August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler Poems

August Kleinzahler Biography

August Kleinzahler (born December 10, 1949 in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American poet. Until he was 11, he went to school in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he grew up. He then commuted to the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, graduating in 1967. He wrote poetry from this time, inspired by Keats and Kenneth Rexroth translations, among other works. He started college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison but dropped out and after taking a year out of school, he ended up, 1971, at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Drawn to the New York poets, including Frank O’Hara, Kleinzahler then discovered the work of Basil Bunting, who had a major influence on Kleinzahler's search for his own voice in poetry. He described Bunting's 1966 long poem Briggflatts (which its author described as "an autobiography, but not a statement of fact") as "everything I wanted in poetry.” Bunting taught a creative writing course at Victoria: "He began with some poems by Hardy and Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, and went up to Yeats and Pound, then David Jones, Williams, the poets who were important to Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lorine Niedecker, and H.D. All he did was smoke unfiltered Player’s and read to us". The Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn (1929–2004) was also a major influence: "the honest treatment of the poetic material at hand, not slipping into rhetorical or poetic postures, inflating subject matter or dodging difficulty," Kleinzahler explained in an interview in The Paris Review in the fall of 2007. Gunn would become a close friend. William Carlos Williams was also an important source of inspiration.)

The Best Poem Of August Kleinzahler

The Dog Stoltz

The dog Stoltz pushed his paw pads into my neck,
the warm, beaten leather deep under my chin,
and let slip the one paw to up near my mouth
with all the filth of the many blocks we trod,
together trod, a well-moistened, adenoidal sound,
part sigh and part growl, coming out of him,
transported, he seemed, in a slow-motion delirium
as I tickled his chest and behind his ear
when he just then told me he'd tear out my throat,
looked in my eye and smiled, best as a dog can,
then turned ruminative and spoke once more:
—I simply have to knock off that essay on Sassoon.
This would have been Sassoon the war poet, understand.
Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this.
As for his talk, well, I took no special notice.
His love of the war poets was well known.
Stoltz would have been part bull and something else.
Two friends walked by just then, handily as these things go,
and inquired of us sitting down there on the stoop,
not even, a doorway merely, along a busy street,
how went the day and what pursuits was I attending;
but what interested the two of them most
were the tergiversations of the dog Stoltz,
first beast, then scholar, then abject and adored.
(Say, who among us does not care to be undressed?)
He was not really my dog, you see, and of this made note,
but were glad as well at my having a new dog in my life.
It was a busy stretch of pavement, Amsterdam maybe,
or Broadway, or farther down just south of Chelsea.
I can tell you it was the West Side, of that I'm certain,
and it was mild, spring-like, a few drops in the air.
The friends passed along and the dog Stoltz slept.
He was not my dog, you know. He simply followed me out
of what can only have been a very fine home,
such were his graces, his recondite tastes.
But he was a killer too, and rather smelled.
I cannot accommodate another animal now, please understand.
I am between places. I will yearn for Stoltz, but no.

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