Sleeping it Off in Rapid City

by August Kleinzahler

The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler’s career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant poets of our time. Travel—actual and imaginary—remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds “This sanctified ground / Here, yes, here / The dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America.”

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, United States

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of eleven books of poems and a memoir, "Cutty, One Rock." His collection "The Strange Hours Travelers Keep" was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City" won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. His new collection, "The Hotel Oneira," will be published by FSG October 1st, 2013. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's unusual for a poetry collection to make like a novel and have a slow start, but this collection of August Kleinzahler poems, new and selected, felt that way to me. In the early going, I was thinking "abandon" or, because it's a poetry collection, "jump around and see if vindication is hiding in the weeds." But I hung in there and I picked up the rhythm of Kleinzahler's voice. Before long: "Hey Mikey, he likes it!" For example there was this poem:


"Family Album"

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 shirtshorts and beatnik top
showing her figure off at 16…
1955 is in an attic bookcast
spine cracked and pages falling out.

Willow and plum tree
green pods from maple whirling down to the sidewalk…
Only the guy at the hot dog 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--
O, my heart.


Another one I really liked, was this one:


"Spring Trances"

Two snails have found the inside of a Granny Goose
Hawaiian-style potato chips,
the clipper ship on its wrapper
headed out from the islands

on a wind-swept main.
The last storms passed now, turning
to snow in the High Sierra:
they baste in their ointments deep in the tall grass,

cool among shadows and cellophane.
The sparrows and linnets have gone mad at dawn,
trilling and swooping in the branches
and ditchweed, flashing a plume

then diving; a racket
we've woken to for weeks, far too long
before the sun turns Scotch broom and the poppies to flame.
We drift through these days

half in trance from fatigue.
At evening, as the streaks of light dissolve,
we watch the boy walk home,
hatband and uniform wet from the game.

The smell of dust and sweat and the oil in his mitt
burns deep into the tissue of him.
Buffeted, drunk, wounded--
his pretty nerves bloom,

a school of minnows just under the skin.
The wind carries music up from the street,
a skewer running through him
that he slowly turns on the scented dark.


Nice, no? And many of that sort. And sharp language and images. Yes. I'll read another by A.K. because, well, I have another.

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow this is awful. It's my fault. This is what I get for going to the library and spending an hour trying to decide what to check out and then just grabbing something at random. I have nothing nice to say about this. I'll leave you with these last few lines of a poem called, "The Single Gentleman's Chow Mein" in the hopes that they will steer others away from this book:

"One of them, oh, three years back
was a stunner, terribly pretty;
taking a night course, as I recall.
-You look like a professor, no?
She said to me one day, a trifle severe
in delivery but very sweet.
I've never been with a Chinese."

[Alexa Harbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

So beautiful, and I finished it right before finding out I got into graduate school!

[Tim Lepczyk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these poems were tough, muscular, edgy pieces of prose that define images and ideas concretely. For me, those were the more enjoyable poems. They had a sense of realism and compactness and stayed with you.

The other poems were a little more sprawling and rambling. Ideas were bound up in language that floated somewhere beyond the reader. After reading some of these poems I was left with a thought of so what? What can I take away from this?

Part of this might stem from the fact that this is a collection which gathers from many other collections. Styles change and shift and in the process it can be a little hard to move with the writer.

All in all, it was a good collection and perhaps if I spent more time with it, I'd feel different.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like him but don't always get him, or am not pushed to try and get him. As another review here said, his words are sometimes just beyond a reader's comprehension. Yet, I find him an American poet as taking a long car trip across the country is American. He writes very much about place, and the publisher is right on in using a dark, black-and-white photo of a White Castle on the front of this edition. This book is a companion to the car trip where you drive by that White Castle and stop just to stop and order with a sense of humor. I just finished reading Philip Levine, and Klenzahler has foot firmly planted in that world as well as the language games of poets more ethereal.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems recall above all the transitory nature of living, often contrasted against the backdrop of a beautiful, lasting, unfeeling natural world ("What do the sky and gardens know about such disappointment"?) Airports and highway pitstops, the ephemera of the seasons, the indeterminacy of what is real and what is imagined - such topics recur throughout the collection.

I feel like I missed 30% of what was happening in these poems (some have lines in foreign languages, many referenced places/things/people I didn't recognize, the dictionary was useful on multiple occasions), but the subset of what I did get (and the subset from that of what resonated) was utterly beautiful.

[Susana Case · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a wackiness to Kleinzahler's poetry, especially when writing about odd little parts of America in his long poems—and even when writing about more conventional parts of America in the shorter poems:

"I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite liquor
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk." (p.88, "Poetics")

Always, though, the possibility of decay lurks over his shoulder. "What is more touching / than a used-book store on Saturday night," he asks in "San Francisco/New York."

A retrospective collection of his work, this is immensely readable.

[Braden Bernards · Rating 5 out of 5]

A total delight.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very hit-or-miss. After reading the first two parts I was certain that this book wouldn't keep its spot on my shelf, but then Kleinzahler surprised me with some good poems. Sometimes his imagery is so stunning, or the poems end with such a different tone and in such a profound way...

...But for the most part, I didn't enjoy the poems in this collection. His diction is bizarre ("phthisic," "tergiversation," "4-phenylcyclohexane," "9-cycloheptadecenone-addled") and many of his poems are sprawling and pointless. There isn't enough punctuation and disparate thoughts run together with enjambments that make no sense whatsoever. His poems in general seem to be a strange mix of ideas, such as "The Single Gentleman's Chow Mein," which starts with one and a half pages about ant poison, then switches to a page and a half about chow mein, then finishes with a line about how the poet has never fucked a Chinese woman. The subject matter is also pretty repetitive, with a lot of poems about travelling and airplanes, and descriptions of one urban locale or another. Kleinzahler is definitely capable of writing great poetry, but too many of the poems in Sleeping it Off in Rapid City are absolute garbage.

Poems that I liked:
"Portrait of My Mother in January," "Blue at 4 p.m.," "Poetics," "The Park" (last three stanzas only), "After Catullus," "Late Indian Summer," "Peaches in November," "San Francisco / New York," "Who Stole the Horses from the Indians?," "Watching Dogwood Blossoms Fall in a Parking Lot Off Route 46," "Silver Gelatin," "Gray Light in May," "Late Autumn Afternoons," "Epistle XIV."

=14/92 (15.2%) poems that I liked.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although he has an absolutely bizarre imagination, connecting things that seem far from each other, and he knows things about art and music and literature but has an often twisted take on them, the poems present themselves very directly, unadorned by simile or flashy diction, getting some good tension from lines, and sometimes stanzas. He loves the dailiness of things, and is often willing to simply list them, kind of like Frank O'Hara. And then he will reach away to large issues, life and death issues, before coming back to the ordinary. The poems can sound talky, but even a quick closer look reveals a chiseled quality to them. He gives popular culture more than it's due, and he sometimes sounds just slightly misogynist. But that might be overstating it.

I was really taken by almost all the poems, but I find it difficult to find one to quote. But here's the beginning of "The Old Poet, Dying" (the title gives you the situation). See how simple and direct the lines are -- they ask nothing of us, no stretching, yet after a few of them, it is clear something special is going on:

He looks eerily young,
what's left of him,
purged, somehow, back into boyhood.
It is difficult not to watch
the movie on TV at the foot of his bed,
40" color screen,
a jailhouse dolly psychodrama:
truncheons and dirty shower scenes.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kleinzahler definitely chose the right poem for the title of this overview of his poetry; if you don't read anything else by him, find the time for it. It's a bit like Tom Waits meets William Carlos Williams meets Charles Bukowski meets Frank O'Hara, which is to say a very American, very male, white but not the stupid kind of white, colloquial meditation that's a lot deeper than it might seem from a casual reading.

While I enjoyed reading just about everything in the collection, there's not a lot that comes close to "Sleeping it Off." Kleinzahler's a bit of a chronicler with a weakness for slightly sprawling series--one on the history of music, travel, letters that riff on classical themes. Reminded me a bit of Ferlinghetti. He's at his best when he connects the externals with the murkier depths of the psyche, in poems like "Snow in North Jersey," "Where Souls Go" and "San Francisco New York." Other favorite: "The Conversation," "I Went to See McCarthy," and "The History of Western Music 13," a very nice take on Thelonious Monk.

[Brian Grover · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a poetry collection, a selection of Kleinzahler's works. I don't remember how I landed on this, of all the poets I might want to dip a toe into reading, but I guess I read an interesting blurb at a time when I thought it might be fun to give poetry another shot.

I read this in tiny pieces, a poem or two a night over the course of a few months. I liked some of them. Most I didn't really understand, or connect with, although there are a lot of individual turns-of-phrase that I liked enough to reread several of these a time or two. Poetry - still not really my thing, but I'm glad I read this, and want to keep trying the form at least a few times a year going forward.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler

Here were my favorite poems in this book published in 2008.

1. Sleeping It Off in Rapid City - a perfect poem with a strong sense of place, imagery and history
2. Vancouver
3. A Valentine
4. Land's End
5. Peaches in November
6. Gray Light in May
7. Someone Named Gutierrez
8. Before Dawn on Bluff Road
9. Epistle VIII
10. The Tartars Swept

There are a quite a few poems that are unnecessarily opaque. For example, when you reference someone named Mary tell me what she looked like or something about her.

4 stars

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Elizabeth Bishop, Kleinzahler’s prose is better than his verse, which is mostly prosy. The best poem here is the Gaelic send-up “I went to see McCarthy”. The best section is the last, where many poems employ the dramatic monologue form and even occasionally remind one of Richard Howard.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Loneliness—huge, suddenly menacing
and no one is left here who knows me anymore”

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining selection of poems, most with urban settings. The language is colloquial and very accessible.

[Ekster Alven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik dacht bij het lezen eerst 'nee', maar het groeit in je terwijl je leest. Niet zo simpel Engels weliswaar.
Sterke accenten, vreemde registers, conventioneel van uitwerking, origineel van aanpak.
Buitenbeentje, maar toch niet echt zo erg extravagant of zoiets.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

August Kleinzahler has great descriptive power as a poet. I can't say these collected poems left me with wondrous insights, but they did create a sense of beauty, often tinged with sadness, that was remarkably vivid.

If there is a theme to these poems, it is one of travel and displacement, occasionally anchored by his return trips to his New Jersey roots. He is at his best when he speaks economically, as in "Storm Over Hackensack."

This angry bruise about to burst
on City Hall
will spend itself fast
so fluid and heat my build up again

But for a moment the light
downtown
belongs someplace else,
not here
or any town close.

Look at the shoppers, how palpable
and bright
against gathering dark
like storied figures in stereoscope.

This is the gods' perpetual light:
clarity
jeopardy
change.


At other times, it's the small moments inside small poems that captured me. In "Spring Trances," he perfectly evokes summer boyhood:

We watch the boy walk home,
hatband and uniform wet from the game.

The smell of dust and sweat and the oil in his mitt
burns deep into the tissue of him.
Buffeted, drunk, wounded --
his pretty nerves bloom,

a school of minnows just under his skin.
The wind carries music up from the street,
a skewer running through him
that he slowly turns on in the scented dark.

And like so many poets, he also tries to describe what his craft is like ...

... then set it down in paint,
the blacks, the greens and browns;
not explain.
Cumbersome words: imprecise, always hurrying
to catch up and never quite.
But further, further still:
even the painter must be destroyed
in order that one may become the paint.

Well worth it.

[Dan Butterfass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kleinzahler is that rare breed of poet whose blend of craft and "fire" is seamless. His poems combust with the heat and irrational inner glow of their original conception, while threading the eye of the needle of technique and craft. His work is all fire and ice. This work is incantatory, erudite, clear and complex at the same time. He's a language star whose loose, five-martinis later flair for the language amplifies and rarifies rather than obscuficates (e.g. Ashberry) or diminishes (e.g. James Tate) meaning - a rare accomplishment.

Onto specifics: As a self-profressed chronicler of city and urban life, Kleinzahler nevertheless has a "nature poem" in here that knocks most of the output of that whole specious genre on its ass: Anniversary. It's about hawks. If you're ever in need of a specific tonic to Mary Oliver, or poems about birds at the birdfeeder, I'd highly recommend it. The longer poems that bookend this collection - Sleeping It Off in Rapid City and The Tartars Swept - are both prime examples of Kleinzahler's unique ability to wed incantatory rhythms with evocative imagery. These are tour de forces.
Christmastime in Coronado is a wonderfully oblique, wonderfully understated take on both Nixon's legacy and the inanity of the military industrial complex. What makes it so good is that it's far more a mood piece than a "political" or "protest" poem. The poems moods are varied and sublte, with hints of both contemptent and sympathy, or even pathos for the former president as he nears his death.

Kleinzahler is high on my own personal short-list of contemporary poets whose work bears continuous re-reading.

[Ms.]

Ultimately Mr. Kleinzahler boiled his case against Mr. Keillor down to these three-and-a-half sentences: “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.”

It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that Mr. Kleinzahler’s career-spanning new book of poems, “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” features on its cover a nighttime photograph of a White Castle hamburger franchise. Like White Castle’s pint-size hamburgers, Mr. Kleinzahler’s poems are of uncertain if not dubious nutritional value. And while there is nothing made-to-order about them, his poems arrive salty and hot; you’ll want to devour them on your lap, with a stack of napkins to mop up the grease.

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 schoolyards — of bullies with names like Stinky Phil and of “fire trucks and galoshes,/the taste of pencils and Louis Bocca’s ear.” And he writes with elegiac insight about life’s losers, the people he calls “strange rangers,” the addicted, insane or destitute.

[Joseph Lerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

August Kleinzahler has been writing poetry for a long time, and he keeps getting better. This volume is a retrospective of sorts, but includes much new work as well. How to describe Kleinzahler? He has his roots in Beat poetry, but he's gone far beyond such influences. His writing always feels fresh, original, inventive, and unexpected, thoroughly American in sensibility but international in scope. Highly recommended.

[Joje · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has replaced the now run-out subscription to the Int'l Herald Trib for breakfast reading, and no loss when you think about it. Taking poetry in bits is healthy and wise, and these are as contemporary as today's news. Maybe I'll go back to Heaney when finished with this, if I ever am. Or Yeats again, or...? Poetry in the morning, a Decameron tale or 2 in the evening, work of various sorts between, not a bad life, after all.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

My review is no reflection on the poet's abilities, but rather an expression of my own personal tastes. Kleinzahler is a fine poet, a kind of natural heir to poets like Ferlinghetti and his ilk, combing poetic realism with contemporary cultural nuances to shape his output. So if you are a fan of that strand of modern American poetry, you will enjoy this collection. I found it a bit too literal, a bit too referential, and less abstract than I wanted.

[Darren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy. Some were funny - some were great. I would like to have had a machete to get through many. I especially liked sections II III and V. Toys was good in IV. I liked Traveler's Tails: Chapter 13. The beginning seemed to imply great questions about modernity, ease...The moderator's question "what is the function of art in society?" - I guess...diversify our "Social democracy".

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry cannot be read linearly. Sometimes, you start out that way, only to discover that it is more fun--and more representative of the poet's work--to jump around. I did that here, and earned a wonderful introduction to the work of a man who pulls no punches, and yet has a surprisingly delicate lyricism to his work. I will read this again. Recommended.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn - this guy is good. Any poet that puts a White Castle photo on his cover is worth reading! Tough poems, a little bit of asphalt and some dogwood blossoms, dying friends and lovers - all types. But more than what they are about, his language is excellent and interesting.

[National Book Critics Circle · Rating 5 out of 5]

See NBCC Board Member Kevin Prufer's review at Critical Mass, as part of 30 Books in 30 Days:
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/2...

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

great poetry by a super talented writer who falls in the tradition of critic/poet. several faves in this edition. i can't write about poetry any better than i can write about music - but find it most enjoyable to keep coming back to some of these poems.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll probably finish this book at some point. But right now I'm not patient enough to wade through his clever, detached irony to find the one good poem in 10.