation. How did you escape that? >> August Kleinzahler: I didn't escape it and I don't think that's a bad thing. It depends who's showing you how the line is scanned and how the pentameter works and the rhyme schemes. If it's a good teacher, that could be quite alluring and the first poems I attempted were in meter and rhyme, very awkward broken-up meter and rhyme but that's what I was hearing earlier on. >> Ron Charles: Were your parents into poetry? Were they poetry readers? >> August Kleinzahler: No, but they were readers. They were novel and nonfiction readers. They subscribed to the magazines of the day, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers, and the Republic, and so forth. And read the novelists, people we would talk about, mainly talked about them. So it was a literate household and my older brother and sister, I was the baby, were readers. They didn't have TV until I came along, when I was about five or six. And the whole family thought I was semi-retarded because I would sit in front of it for hours. And they read for entertainment. >> Ron Charles: Your brother? >> August Kleinzahler: Harris? Harris and Laura. And Harris wrote and my father wrote. He didn't finish high school but he wrote, and he painted, and he collected antiques and paintings, and dragged me through junk stores, antique stores, auctions, and I thought that's how everybody grew up. It wasn't a sophisticated household. They were very provincial people but there were a lot of books and paintings and that kind of stuff around. >> Ron Charles: You've talked about the influence Harris had on you, your older brother. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, well he's -- I loved him. He's my older -- he's my big brother. >> Ron Charles: And he went into a very different career than you did at first, right? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, he went to Wharton and worked as a financial analyst. ^M00:10:01 He died quite young but I don't think that's what he wanted to do and I think it made him rather unhappy. But he was able to get work and my parents, society had a sorts of expectation. You put on a shirt and tie and you go to an Ivy League school and you get to go to an office in the morning and like that. He wasn't cut out for that but people forget how limited opportunities were. My father was a very creative, imaginative character. It was the depression. It wasn't conceivable for him to go into the arts. >> Ron Charles: Right. You should read a poem called ^IT The Crossing ^NO. >> August Kleinzahler: All right, well. This is rather emotionally loaded one. It's a dream about encountering my brother who killed himself at the age of 26 or 27. But I encounter him; I've encountered him as many years since in dreams. And I was close enough to waking with this dream that I was able to retain most of the backdrop and narrative and so forth. ^IT The Crossing ^NO. To carry this across then like contraband, from one country to another, the hour before dawn. The border outpost, half-hidden beside a copse of laurel, quiet for the moment, the guard asleep or having headed home early, before the change in shift -- senior enough to get away with such things -- to slide back into bed beside his warm, sleeping wife. A lamppost, the light flickering amidst the trees, the mist still heavy -- Imagine what we're spiriting across -- imagine what we're spiriting across as a large wooden tray, one with a glass cover. Perhaps like those trays filled with butterfly specimens one pulls from drawers in museums. Or better still, moths, yes moths floating in the tray like pieces of fabric that if touched would turn to dust on one's fingers. Or if you like, a sheet of papyrus, ancient, discolored, adorned in glyphs like patterns in a Lepidoptera's wing, floating atop a pool of solution, kept together only by dint of the liquid's surface tension. To carry you across from the shadow country, with its multitudinous stairwells, tiered rail stations and Victorian hotel lobbies with their raft of private alcoves off to the side into this harshly lit arena of insensate, bleeding forms. I am, as whenever we meet, overcome. The tenderness and sorrow I feel in your presence, a kind of exquisitely sweet agony, unbearable nearly. How can you pretend to be half a stranger when we are brothers? How can you stay away for many months, years on end, only for us to meet up again like this in one of these cloakrooms or pantries, the voices, lit chandeliers and clatter in the drawing room next door, with me beseeching you, as I always do. Please, you mustn't leave. Not this time. And you, eyes averted, looking cornered, confused until you slip away once more, retreating like a wounded animal into the bush. >> Ron Charles: That was powerful. What's the process of taking a dream, a vision I suppose, and turning it into a crafted poem like that? The poem didn't come to you in a dream, right? The lines? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I was aware when I woke up, as I mentioned, it was close enough to waking where I retained -- I had retained most of the injury. Injury, [inaudible]. That's a Freudian slip. Most of the imagery and sequencing, so I immediately -- because I'd had this dream before and it's one of the most painful recurrent dreams I have. And I wanted to trap it and it was trappable. You know, it's a painful thing to trap but in some ways, it's cathartic to be able to express that kind of feeling and sense of loss almost betrayal in imagery and language and imagery. >> Ron Charles: He did everything he was supposed to do until of course, his life fell apart. That is, he went to this college. He got the good job, all that. You then left. You left New Jersey. You left your family. Did his -- in other words, did his life in some way determine the direction yours took? >> August Kleinzahler: I had already gone out west that his life was coming apart very dramatically and I had spent several months with him as it was coming apart. And he'd certainly intimated that he was going to check out one way or another, maybe go to a logging camp but I was the one who wound up in the logging camp. But it was certainly no surprise he'd gotten himself into a terrible bind and he saw no way out and we had a conversation very shortly before he killed himself. And I knew that's what he had in mind and I booked a ticket east that I -- I don't know if I would have made any difference but I got there too late. >> Ron Charles: Traveling -- traveling across the country, across even the world is a huge part of your poetry. In one of your poems, you write motion is not a condition but a desire to be outside one's self. Is that the appeal? >> August Kleinzahler: You know, I've read that someone else quoted that. And it is an appeal. I like to move outside my quotidian orbit. It wakes me up and it makes me feel more alive. And I also find travel is usually educational. You encounter people and architecture and weather that you wouldn't normally -- it's very stimulating. I'm a fiend for stimulation. >> Ron Charles: One of the places you went to was Alaska, right? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: When? How early was that? >> August Kleinzahler: That was 1973. >> Ron Charles: It's pretty exotic then to go to Alaska, wasn't it? It's still kind of exotic. But -- >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking. I was in the northwest. What I was thinking was that I would make my stake. >> Ron Charles: What did that mean to you at the time? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I would get a lot of, you know, like some fast money. That's where I felt like, you know, make some fast money and then I would set it up and I'd go to the south of France or Spain like, Ezra Pound and be a poet or something like that [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: And how were you going to make this money in Alaska? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I thought I would make it in the bush, or construction, or fishing, or canning, or whatever. But as usual with me, I wound up with the Alaska State Museum on a government wage [laughter] of about -- which was a large government wage by American standards but it was about 10 bucks an hour. But I had my own set of adventures out there and as usual, it wasn't what I had intended but it was a very rich experience. And I met some people who remain dear to me to this day. ^M00:20:00 And I was writing and it was rich -- it was a rich landscape in many ways to explore. >> Ron Charles: You've written a series of poems or you've written poems with the title of ^IT The Traveler's Tales ^NO from time to time. >> August Kleinzahler: Right. >> Ron Charles: I want to know if you would read one of them, chapter 34. Are they sequentially numbered? It seemed to me there were some numbers missing. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, I think I'm being rather playful with the [inaudible]. But at some point, you know, if I live long enough, they'll all come together and -- ^M00:20:35 [ Laughter ] ^M00:20:38 >> Ron Charles: Okay, would you read that one, ^IT A Traveler's Tales ^NO chapter 34. >> August Kleinzahler: A Traveler's Tales, chapter 34. This is in Australia. The native whites are flat of head, especially small children who bark sharply and spit at any provocation. The dark race wears an earthen cast, a mix of sand and ash, and look out from under their brims weary and dazed, as if for a long time hunted. Sun Microsystems is at one end, the bank towers at the other. In between, terror alerts are rotated with sportswear ads on the sides of bus shelters. If you see or hear anything out of the ordinary, it is your duty as a citizen to phone. One feels almost at home [laughter] and here so very far away, another hemisphere facing on a distant ocean. A seabreeze called "The Doctor" arrives at six, along with the stewardesses in their red caps and gauzy veils, filling up the hotel lobby and chattering away like exotic birds. The purply neon of the bank towers does something, something marvelous over the river with the magenta of the altocumulus clouds vibrating off one another until the Supreme Court gardens are suffused in a light, first-spectrum violet then Moorish blue then back again. Dubai sky, offers the famous travel writer. He is standing at my shoulder, a dark, slight, genial man. We meet in such places as this. Every few years we cross paths far away from home. Although, he seems not really to have a home except that of airports and a perpetual predawn realm, lived out alone in this Asian city or that, unable to sleep, walking the streets, always in search of the red lantern betokening the entrance to an unforeseen world. And that's Perth, Australia and the traveler writer is Pico Iyer, who you've probably heard of, who's a wonderful writer and a lovely person. >> Ron Charles: What draws you back to that subject again and again? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, you wake up on the Indian Ocean and I'm a country boy from Portland, New Jersey. It gets your attention [laughter]. It's different. The light is different. It's disorienting which I like. >> Ron Charles: Right. I see that again and again in your poems. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: I also see this strange mix between familiar and exotic things which you sometimes push together in witty ways as in this poem. That's all part of your method. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, the method and its part of how I see things and who I am. I do bring myself along on these trips with my [laughter] ordinariness. >> Ron Charles: There are many poems about going home. It's one of the ways you travel is to go home. There are a number of powerful poems about going home. Some you go home, others you think about going home. Some you dream about going home. Some of them are quite lovely. Some of them are desperately sad. >> August Kleinzahler: Well -- >> Ron Charles: Do you still go home? >> August Kleinzahler: I don't go home. >> Ron Charles: No? >> August Kleinzahler: There is no home to go to. >> Ron Charles: Your parents passed away? >> August Kleinzahler: My mom passed away a few years ago and we -- my sister and I sold the home, which was extremely traumatic, and I wrote a piece about that actually for the London Review books. And it was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life because having a house there as the family did for 60-some odd years, and I was 60-ish, I think, 61 when we sold the house. It kind of kept me rooted to some kind of emotional solidity and when that was gone -- oh, it was weird. >> Ron Charles: Really? >> August Kleinzahler: Oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: Did you still have friends there? >> August Kleinzahler: A few, not many. They're rather dispersed. I have a sister in Jersey, close by, whom I see when I go back, and friends here and there down the shore and the [inaudible]. And in the city, it's right across the river from Manhattan. >> Ron Charles: Was it a particularly lovely house or was it mostly just the experience that you associated with it? >> August Kleinzahler: It was a brick Georgian knockoff kind of house with a slate roof and a graveled driveway. My folks bought it for 17 grand in the '40's on a quarter acre in a nice block on the Palisades. It wasn't grand. It was, you know, by modern standards, the rooms were quite small. But when I think of home, when I think of space, [inaudible] poetic space, something like that, and in my dream life, that is the space. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> August Kleinzahler: That is the primal space. That's where they took me from the hospital and it remained. And when I come to visit, except toward the end, I would sleep in my bedroom. >> Ron Charles: In your old boy's bedroom. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, you know, the wallpaper calmed down quite a bit but the [laughter] -- but it was the same room with the same trees out front and that sort of thing. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, I had that. I know what you mean. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: It is very powerful and you dream in that place for years. >> August Kleinzahler: Forever. >> Ron Charles: Decades later, maybe forever. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, I suspect so. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, you know this poem well, I'm sure. >> August Kleinzahler: This is called ^IT 1975 ^NO. This is a rewrite of a poem I'd written 20 years earlier. >> Ron Charles: Can I ask you about that? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: There's another poem. I can't remember the title but it -- >> August Kleinzahler: I can't remember the title either but -- >> Ron Charles: This is better. >> August Kleinzahler: This is better [laughter]. Well, that's why I rewrote it [laughter]. Because there was a poem in there, there was a better poem in there. And it's called ^IT 1975 ^NO. Even the crickets are unnerving me tonight and the smell of camphor in the warm room were still. My woolens will outlast me. Home again from points northwest, a suitcase full of useless books and no prospects. There's a folk song that goes like that. Isipid, pathetic really without the music. This appears to be a condition I shall not escape, a gravitational field to be suffered through all my days like some wayward doomed alien. At least the folks are asleep, getting along in years, they shrug. A shrug means peace. The stomach knows, when the clams are bad, or worse. Perhaps that is truly the site for love. Or where love takes root finally and sets up shop. I had imagined something much less uncomfortable. The dirty aureole across the Hudson is New York. Jets sink into it. Here on the cliff's opposite, trees whisk themselves, the wind freshens for rain. Even George Washington on the lam from Howe, hid out here. He ate and ran south. Ask any ghost along the Hackensack. It's late, very late, that I do know. Mother's bought new bed linen for the occasion, described on the package as "duck egg blue." So clean and cool, I could be afloat on a lake. Thank you. >> Ron Charles: And captures that strange sense of comfort and disappointment about being home again. How old were you in 1975? >> August Kleinzahler: Twenty-five. >> Ron Charles: Twenty-five. >> August Kleinzahler: And not a picture, I can tell you that. There was nothing. No one would -- a boy that wouldn't please any parent [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: You had no job, no prospects? >> August Kleinzahler: I had nothing. >> Ron Charles: You dropped out of school? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I had done it. I had gone back to school and finished but I -- I was a mess and no reason to belabor that but I'm very -- when I run into young people today, if I'm teaching, they're a bit younger and they're casting about them, they always encounter a very sympathetic older person [laughter]. ^M00:30:08 >> Ron Charles: Another one here. Another one about going home here. It's quite nice. This is called ^IT Grey Light in May ^NO. >> August Kleinzahler: You got me reading all the emotionally charged ones, you know. >> Ron Charles: Sorry [laughter]. >> August Kleinzahler: ^IT A Gray Light in May ^NO and this is again in -- I wrote this taking a little walk around the corner from Bluff Road just a couple of blocks from the -- overlooking the Hudson, the tip of the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. Then it looks across to Harlem, Grant's Tomb like there in, that part of New York. The soft gray light between the rains, this enveloping light under a canopy of green, oak, chestnut, maple. Last night the moon, orange and full over Manhattan's West Side. Edgewater below so sleepy. The neighborhood asleep, my family asleep. Coming back here, how many years now and the ride in from Newark, Manhattan looking over the meadows. The beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them -- which is a quote from William Carlos Williams. The soft windless air away now nearly 30 years, you can smell the tidal flats below. Passenger jets silent overhead in and out of Kennedy, La Guardia as if gliding across the night. My heart abrim a glass of wine, spilling over the air like wine. I am a stranger to myself. The soft gray light, the still moist air, the azaleas in these yards under the canopies of leaves fiercely abloom in this gray light between rains, almost stereoscopic. The broad green leaves overhead as well. Painters know it, photographers too. The smell of lilac nudging my chest like the muzzle of a dog. The manner in which this gray light wraps itself around things, saturating them, bringing up the color. So much a part of me. So much of what is dearest; I can barely stand upright under the weight of it. The song the wood thrush reverberates through the heavy air. And around its hidden columns, who knows the Palisades as I do? Lilac and dogwood, flowering pear blossoms, mingling, drifting in gutters. How many years, for how many years, a stranger to my own heart. And again, that's Williams, who knows the Palisades as I do and the strange hours are both from one of my favorite poems that is called ^IT January Morning ^NO. He would often come to the Palisades. He lived in East Rutherford about a half-hour down the road and the Palisades are quite beautiful. >> Ron Charles: One of the things that make that poem so powerful, of course, is the way you root these memories in the physical experience of the place and the way how it looks, how it smells. The snow, those lilacs, they seem nuzzling your chest like a dog? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, that's just a great -- >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: It's just a great, great line. And of course, another great poem about lilacs and the memory of lilacs that we all know from Whitman. Yeah, I just think it's fantastic. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, thank you. >> Ron Charles: Another one now. It's the last one about going home and I -- >> August Kleinzahler: No, it's all right. >> Ron Charles: You can read here. >> August Kleinzahler: No, I enjoy it. About the '80's, it's not the Bluff Road one, isn't it? >> Ron Charles: It is called the ^IT Family Album ^NO. >> August Kleinzahler: Oh! You've picked some interesting ones. You're a sharp guy, Ron [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: It's right there. >> August Kleinzahler: Okay. It's a bit older, earlier poem. ^IT Family Album ^NO. Loneliness, huge, suddenly menacing. And no one is left here who knows me anymore. The Little League coach, his TV repair truck and stinking cigars, and Saul the Butcherman, and the broken arm that fell out of the apple tree -- dead. Dead or gone south to die warm. The little boy with mittens and dog posing on the stoop, he isn't me. And the young couple in polo shirts, ready to pop with their firstborn four pages on in short shorts and a beatnik top, showing her figure off at 16 -- 1955 is in an attic bookcase, spine cracked and pages falling out. Willow and plum tree, green pods from maple whirling down to the sidewalk. Only the guy at the hotdog stand since when maybe remembers me or at least looks twice. But the smushfaced bus from New York, dropping them off at night along these avenues of brick somber as the dead child and crimes of old mayors, lets off no one I know or want to. Warm grass and dragonflies -- oh my heart. >> Ron Charles: You ever read an old poem and see things you really like or really don't? >> August Kleinzahler: I should have altered a line. >> Ron Charles: Which one? >> August Kleinzahler: Never mind [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: No, this will -- it will not leave the room [laughter]. >> August Kleinzahler: What stays at the Library of Congress is [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. You know, I wondered about that as you know, someone who had been publishing for a long time, as you look back, do you think that really worked or that does not work at all? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, sometimes, I haven't read that in many years and I was teaching a teacher course at Claremont -- a teacher course at Claremont McKenna this semester and one is a [inaudible] -- letter writing. And I was telling the kids, you know one of the beauties about writing is you're not up on the stage in front of a hundred people and three-quarters of the way through your poem, you realize that's not right [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Well, here we are. Here we are [laughter]. You know, it's -- >> August Kleinzahler: It's a technical thing, you wouldn't know [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: Okay [laughter]. It's -- we all have this experience when we go back to the high school reunions, when we go back to our folks, we have this experience of looking around and we recognize everything but we know we are not being recognized and they've all moved on, that we're nothing to them. >> August Kleinzahler: It's like that corny Christmas movie, what was that? When Jimmy Stewart goes back to the town and nobody -- >> Ron Charles: Oh yes. >> August Kleinzahler: Remembers him. >> Ron Charles: Yes, and we all know this. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: ^IT A Wonderful Life ^NO, yes. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Right. Yeah, it's a very raw poem. It ends very raw too. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, we're in the wrong mode here. That must have [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, let's talk about jobs. You've had so many jobs. You mentioned a few of them there. Some of them are really tough too and they expose you to a variety of people and careers that you would never have met had you gone to graduate school, immediately gotten a job, you know, teaching poetry and just stay there the rest of your life in an ivory tower. I wonder if that experience, I mean, it clearly enriches your poems, right? I mean, the people we see in your poems, people you would not have met had you had that sort of career. Here's a fabulous poem in a career I've never thought of, the sausage maker? >> August Kleinzahler: Oh, that's ^IT Master of Minsk ^NO. I actually started this when I was in Alaska and I finished it a couple of years later, three years later in Montreal. And it has nothing to do with that. But it does have a bit to do with Montreal because I lived right off Saint Laurent Boulevard with their all sorts of wonderful charcuteries and sausage shops and I loved that kind of food and anyhow. ^IT The Sausage Master of Minsk ^NO. I was sausage master of Minsk. Young girls worked brought parsley to my shop and watched as I ground coriander, garlic and calves' hearts. At harvest time, they'd come with sheaves, hags in babushkas, girls plump as quail, wrapped in bright tunics, switching the flanks of oxen. Each to the other, beast and woman, goggle-eyed at the market's flow. My art is that of my father. ^M00:40:02 Even amongst stinking shepherds, bean-brained as the flocks they tend, our sausages are known. The old man sits in back, ruined in his bones, a scold. So it was my trade brought wealth, my knuckles shone with lard, flecks of summer savory clung to my palms. My shop was pungent with spiced meat and sweat, heat from my boiling pots, my fretful labors with casings, expertly stuffed. Fat women in shawls, muttered and swabbed their brows. Kopeks made a racket on my tray. But I would have none of marriage, the eldest son, no boon, even with the shop's renown, was I to my parents. Among mothers with daughters, full-bottomed, shy, I was a figure of scorn. In that season, when trade was a blur, always from the countryside, there was one, half-formed, whose eyes unlike the haggling matrons' squints, roamed and sometimes found my own. And of her I would inquire. Before seedtime, they always returned. Tavern men speak freely of knives, of this, of that. Call me a fool. For in spring, I would vanish to the hills and in a week return, drawn, remote, my hair mussed, interlaced with fine, pubescent yarn. ^M00:41:47 [ Laughter ] ^M00:41:54 -- you liked me to read it. I didn't [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: What on -- you know that [laughter]. You know that guy so well. How? >> August Kleinzahler: Beats me, you know, imagination is a wonderful thing. Well, I like sausages [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: That poem is so full of the smell and the feel and the matter of that shop. >> August Kleinzahler: I spent a lot of time in those sausage shops. >> Ron Charles: Really. >> August Kleinzahler: And in fact, I was just in Montreal this summer, where I hadn't been in many years with Marcy, my partner and I took her to my favorite sausage shop and there was a little picnic table out in front. It's Romanian and I got the spicy Romanian sausage and she got the mustard and the spicy mustard and I was just saying this. "Isn't this the best goddamned thing you ever had?" And she says, "Yeah it is." >> Ron Charles: And what made that poem work, of course, is that mysterious week, the week pursuing the girl. That's just a brilliant move in the -- if I can call it the plot of that poem. How did that come about? >> August Kleinzahler: You know, I honestly don't know. I'm not being coy or evasive. As poems develop, and you've heard or read this, they do take on a life of their own. That's the logic of metaphors in the [inaudible], I think. We talked about it. And you have to give them a kind of free rein to go where they want to go because it leaves you. At least, one's will, which is I think one of the most exciting aspects of writing poetry. You kind of tap into a larger -- it feels like a larger consciousness and you can't make it do what it doesn't want to do. And which can be problematic and disappointing and blow up whatever you had intended. But sometimes, it turns out better than you could have managed if you didn't impose your will on it. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> August Kleinzahler: This is what I want it to be. Well, it's better than what you know, you wanted. You know, and you'll see down the road. ^E00:44:26 ^B00:44:33 >> Ron Charles: We'll talk about another weird profession here. >> August Kleinzahler: That wasn't a profession. That was a -- I've had enough weird professions. I would have liked to. >> Ron Charles: Maybe I'll [inaudible] yours. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: ^IT Sports Wrap ^NO. >> August Kleinzahler: Oh! Yeah, I wrote this in St. Louis. >> Ron Charles: St. Louis! Did you teach at Wash U? >> August Kleinzahler: No, I had a two-week gig at St. Louis University, not long ago, maybe three years ago and they're baseball crazy there and the character at the end is Tony La Russa whom so many baseball fans might remember. He's got big hair. He's obviously very pleased with it [laughter]. And that's what I would be [laughter]. And oh, and I -- one shouldn't give too much background but I've just driven cross country from San Francisco to St. Louis. >> Ron Charles: Oh my gosh! >> August Kleinzahler: With a friend from Madison, Wisconsin where he was headed, where he grew up and we're friendly in San Francisco. And he dropped me off. ^IT Sports Wrap ^NO. Who would have credited their late August collapse? They flourish like jump weed over these punishing summers or did do adversaries going faint here alongside the river, 18 wheelers bussed across the interstate, devouring horizon, tuned to the one same station, signal fluttering as this distressing tale unfolds, inning by inning, game by game. Do you suppose in the beginning, there was an actual Denny for whom the tuna melts, iced tea and assorted sides were meant as commemorative, an act of devotion? Surely someone has written on this subject at length. But is it not pleasing to think of a corporeal Denny? Adored child, dotting granny, down-home deep-dish Salome? Living in one of those clapboard shitholes behind a silo, playing at quoits, kibitzing, shrieking like an infidel set alight? Skip, you must be as baffled as anyone. The veteran field general gazes into the near distance. You know this look, cerebral, resolute, contempt? Big hair threatening to erupt from under his cap. The cell is vibrating in his left front pants pocket. Three likelihoods, none of them at this moment inviting. Who attends to these staged postmortems on TV? Inebriates, the Eviscerati, Denny [laughter], you, me? I wish I knew the answer to that one. Pete, I do. I really truly do. I wonder, there are a lot of educated people here. Is it corporeal or corporal? Start talking about the material -- corporal? >> Corporeal. >> August Kleinzahler: I said it right? Okay [laughter]. I hate to do this, you know. Like I tell the kids, you don't want to do it in front of a hundred people [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Denny? You mean Denny's? >> August Kleinzahler: I mean Denny's. >> Ron Charles: The fast food, sort of a sit-down fast food restaurant. >> August Kleinzahler: Like the [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. Surely someone has written about this subject at length. I don't -- I really don't think so. >> August Kleinzahler: Oh, I bet someone has wrote the -- you know, the founding of Denny's and -- >> Ron Charles: [Inaudible] maybe. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: And the closing of Red Lobsters, something like that. Why do you? Why would you -- why would you write this poem about a subject like that? >> August Kleinzahler: It crossed my mind. Because I probably gone into a Denny's and was driving across Kansas and maybe there was a Denny's. You know, it was someone's mom [laughter], dog. When you start a restaurant, what do you call the restaurant? Well, you do call it after someone, you know, sweetheart, a loved one, you know, it might be some bizarre acronym but [laughter], you know. >> Ron Charles: You've spoken somewhat dismissively about academic poets and the way poetry is taught and the way poets are kept by universities. Are you recalling any of these comments now? >> August Kleinzahler: I -- you know, if I speak off the cuff. >> Ron Charles: Were you misquoted perhaps? What's wrong with the workshop culture, with the way poetry is taught at the expensive graduate schools and colleges? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, one, you can't teach it. ^M00:49:57 You know, it's like teaching some of us to be happy or -- >> Ron Charles: But it's done everywhere. People pay tons of money for this. >> August Kleinzahler: Exactly, it's a business. It's a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars and that's why universities do it. It has nothing to do with anything really except that it's a business. And -- >> Ron Charles: Good people come out of some of these programs. >> August Kleinzahler: Very few. >> Ron Charles: Really. >> August Kleinzahler: But in spite of the programs, people do come around [laughter] the other end. I certainly discourage bright undergraduate students who have talent to avoid -- >> Ron Charles: You would not tell them to go. >> August Kleinzahler: No, I would tell them to travel and sleep with people who are more interesting than they are [laughter] and read and -- >> Ron Charles: Did you say breed? >> August Kleinzahler: No, I didn't say that and I cautioned them against that [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: You said read. >> August Kleinzahler: Read! >> Ron Charles: Read, okay. >> August Kleinzahler: It rhymes with breed but it's very different. >> Ron Charles: They're so different [laughter]. It's much cheaper to read. >> August Kleinzahler: Oh yeah, right [laughter], like that. >> Ron Charles: You know, about 10 years ago, you wrote a really funny essay in Poetry Magazine. It's quoted all the time. I'm sorry to make you talk about it again. I'm sure you could think of a better -- it's just too funny to ignore. >> August Kleinzahler: Oh no, it's the gift that keeps on giving [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: You suggested among other things that -- well, it was about Garrison Keillor and you suggested -- >> August Kleinzahler: A beloved figure in America [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: You suggested that Keillor's daily bit on public radio called The Writer's Almanac could be used by the army as psychological torture to break the will of terrorists [laughter]. But I bet most people in this room listen to that and kind of enjoy it most days and think, you know, it acquaints them with poets they haven't heard of or reminds them of poets they loved, certain quaint anniversaries. What's so bad about that? What's so bad about The Writer's Almanac? ^M00:52:13 [ Laughter ] ^M00:52:16 >> August Kleinzahler: It's like -- it serves up like a [inaudible]. This is good for you. This will help you through your day and make you a better person. And if you're anxious, perhaps it will relax you [laughter]. And that is not the function of art. I'm sorry. Art does quite the opposite thing. And even when he reads marvelous poems, it's still with this gruesome weird Cub Scout masterly drone, you know [laughter]. It creeps me out. ^M00:52:51 [ Laughter ] ^M00:52:54 >> Ron Charles: You said in that essay, I avoid Keillor's poetry moment on the radio as I avoid sneezing, choking, rheumy-eyed passengers on the streetcar [laughter]. >> August Kleinzahler: I do. You know, that's what I do and whoop! You know, I just flip the dial. I listen to a lot of radio. That's my favorite medium and sometimes, I'm not paying attention and listening. But I'm listening to the news on public radio or something and then all of a sudden, "Here's Johnny!" And then, "Yeah!" >> Ron Charles: For many people, I bet for most Americans, that's all the poetry they're going to get. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, good [laughter]. Good for them [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: What do you think on that one, it's a negative influence? It gives us an impression of poetry as a sort of relaxing, comforting, soothing art. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, I mean it's -- I suppose it's harmless. It's -- you now, traveling through Louisiana and turning on Christian radio in the morning, it's okay. God forgives you, you know [laughter]. And I'm sure He does. And he should be forgiven. We should all be forgiven. Well, most of us and not for that, but for most [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: Has Keillor ever read one of your poems for The Writer's Almanac? >> August Kleinzahler: He did. I was unaware of it but -- and he pronounced my name [inaudible] as Kleinzahler. He put me in my place. >> Ron Charles: [Inaudible] back to you. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah and I think he put me in one of his anthologies. But that's not going to -- >> Ron Charles: Yeah? That wasn't enough. >> August Kleinzahler: I'm not going to get [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: You can't be bought off [inaudible]? >> August Kleinzahler: No, I [laughter] don't. ^M00:54:40 [ Laughter ] ^M00:54:43 >> Ron Charles: You've never met him. >> August Kleinzahler: No. And never mind. No, I have no interest in -- I'm sure he's a wonderful person. Otherwise, he wouldn't be so beloved [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Let's take a little break. We'll be right back. There's music all through your poems and some of it is quite funny. Sometimes you write about musicians, sometimes about their music, sometimes just the experience of hearing music. There's a line here, the oboist upstairs, why does he insist on practicing during my afternoon nap? Why does it always have to be Ravel? >> August Kleinzahler: I altered that. That's -- she's actually a bassoonist. >> Ron Charles: A bassoonist. >> August Kleinzahler: But I didn't want to hurt her feelings [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Did you love music before you loved poetry or are they intertwined in your mind in some way? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, they're naturally connected but I don't think I became a serious music -- [inaudible] serious. >> Ron Charles: Well, you are. >> August Kleinzahler: That's nearly until later -- later on when I began -- I think when I began listening to jazz more seriously in my 20's. And then I kind of went off the deep end and got interested in all sorts of music and remained so. And it's very -- it's endlessly pleasurable. >> Ron Charles: You write in one poem, everything sounded good in 1957. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I think the culture was at its apex. Someone wrote a book 1958 a few years ago talking about -- I had already been of that opinion. He went on about what was happening in 1958 why American culture was at its apex and it's actually not that interesting a book but [laughter] -- but I would say between 1956 and the early '60's, American culture topped out. >> Ron Charles: And you got a series of poems called ^IT The History of Western Music ^NO. There's tremendous variety in those poems too. What inspired that series and will you ever publish them, you know, as a series? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah -- >> Ron Charles: In fact, I kind of [inaudible] that around, right. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, if I live long enough, get enough pages. That had a very specific beginning. I was writing my columns, some music was in my head all the time, a weekly column. It's interesting, no matter how contemptuous you may feel about this or that columnist in the Post, or the Times, or whatever, knocking off one or two columns a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 weeks a year, it's a lot of work. >> Ron Charles: It's just brutal. It ruins your life. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah. I mean, you wake up -- you wake up, well you know, you wake up in the middle of the night and -- but I was on a reading tour of sorts. That sounds more glamorous than it was, in Britain and Ireland. And for some reason, they were playing the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony. I think that must have been big [inaudible] contract across Britain and Ireland so everywhere you went and -- >> Ron Charles: You mean, you heard it in grocery stores and things? Is that what you're saying? >> August Kleinzahler: Airports, public buildings, and at the same time, in Britain -- or in London -- I think they were having Frank Sinatra Week or something because there was a -- Sinatra was every pub you walked in to, on television late at night, they had reruns of Tony Romo -- or Tony Roma, Tony Rome and this or that. And so everywhere I went, it was either Mahler or Frank Sinatra. >> Ron Charles: Together again. >> August Kleinzahler: Together again, that great old pair. And so, I had to get this strange phenomenon because I was going through these very different sorts of landscapes, some ethereal like the one I mentioned in the mountains outside of Dublin and less ethereal in London. And so -- you know, these old-fashioned textbooks, ^IT A History of Western Music ^NO, a history of this and that, so I figured, it's a history of western music and then I just assigned an arbitrary number to it. >> Ron Charles: Let's hear a few of these. >> August Kleinzahler: And continued for the next 15 years [inaudible]. ^M00:59:42 [ Laughter ] ^M00:59:45 >> Ron Charles: Oh, this one's not numbered. Does that mean it's the first one? >> August Kleinzahler: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Great. >> August Kleinzahler: This is the one I was talking about. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> August Kleinzahler: April of that year in the one country was unusually clear and with brisk north easterlies straight from the Urals. ^M01:00:07 Their ancient region at long last succumbed and laid to rest after much ceremony. Sinatra was everywhere that spring, in the hotel lobbies, toilets, shops. Fly me to the moon, you make me feel so young. Name it. On TV a computer generated [inaudible] sang, "I Did It My Way" [laughter] in a gravely bar room baritone. "He only weighed 130 pounds," Ava Gardner was to have remarked, "soaking wet, but 100 of those pounds was cock." [Laughter] Whereas, the season before, in the other country to the west, no matter into which room you walked, it would have been the heart wrenching [inaudible] Symphony Number Five. Only a small country, it had endured a long, famously tragic history. Still, it was more than passing strange, not halfway through your plate of muscles, the trembling Adagietto showering you with the debris of Gustav Mahler's tortured soul. True wife, Alma, was a troublesome slut [laughter]. We know this of her and choose to forgive. But what of this late romantic excess, this anthem of the Hapsburg twilight in a cruelly served and windswept land. We'd only lately come over this sally gap across the bog land, down from the glen, and were walking slowly along the lower lake of Glendolo [assumed spelling]. Afternoon had turned toward evening, and with it came a chill, and with the chill a mist had begun to gather over the lake. "This is a haunted place," I heard her say. It was quiet, then. We were the last ones there, only a patch [inaudible] the wind. Unheated from somewhere out of the blue, "Liberace," she said and nothing more. We continued on our walk and listened if just to the silence. This would have been an hour [inaudible] before retreating to the gate house and into the monastery for evening prayer. One can imagine a stillness forming around him there, like those halos of gold or [inaudible] that surround the sacred figures in ancient Fresco's. Much as I do with [inaudible], in one of his brocaded [inaudible] jumpsuits, with its sequins catching the spotlights, enorbing [assumed spelling] the performer in brilliant rays as he smiles coquettishly to the Vegas crowd. Then turns to deliver the first in a series of thunderous glissandos, somehow finding his way back to a climatic, magnificently rousing chorus of that million seller and timeless classic, Moon River [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: That's really good, it's really funny too. When you wrote this you didn't know it would be a series? >> August Kleinzahler: I didn't, but I kept traveling and I -- and I still hadn't -- that [inaudible] in my head a lot it was a fun way to travel, because there's often a musical connection to the environment you're traveling in. >> Ron Charles: Right, and it's completely [inaudible] as it is -- >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, right. >> Ron Charles: -- and, yeah. History is such a -- such a clever way of encompassing it. Now, this poem may be the most recent of the History of Music poems, do you think? >> August Kleinzahler: There have been some since. >> Ron Charles: Since then? This is certainly a more recent one, though? >> August Kleinzahler: Right. I mean, there's some -- this is my most recent book, but I've published a couple -- one or two since. >> Ron Charles: This is a very different poem. >> August Kleinzahler: I hope so. I try to -- I try to -- I don't like revisiting the same place, particularly. Although, as you've pointed out, I seen two, they're themes, like going home, but. ^IT History of Western Music ^NO, chapter 44, B-bop. ^M01:05:00 [ Inaudible Reading of Poem ] ^M01:06:32 And the yahtzee, I suppose is like rim shots and -- >> Ron Charles: Right. That's a [laughter] remarkable poem. Actually, except for when you stopped, you read it really spectacularly, I thought. It's so much like music. I mean, everything what you write is music [inaudible], but you know what I mean. You're really representing the sounds of instruments with the words. This other poem we were much more aware of the sense of the sentences and what was being said. We were building themes, we were looking for wit. This is a totally different kind of poem. >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, I was trying to get that -- that tumbling, propulsive aspect of B-bop and -- and the quoting of different bits leaking out here and there. And -- like that. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. I wish you could all see it, too. It's a -- I wondered about that as I read some of the poems. Your strange and remarkable diction, the range of words and references, it's really remarkable. The poem about that whole process -- >> August Kleinzahler: When I was talking about [inaudible], interpolating bits and pieces of other songs while they're going through the jazz piece they're playing, that Charlie Parker does, little snippets of this or that. >> Ron Charles: Right. You write in a poem called Summer Journal, which I can't find, sorry. I lay there struggling to remember a word. It takes awhile, but it's not far. As I begin to doze off, it comes to me, as so many things do in this condition of mind. It was necessary that I find a word. Whatever else happens in the course of the day, the important work has been done. And the word you were looking for there is Zamboni [laughter]. >> August Kleinzahler: And that was true. I was in this hypnologic state where a lot of things happen, by the way, poetry, scientific inventions and whatnot that place between sleep and waking. And there was -- I don't if you've had this experience, but there was a word and the word encapsulated a feeling. And although it was a nonsense, it had no connection to anything, it was a specific word, and I struggled for awhile with it. And -- and you can -- I can, one tries to sort of ride this hypnologic condition to keep it going, because you don't want to wake up, and you don't want to slip away, because it's a fascinating place to tease out, I think for an artist, for anybody, really. And then I found it, you know, this ice machine word. And -- >> Ron Charles: Was it satisfying or was it disappointing? >> August Kleinzahler: Oh, it was -- [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Have you had the experience, though, where you think the right word's out there but then you find that it's not, it didn't, doesn't -- >> August Kleinzahler: Once I -- and this took years to find. I don't know if you can say this in Washington, D.C., but it was the -- 1970 and I was tripping with my brother, and we were at a friend of his house, and, you know, I was very overwhelmed by the drug LSD, and -- this is all okay, isn't it? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> August Kleinzahler: Okay. >> Ron Charles: It was a long time ago. >> August Kleinzahler: And there was this word, and I knew the word -- I knew this word, it was -- it would unlock the -- everything. ^M01:10:16 And I literally spent years re-composing that moment -- getting myself to that place, and one day it came to me. >> Ron Charles: What was the word? >> August Kleinzahler: Jumpster banister [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Is that even a word? >> August Kleinzahler: No [laughter]. And, you know, I was tripping. And -- but there was a banister, I remember, and it had nothing to do with anything, but it encapsulated all wisdom [laughter]. And -- >> Ron Charles: That had to have been a little disappointing. >> August Kleinzahler: It was a great relief. It was like, if you've had cats, you know, you watch them with the hairballs. ^M01:11:04 [ Laughter ] ^M01:11:09 But I want you to know, and it speaks -- it says a lot about me, that I did pursue that literally for years. And how I found it, goodness knows, but, yes, it was usually satisfying. >> Ron Charles: [Laughter] In another poem you write, "How like an intoxicant the way words come loose of their moorings and fall apart, little bits of them all over, like an airliner wreck spread across the phrenologist's chart." >> August Kleinzahler: You read that very well [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Phrenology shows up in your poems several times. >> August Kleinzahler: I'm fascinating by a lot of that late 19th Century -- >> Ron Charles: Junk. >> August Kleinzahler: -- quackery [laughter]. Yeah. And I like the style of those writers, too. It's a -- a formality and sentence structure and so forth. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> August Kleinzahler: Earnestness of tone. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. And the sense that they were doing something scientific. >> August Kleinzahler: Yes. Yes. >> Ron Charles: They weren't at all. What's our time like, Rob? >> 8:30. >> Ron Charles: 8:30, okay. The time just changed, so at our house half the clocks are ahead, half are back, we never know what time it is. >> August Kleinzahler: You live in Arizona, or? >> Ron Charles: No [laughter]. We just don't know how to change half the clocks. >> August Kleinzahler: Oh, yeah. >> Ron Charles: So we just put up with it for six months and then we're back. ^M01:12:36 [ Laughter ] ^M01:12:41 There's a lot of wit, we've heard a lot wit and music in your poems, but there is, as we began at the beginning, some unspeakable sadness, too. In one poem you ask, "What sort of life have I led that you find yourself, an adult male of late middle-age, about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruit." That's autobiographical? >> August Kleinzahler: Maybe. [Laughter] That's a break-up poem. >> Ron Charles: A break-up poem. Are you married now? >> August Kleinzahler: I don't think so [laughter]. No, but I'm happily together with someone. >> Ron Charles: Nice. In a poem called The Hollyhocks and the Fog, you write, "There is nothing further to be known. The fog has taken over the world and with night settling in, all that has been has ever been is gone. Gone, but for the sound of the wind." That's a really dark place. >> August Kleinzahler: Not so much. That's summer in San Francisco and it's [laughter] -- which can be pretty bleak, as tourists find out. But it's -- I was thinking of the nothingness. I'm very much interested in [inaudible] and the sense of nothingness behind all material phenomena, and it's -- it was actually rather comforting. >> Ron Charles: It reminded me of one of Emily Dickenson's poems which ends, "when the winds take force in their paws, the universe is still." There's a lot of wind in your poems, a lot of bad weather in your poems. >> August Kleinzahler: I like the weather, and no point in writing about good weather, it's all the same, [laughter] like happy family's, right? >> Ron Charles: [Laughter] It's also weird to me the way despair -- the way a poem can express despair and at the same time sort of work against it. It can both make that despair more articulate and yet sort of comfort us at the same time. Several of your poems do that. You're interested in -- was it a religious house you grew up in? >> August Kleinzahler: Not at all. They would pretend, when their parents were around, to be more religious than they were, you know, during holidays. But, no, they couldn't have cared less, and none of my siblings, neither I or my brother or sister, have any religious feelings. >> Ron Charles: But now you've been studying or you're interested in Eastern philosophy? >> August Kleinzahler: Yes. I studied that in college, and I was interested -- actually I had a rather interesting high school teacher who taught us a bit of Eastern history and philosophy, and then when I went to Wisconsin and I would up majoring in Asian studies and -- >> Ron Charles: Was it more than just academic? Did it really move you? Did it speak to you? >> August Kleinzahler: Absolutely, you know, particularly Chinese and Japanese poetry, and landscape painting, [inaudible], landscape painting I'm very affected by. And that happened early. I think one of the earliest experiences of getting very excited about poetry was at the New York Port Authority on 175th Street, when they had little bookstores -- the little bookstores they used to have. And there were a couple of -- there was a book of Kenneth Rexroths's [assumed spelling] ^IT 100 Poems in the Chinese ^NO, and also ^IT New Directions ^NO book and ^IT 100 Poems from the Japanese ^NO. And that really fascinated me, and it has never ceased to fascinate me. >> Ron Charles: [Inaudible] read a poem about the afterlife. >> August Kleinzahler: The [inaudible]? >> Ron Charles: Yeah [laughter]. >> August Kleinzahler: I like to read this one. The Hereafter. At the gates to the hereafter, a rather drab affair. Might as well be a union hall in south Milwaukee, but with shackled, sweating bodies along the walls. Female, chiefly, and not at all miserable. Straining like bored sultanas at their fetters, each of them singing a separate song. A [inaudible] chap of the greeter, I suppose, gives me the quick onceover and most amused he seems to be. Has me figured. Not unlike a gent I met only last week, a salesman at a stereo shop on Broadway. So he says, nothing more. Sew buttons says I in a cavalier mood, and why not. Ushers me into a tiny cinema, two seater, really quite deluxe. A great big Diet Coke in a cup holder, fizzing away. Okay, he asks. I nod and the film unrolls. A $20 million home movie it is, featuring yours truly. At the foot of the stairs with the dog, mounting Josette [assumed spelling] in a new [inaudible] love nest. A fraught kitchen showdown with mom. The suicide, car wreck, homerun, you know what these things are like. The outlandish hairdos, pastel bathroom fixtures. The editing is out of this world. The whole shebang in under an hour. The air raid drill on Wednesday morning, 1957, when Tito wet his pants. There I am, beside myself with laughter, miserable little creature. The elemental slow motion machinery of characters forcing [inaudible]. Even with the fancy camera angles, junk cuts and the rest, might as well be a chain of short features. Animal husbandry, sexual hygiene, [inaudible] by night. What a lot of erections, voiding's, pretzels, bouncing the ball against the stoop. She really did love you all along. These jealousies and rages of yours, like a disgusting skin condition that never entirely goes away. You, you, what a [inaudible] of failure, self-deception. And then the lights come back on. Likewise, the choir is splintered [inaudible] with its shards of [inaudible], the ronettes [assumed spelling] whatnot. And then the air around us something like the odor of a freshly spent cartridge. When [inaudible] asks brightly, "How about another Coke?" ^M01:19:19 [ Laughter ] ^M01:19:23 >> Ron Charles: Is that what awaits us? >> August Kleinzahler: Is that? >> Ron Charles: Is that what awaits us? >> August Kleinzahler: I hope so [laughter]. Could be worse [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: Could be much worse for some of us. This is Washington, after all. It's a very witty poem. What inspired a poem like that? >> August Kleinzahler: Well, I was -- I was in a stereo shop on lower Broadway shortly before I wrote that. And -- so that was in my head, and it was an amusing sort of high pressure, [inaudible], I think. And then a bunch of other stuff accumulated around there. ^M01:20:12 And so it's often a combination of what's been stewing, and -- for awhile and then bits and pieces of what are your immediate consciousness. And, then, as I said, when the thing starts going, who knows what's going to come off the shelf and mix. >> Ron Charles: [Laughter] I'd like to end with some love poems. I didn't associate you with love poems. >> August Kleinzahler: Most don't. I -- >> Ron Charles: But as I read all your poems, [laughter] there were many really lovely love poems. You agree, you write some love poems? Well, one is called Love Poem, so you'll have to give me that one, at least. But [laughter] -- >> August Kleinzahler: One does fall in love. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. And if you can, you write about it. Here's one called Anniversary. >> August Kleinzahler: Right. Thank you. I like to read this one. The setting here is Austin, Texas, in summer, where it's very hot. He figured the hawk for an isolate thing, commanding the [inaudible]. Taking his ease in the thermals and wind until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek. Cruelly perfect at what he is. With [inaudible] igniting the streets and flowering pansy under foot, I'd get out there just after dawn each day, before the sun made it over the mesquite and honey locusts. Cliff swallows rocketed low over grass, dragonflies darted above, every day. On the heels of first bird song, juiceheads sleeping rough by the culvert. Before the heat, before the ebb and flow of [inaudible] swallowed the world, when the crepe myrtle was still in bloom, when it was the flowering pansy's time in the park [inaudible] lots, and still a touch of cool in the air. I remember once a red tail perched close by on a branch or utility pole. Maybe he came down for a better look, but I think it was so that I might better see him, who reigned over these few acres and beyond. And what it was about him so overmastering, an ugly sheen encouraged some gold in his [inaudible] mantle. His belly was white. Look at me, he seemed to be saying -- seemed to be insisting. Behold a pure wild heartless thing. Beautiful and horrible, nothing in between. I one day saw him tearing at his prey. He was in the crook of a tree, low and close at hand, fixed on it, drunk with it, merciless at it. The sound like a cleaver tearing through meat. Cruelly what he was, nothing else. But on another day not long after I heard him perched high on a branch calling out, crying out in distress, piteously, [making bird noises]. A harsh descending sound and unrelenting, [making bird noises]. Panicked or wounded, terrible in his dismay, until suddenly from some other corner of sky another hawk flew down to join him. Not right there on the same branch, but on another close by. And soon after that, off they flew together, drifting, spiraling, higher and higher in partnered loops, wheeling and diving, enraptured by all they were able to do, not as separate beings, but as two. I'm going to Austin tomorrow [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: That is a beautiful, beautiful poem. >> August Kleinzahler: Thank you, sir. >> Ron Charles: It's surprising, it's repeatedly delightful. The tremendous tension -- >> August Kleinzahler: Am I not flesh? Do I not bleed [laughter]? >> Ron Charles: No, it just works so well. It does so many things that you do so well in there. >> August Kleinzahler: Thank you. >> Ron Charles: Here's one called Love Poem. >> August Kleinzahler: How do you like that? That's an old one. As long as the cat -- Love Poem. As long as the cat comes home and the skinheads keep to their concrete shell over the fence, screaming, "Break your face!", smashing empties, what need is there to worry or come undone. So the wolf slips in, cutting through us like cheese, soft cheese, an emulsion of blood and cheese. Except for the radio tower close by, blighting, Ruby, my dear, until you shift in your chair and it's right, both speakers all there. Poor monk, dying at the baronesses on the hill above Weehawken. Night after night, cars [inaudible] into the tunnel below, into the city, fanning lights across the broad river. The west side throbbing across black water. [Inaudible] dying. >> Ron Charles: A more difficult poem, I think, to hear once, but so spectacularly complex. And the references all over the place, from the skinheads to monk. Fascinating, again. And one more, a wildly romantic poem. >> August Kleinzahler: [Inaudible]. Some of these I forget I've written, which isn't always a terrible thing. A Valentine regarding the impractability [assumed spelling] of our love. Evil Knievel, Robert Craig [assumed spelling], knievel of beaut. Now that one, that wild -- the crack up at Caesar's Palace in '68, then trying to clear the 13 Pepsi trucks in [inaudible]. And just down the road here at the [inaudible]. You could tell by the way he wore his hair and that white kid leather jumpsuit with fringe, an ordinary man doesn't jump the Snake River Canyon with nothing underneath his ass but a two-wheeled [inaudible] X1 Sky Cycle and a seven figure guarantee from some [inaudible] in L.A. Darling, I've walked away from a wreck or two myself, or crawled, and earned the name of fool, [inaudible]. But let's take off this one last time, no net, no harness, no nothing underneath to break our fall. The animal spirits that from pure blood arise are what gets us aloft, and the fuel by which we fly. So hold on, baby, we're lifting off. Don't look down, your head will swim, and don't let go. Once in the air we're on our own, they'll all be watching, assembled below. Come on, love, let's give the punters a show. ^M01:27:36 [ Laughter ] ^M01:27:40 >> Ron Charles: Was this given to someone as a Valentine? >> August Kleinzahler: Yeah, and that went up in flames, too. ^M01:27:48 [ Laughter ] ^M01:27:51 >> Ron Charles: That's kind of where I was going with this. Yeah, I mean, who compares his relationship to Evil Knievel? >> August Kleinzahler: [Laughter] Well, if you -- >> Ron Charles: You should have known. >> August Kleinzahler: -- live with yourself that long you start comparing yourself to Evil Knievel [laughter]. >> Ron Charles: All three of those poems do something which I think is sort of remarkable and there's tremendous range in the poem about the hawks. You know, it begins with such violence, you know, the tearing apart of this other -- this other smaller bird, a rodent, I suppose, and then it ends with this beautiful image of them flying off together. The other one has the skinheads. And this poem, Evil Knievel, but then there's a line from Paradise Lost dropped in there, too. That's an enormous range. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, it's -- I always tell people, it wasn't unusual for me. I'm in New York, it wasn't unusual to go from the Museum of Modern Art to a tavern with the fellows, you know, with their baseball caps turned backwards, watching the Yankee game. It's just I move in and out of these different environments, and I don't -- naturally, and I enjoy drawing from all different sorts of realms, what I've read, what I've seen, what I've -- it's all there. >> Ron Charles: It makes reading the poems exciting and demanding, too. >> August Kleinzahler: Well, good. I'm sorry about the demanding. >> Ron Charles: No, no. >> August Kleinzahler: No, no. Garrison, you know, I'm -- Garrison has issues with demanding, but [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: I don't mean that as a criticism, you know that. >> August Kleinzahler: No, no, I know you [inaudible]. I'm just joshing. >> Ron Charles: I'm going to close with a quote from one of your own poems. "I mean, how good is this, really? I mean, really, seriously, how good is this?" That's you. [Laughter] Thank you very much. >> August Kleinzahler: Thank you very much. ^M01:29:32 [ Applause ] ^M01:29:38 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:29:44