Poetry review – A HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC: Rosie Johnston is impressed by August Kleinzahler’s skill at conveying the experience of listening to music
A History Of Western Music
August Kleinzahler
Carcanet Poetry
ISBN: 978–1–80017–493–1
80pp £12.99
In his early days, August Kleinzahler enjoyed the shadows of being a cult figure, described by Allan Ginsberg as producing ‘that quality of “chiseled” verse memorable in Basil Bunting’s and Ezra Pound’s work. A loner, a genius.’. His prestigious American publishers, Farrar Strauss & Giroux, have gathered his earlier poems for revival three times this century, so far: in 2000 Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: poems 1975 – 1990; in 2008 his multi-award winning new and selected poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City; and in 2017 Before Dawn on Bluff Road/ Hollyhocks in the Fog, Selected San Francisco Poems, published as a single volume. In 2018, Faber picked up that collection and now Carcanet follows with A History of Western Music, published by FSG last year.
Kleinzahler was born in New Jersey in 1949 and has lived much of his life in San Francisco. In 1971 he began to study poetry at the University of Victoria, Vancouver Island in British Columbia, drawn there by love of Bunting’s work, especially his long poem Briggflatts (1966). According to Kleinzahler, Bunting’s teaching style was simple: ‘All he did was smoke unfiltered Player’s and read to us’, which sounds exactly what Kleinzahler was looking for.
Over the years, honours have flooded Kleinzahler’s way: The International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2004; Fellowship of the Guggenheim Foundation, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lila Acheson-Readers’ Digest Award for Poetry in 1989; the Berlin Prize in 2000; the Lannan Literary Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2008. There may well be others. Helen Vendler in Parnassus has described his work as ‘experimental poetry of exceptional wit and control’.
You can hear Kleinzahler himself read the title poem of Green Sees Things in Waves (FSG, 1998) here: Green Sees Things in Waves | The Poetry Foundation His style is sharp, unwasteful, clear, building in emotional tidal waves, and at times ‘almost improvisatory’ (TLS, Stephen Knight). Given his passion especially for jazz and blues, it was only a matter of time until he wrote A History of Western Music about his lifelong scholarship and love of music.
The collection starts with its most accessible poem, “Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston)”. Chapter numbers appear at random throughout, without explanation. We are standing in a supermarket:
They follow you around the store, these power ballads,
you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs,
cookies, 90 fl. oz. containers of antibacterial dishwashing liquid,
buffeting you sideways like a punishing wind.
The collection’s first poems use something like musical dynamics to start softly, build around us into a whirl of dance and excitement, then drift away as if up the street, like an unruly group of dancers off to their next bar without us. Kleinzahler’s tone is marvellously tragic and comic as he’s stopped in his tracks:
What sort of life have you led
that you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age,
about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits
in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma
with her sparkly, extravagant eyewear?
It’s good that your parents are no longer alive.
These first poems are dense in style and exciting. “Chapter 88 (Zipoli and the Paraguay Reductions)” takes us back in time to an imagined continent in the southern hemisphere, known from the 15th to 18th centuries as Magellan’s land, in the company of Domenico Zipoli, a real Italian composer of the Baroque era:
The rivercraft moves slowly upriver in the heart of Terra Magellanica,
this forestland of earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions,
sitting low in the mud-colored water, laden with its cargo
of appoggiaturas, mordents, sarabandes, gavottes and trills,
along with Domenico Zipoli in his black cassock, late of Rome, Florence, Bologna
and Naples, scene of his famous contretemps with Scarlatti père.
Kleinzahler writes us upstream with a poetic richness of triplets and semiquavers that Marlowe might have envied. Then, mid-stanza, we’re in 1992, listening to Susan Alexander-Max play Zipoli’s vibrant music at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. The finest fortepiano player of her time, she is playing the ‘gravecembalo col piano e forte’ (fortepiano) they have there, built by Bartolomeo Cristafori (1655–1731), one of only three originals remaining in the world. The poet sets the scene: ‘a beautiful fall afternoon … tourists and local taking in the sun’, when they might have been at the recital indoors, having the musical experience of their lives. This masterly poem draws to a close with us back on the tropical river with Zipoli, ‘crimson carpets of verbena, devil’s trumpet, yellow datura’ and an organ blast fading through the jungle into ‘insect whirr and birdsong’.
A little beauty of a poem, full of teasing, is “Chapter 60 (Little C. R. and Judy)”. A ‘good lad, Christopher, a tad pensive, or watchful, for one so young’ can hear a drunk woman in first class singing Over the Rainbow. It’s another experience of a lifetime, despite ‘the slurring and occasional hiccup’: the singer turns out to be Judy Garland. But who is C. R.? Is it Christopher Reid, later of Faber? A little more background would help.
In later poems in this collection, the pace drops and it can feel sometimes as if we readers are eavesdropping while the poet reminiscences with a friend, the two of them chatting in a private code they’ve developed over decades. In “Chapter 11 (Spoleto)”, for example:
When de Kooning, drunk, crashed into us,
then the lot of us staggering off to that bar
overlooking the Ponte delle Torri,
winding up drinking in the dawn outside Vincenzo’s.
I remember the violist and cor anglais
enjoying some passion in the doorway.
Didn’t they later marry? Perhaps not.
Do we readers need to nail down every allusion? Maybe, as Louis Armstrong said, ‘Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.’ Better to let the poems envelope us like jazz.
For me, the book’s genius is how it conveys (sometimes like a gut punch) the unique verve of an exceptional musical experience in any genre. In Kleinzahler’s hands, ekphrasis swirls us from Baroque to jazz, eddies from Schubert to blues, then off on a Guinness night with Seamus Ennis and his uilleann pipes. With nothing but vocabulary, he weaves the pace, tempo and dynamics of music into sometimes exquisite visuals. It’s an astonishing achievement.
Rosie Johnston’s fifth poetry book is Safe Ground, published by Mica Press in 2025. Four have been published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The Phare, Snakeskin, London Grip, Culture NI, The Honest Ulsterman, Mary Evans Picture Library’s Poems and Pictures blog and Fevers of the Mind. Her poetry is anthologised by Live Canon, Arlen House, OneWorld’s Places of Poetry anthology, Fevers of the Mind and American Writers Review. She reads her poetry widely, most recently at In-Words in Greenwich and the Faversham Literary Festival. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com
Jan 14 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – August Kleinzahler
Poetry review – A HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC: Rosie Johnston is impressed by August Kleinzahler’s skill at conveying the experience of listening to music
In his early days, August Kleinzahler enjoyed the shadows of being a cult figure, described by Allan Ginsberg as producing ‘that quality of “chiseled” verse memorable in Basil Bunting’s and Ezra Pound’s work. A loner, a genius.’. His prestigious American publishers, Farrar Strauss & Giroux, have gathered his earlier poems for revival three times this century, so far: in 2000 Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: poems 1975 – 1990; in 2008 his multi-award winning new and selected poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City; and in 2017 Before Dawn on Bluff Road/ Hollyhocks in the Fog, Selected San Francisco Poems, published as a single volume. In 2018, Faber picked up that collection and now Carcanet follows with A History of Western Music, published by FSG last year.
Kleinzahler was born in New Jersey in 1949 and has lived much of his life in San Francisco. In 1971 he began to study poetry at the University of Victoria, Vancouver Island in British Columbia, drawn there by love of Bunting’s work, especially his long poem Briggflatts (1966). According to Kleinzahler, Bunting’s teaching style was simple: ‘All he did was smoke unfiltered Player’s and read to us’, which sounds exactly what Kleinzahler was looking for.
Over the years, honours have flooded Kleinzahler’s way: The International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2004; Fellowship of the Guggenheim Foundation, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lila Acheson-Readers’ Digest Award for Poetry in 1989; the Berlin Prize in 2000; the Lannan Literary Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2008. There may well be others. Helen Vendler in Parnassus has described his work as ‘experimental poetry of exceptional wit and control’.
You can hear Kleinzahler himself read the title poem of Green Sees Things in Waves (FSG, 1998) here: Green Sees Things in Waves | The Poetry Foundation His style is sharp, unwasteful, clear, building in emotional tidal waves, and at times ‘almost improvisatory’ (TLS, Stephen Knight). Given his passion especially for jazz and blues, it was only a matter of time until he wrote A History of Western Music about his lifelong scholarship and love of music.
The collection starts with its most accessible poem, “Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston)”. Chapter numbers appear at random throughout, without explanation. We are standing in a supermarket:
The collection’s first poems use something like musical dynamics to start softly, build around us into a whirl of dance and excitement, then drift away as if up the street, like an unruly group of dancers off to their next bar without us. Kleinzahler’s tone is marvellously tragic and comic as he’s stopped in his tracks:
These first poems are dense in style and exciting. “Chapter 88 (Zipoli and the Paraguay Reductions)” takes us back in time to an imagined continent in the southern hemisphere, known from the 15th to 18th centuries as Magellan’s land, in the company of Domenico Zipoli, a real Italian composer of the Baroque era:
Kleinzahler writes us upstream with a poetic richness of triplets and semiquavers that Marlowe might have envied. Then, mid-stanza, we’re in 1992, listening to Susan Alexander-Max play Zipoli’s vibrant music at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. The finest fortepiano player of her time, she is playing the ‘gravecembalo col piano e forte’ (fortepiano) they have there, built by Bartolomeo Cristafori (1655–1731), one of only three originals remaining in the world. The poet sets the scene: ‘a beautiful fall afternoon … tourists and local taking in the sun’, when they might have been at the recital indoors, having the musical experience of their lives. This masterly poem draws to a close with us back on the tropical river with Zipoli, ‘crimson carpets of verbena, devil’s trumpet, yellow datura’ and an organ blast fading through the jungle into ‘insect whirr and birdsong’.
A little beauty of a poem, full of teasing, is “Chapter 60 (Little C. R. and Judy)”. A ‘good lad, Christopher, a tad pensive, or watchful, for one so young’ can hear a drunk woman in first class singing Over the Rainbow. It’s another experience of a lifetime, despite ‘the slurring and occasional hiccup’: the singer turns out to be Judy Garland. But who is C. R.? Is it Christopher Reid, later of Faber? A little more background would help.
In later poems in this collection, the pace drops and it can feel sometimes as if we readers are eavesdropping while the poet reminiscences with a friend, the two of them chatting in a private code they’ve developed over decades. In “Chapter 11 (Spoleto)”, for example:
Do we readers need to nail down every allusion? Maybe, as Louis Armstrong said, ‘Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.’ Better to let the poems envelope us like jazz.
For me, the book’s genius is how it conveys (sometimes like a gut punch) the unique verve of an exceptional musical experience in any genre. In Kleinzahler’s hands, ekphrasis swirls us from Baroque to jazz, eddies from Schubert to blues, then off on a Guinness night with Seamus Ennis and his uilleann pipes. With nothing but vocabulary, he weaves the pace, tempo and dynamics of music into sometimes exquisite visuals. It’s an astonishing achievement.
Rosie Johnston’s fifth poetry book is Safe Ground, published by Mica Press in 2025. Four have been published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The Phare, Snakeskin, London Grip, Culture NI, The Honest Ulsterman, Mary Evans Picture Library’s Poems and Pictures blog and Fevers of the Mind. Her poetry is anthologised by Live Canon, Arlen House, OneWorld’s Places of Poetry anthology, Fevers of the Mind and American Writers Review. She reads her poetry widely, most recently at In-Words in Greenwich and the Faversham Literary Festival. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com