Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2016

by August Kleinzahler

Sixteen years’ worth of incisive essays by the great poet and memoirist

“Witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler” (Publishers Weekly) has gathered the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies, always with insight and humor, and never suffering fools gladly.

Here, in Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, August Kleinzahler eulogizes famous friends, warts and all (Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton, Leonard Michaels); leads the charge in carving up a few bloated reputations (E. E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 9, 2017

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

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an engaging collection of essays which were mostly published in the London Review of Books. Kleinzahler is a poet and critic and so writes convincingly about the craft and about the poets of our time. However, some of what he writes is surprising. He says, for instance, that E. E. Cummings is not only over-valued as a poet but that many of his poems are simply bad. I've read the charge before, though stated more softly as Cummings not always choosing his strongest work to publish. But Kleinzahler is on the attack here, and I thought him a bit unfair. One thinks of Cummings as a lyrical poet, and I think to not judge him from that angle is to miss the mark. A little sally and romp of my own. I recently read a small volume of Cummings called Erotic Poems (they are that, I was in the mood, and I was delighted with them) and was reminded that few can write about love so breathtakingly as Cummings did.

Kleinzahler is also savage with Richard Brautigan. I'm not familiar with his work and so can't defend him.

If a defense is even needed, because, as I say, Kleinzahler writes convincingly about poetry and poets. He heaps praise on people like Lorine Niedecker, James Merrill, and Christopher Logue as well as many others. But one of the strengths of the individual essays is that the larger names of poetry keep recurring and help to make this a collection about contemporary poetry. Ezra Pound is a star here, and so is Robert Lowell.

Also running through these essays is Kleinzahler's home, San Francisco. Perhaps you know as well as I do, it's lovely, and he clearly loves it and loves to write about the city and its well-known poets. His essay on Thom Gunn is one of the best in the collection. That particular piece about his long friendship with Gunn, a longtime resident of San Francisco, is a personal essay. A couple of the best essays are personal, too, one about working in Alaska as a young man and 2 love letters to San Francisco. One of the essays, and a strong favorite, serves as both personal essay and as criticism, his account of lunching with Allen Ginsberg. It's a portrait of Ginsberg I've never come across before but which I don't doubt is an accurate portrait. Ginsberg as something other than poet, legend, Beatnik. Why, he's almost cuddly.

He ends with a nostalgic essay about the Palisades section of New Jersey where he lived as a kid. Maybe he'd been working himself east the whole time, stopping in Wisconsin to look at Niedecker and again for lunch with Allen before visiting his old home. Maybe it's a frame, the opposite coasts. He'd begun with a description of thick San Francisco fog and ends with the clear autumn air above the New Jersey Palisades, air so clear he can see his whole boyhood. In between is good literary traveling.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Punchy and pungent essays - mostly literary - on folks like Lorine Niedecker, John Berryman, Lucia Berlin, Louis Zukofsky, Richard Brautigan, and more. Insightful appreciations, reluctant takedowns, and portraits of difficult friendships with larger-than-life figures like Leonard Michaels. Extremely companionable and educational, even.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/4 stars

[Heather Scott Partington · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Poets’ lives are seldom eventful or interesting,” Kleinzahler writes in this collection. “There’s a great deal of looking out the window, pacing around, reading, writing, drinking, gossiping, complaining, especially about money and neglect, and more often than not ill-advised romantic attachments.” Yet Kleinzahler, a celebrated poet in his own right, makes merry work of the gossip surrounding myriad writers of postmodern poetry and so-called New Fiction...

Read more at The New York Times Book Review .

[Blaise Carland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked it. It was harder to get into than Cutty, one rock. But halfway through I got sucked in. I know next to nothing about poetry so I would stop frequently to look up poets in Wikipedia. He’s a good writer and i hope that he writes some more. I’ve ordered one of his books of poetry, we’ll see how that goes.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays are addictive-you can't read just one!

[Paul Wilner]

August Kleinzahler is the man. Read it and weep, laugh, learn.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining collection of essays mostly literary. Especially nice to see tribute to Lorine Niedecker and Basil Bunting.