Green Sees Things in Waves: Poems Book

Read the STOP SMILING interview with August Kleinzahler:

He Sees Things in Waves: 10 Questions for poet Agust Kleinzahler
by Ange Mlinko

(This interview originally appeared in the first annual STOP SMILING 20 Interviews Issue)

August Kleinzahler has worked as taxi driver, locksmith, logger, building manager and music critic. But he is most famous for his 10 books of poems, including the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize winner, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (FSG). His autobiographical essays are collected in Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained, whose title alone evokes his signature dive-bar/chevalier aesthetic ' a kind of mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Robert Herrick.

Born in Jersey City in 1949, raised in Fort Lee (which named him poet laureate last year), Kleinzahler settled in San Francisco but has remained itinerant. He has taught most recently at the University of Texas at Austin, and was awarded a fellowship in Berlin in 2000. Accepting the Griffin Prize, Kleinzahler wrote, "My ideal reader is a taxi driver in Karachi." It wasn't a wisecrack. He went on to imagine an Everyman negotiating traffic in an ancient city of 15 million who is nevertheless a connoisseur of the evening light; who owns obscure pamphlets by poets of small cult presses; who is eclectic and genuine. "Poetry is the most difficult and demanding of the literary arts. It is also the oldest and most enduring, and despite rumors to the contrary, is not about to go away anytime soon. Long after the art novel, as we know it, is gone, we shall have poetry."

Kleinzhaler was about to hop on a plane to South Dakota when we spoke by phone. Between the state's geophysical anomalies and decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles, he thought there might be a poem somewhere in there...

Read the complete STOP SMILING interview with August Kleinzahler...