Bard of New Jersey
Snow Approaching on the Hudson by August Kleinzahler.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
85 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper)
August Kleinzahler’s fourteenth collection of poems, Snow Approaching on the Hudson, begins with the death of Elvis and ends with a recollection of his teacher, the great Northumberland poet Basil Bunting, whose long poem “Briggflatts” (1966) has proved a lasting influence on many writers. That is to say, the book begins in 1977 and circles back to the winter of 1971–1972, when Bunting was teaching at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the younger poet happened to bounce there on an extended peripatetic jag. It also happened to be the winter that his beloved older brother, Harris, killed himself in New York City, three days before Kleinzahler’s twenty-second birthday. Recourse to numbers (an old word for verse, after all) comes readily to hand when death looms: the clock is ticking, and what’s approaching on “the lordly Hudson,” the famous phrase Kleinzahler borrows occasionally from Paul Goodman, is a bit more than snow. The book is dedicated “To Friends Departed—‘See you on the river.’”
The range—between a Croesus-like song-and-dance man and an obscure, impoverished poet—is crucial; traversing across contrasting modes is the driving force behind Kleinzahler’s work. As is the case with his most challenging poems, the opener, “30, Rue Duluth,” is a burlesque. (Kleinzahler has written that the purpose of art is entertainment, full stop.) “Elvis is dead, the radio said,” it begins, recalling the story in Plutarch’s The Obsolescence of Oracles in which a Greek sailor hears a divine voice proclaim, “The great god Pan is dead.” Kleinzahler lets the allusion echo lightly without comment, instead having his narrator dive into the description of a sausage: “I read that piece of meat as if I were Chaim Soutine, /with its capillaries and tiny kernels of fat, /bound up in its burnt-sienna casing.” It’s not long before we realize that the “meat” he is reading is that of the singer found dead of a heart attack on the bathroom floor:
They say he existed on Tuinal and cheddar, his blood turned to sludge, odds & ends from this snack or that buried deep inside him, dating all the way back to Blue Hawaii, the fat around his neck like a collar of boudin blanc.
“Now, that’s what I call a showman,” the narrator exclaims, the nearhomophone shaman echoing in the word. Of course, there’s showmanship in Kleinzahler’s language too: he’s going toe to toe with the diamondsuited, caped king, wielding language with insolence to match the bombast of late-stage rock and roll. There’s a sleight of hand at work in the suggestion that the speaker is other than Kleinzahler—a composer, as it happens, who himself has a slight air of ridiculousness (he alights on his motif for “my early masterwork, Opus 113,” while the news of Elvis’s death is being broadcast). A lineup of unreliable narrators is part of the entertainment. So is the effect of dainty diction set in opposition to grotesque vocabulary or to the profanity of the whole miseen-scène (the “broken link of kolbasz/ fetched only lately from Boucherie Hongroise”). And so is the little ironic diminuendo at the end: the day the King of Rock and Roll dies, Satie’s delicate Gymnopédies play on the radio as evening falls.
In sharp contrast to those buffo ironies, however, Kleinzahler is also a writer of elegies; his tribute to Bunting couldn’t be more direct and heartfelt: “I watched you carefully that year, / and listened./It was good to be around a man like that.” The irreverent, egregiously inappropriate Bunting scandalized his university colleagues, and students dropped his course en masse; Kleinzahler and a few others stayed on to read verse (not their own), listen to music, drink wine, and hear stories:
That bungalow we’d meet at, the few of us, rain pouring down outside, listening to Scarlatti, Dowland, Byrd, or you reading aloud to us, Wordsworth, Wyatt— just back there across the road, torn down, a gruesome condo complex now.
Bunting was a Poundian who had sat at the master’s feet in Rapallo; he had also served in the RAF and as a military intelligence officer in Persia during World War II. His relation to employment was tenuous, but he was a fund of poetic knowledge from ancient Persians to the Celts to the Elizabethans. For the young Kleinzahler, who was already well on his way to a similarly precarious lifestyle (he even, like Bunting, supported himself writing a music column at one point), this was a stroke of unbelievable luck.
There are some echoes between the styles of the two poets, one an Englishman with a northern burr and one a guy from Fort Lee, New Jersey, with a twang. For all the aural density of Bunting’s poetry, Kleinzahler discovered, it didn’t depart significantly from how Bunting actually talked. And so how a guy from Jersey talks became a baseline for a Kleinzahler poem—its tone can veer unexpectedly up or down, or leap into the hinterlands of vocabulary, as in the comic poem “A Baroque Scot’s Excess”:
Chivvied by creditors, pilloried by malison of every kind, his noddle much modified by the liquor of grape, he gan to unleash his word-hoard and visit upon the worst his fullest measure of clapperclaw; . . .
followed hard by sulfurous hail of scorn: slabberdegullion druggels, freckled bittors, drawlatch hoydons, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, blockish grutnols ...
The distance, then, between the artist as Elvis and the artist as Bunting is like the span in linguistic registers, writ large. It’s also correlated with an