August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler (born 1949) is an American poet.

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. 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. He started college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison but dropped out. After taking a year out of school, he ended up at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia where he took classes with the British modernist poet Basil Bunting (1900-1985).

Basil Bunting had a major influence on Kleinzahler's search for his own voice in poetry. Another person who later influenced him was the Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004). Gunn's influence had to do with "the honest treatment of the poetic material at hand, not slipping into rhetorial or poetic postures, inflating subject matter or dodging difficulty," Kleinzahler explained in an interview in The Paris Reiview in the fall of 2007.

Possibly the most-used blurb quote regarding Kleinzahler's work is from Allen Ginsberg: "August Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare - that quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Ezra Pound's work. A loner, a genius."

Kleinzahler is the author of ten books of poetry, including "The Strange Hours Travelers Keep" and "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City". He has also published a non-fiction work, "Cutty, One Rock (Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained)". (The title refers to Cutty Sark Scotch with a single ice cube, the favorite drink of his beloved older brother who in 1971 committed suicide at age 27.)

For many years, he has lived in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco but has retained strong ties to his old home base in New Jersey. In 2005 he was named the first poet laureate of Fort Lee. That same year, after many years as a bachelor, Kleinzahler married Sarah Kobrinsky.

Poetry

* "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City", Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 [http://us.macmillan.com/sleepingitoffinrapidcity]
* "The Strange Hours Travelers Keep", Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004 (winner of the 2004 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
* "Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club : Poems: 1975-1990", Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000
* "Green Sees Things in Waves", Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999
* "Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow", Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1995
* "Like cities, like storms", Picador Australia, 1992
* "Earthquake Weather", Moyer Bell Ltd, 1989
* "Storm over Hackensack", Moyer Bell Ltd, 1985
* "A Calendar of Airs", Coach House Press, 1978

Prose

* "Cutty, One Rock : Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained", Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

External links

* [http://us.macmillan.com/author/augustkleinzahler August Kleinzahler at FSG]
* [http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2004.php?t=6 Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio and video clips]
* [http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/speeches.php?t=2 Griffin Poetry Prize 2005 keynote speech, including audio clips]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/books/02poet.html?scp=5&sq=Kleinzahler&st=nyt In Addition to His Pugnacity and Charm, He Can Write Poetry, "New York Times", August 2, 2005]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/books/24garn.html?ex=1209700800&en=81826d8a5b068d91&ei=5070&emc=eta1 Bullies, Addicts and Losers: A Poet Loves Them All, "New York Times", April 24, 2008]
* [http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/may08-kleinzahleresque/ Kleinzahleresque, "Open Letters", May, 2008]